Dr. Robert Chapman Wood

Professor of Strategic Management in the College of Business at San Jose State University.

Bio

Robert Chapman Wood is Professor of Strategic Management in the College of Business at San Jose State University. His research focuses on innovation processes in large organizations and the processes by which high-performing institutions emerge within human systems, and in how for-profit firms can organize to address societal problems such as possible global warming. Wood completed his doctoral studies at Boston University and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Business School. Prior to his career as an academic, Wood was a journalist whose work appeared in such publications as Forbes and the Financial Times of London.

Title

Economic Systems, Institutional Theory, and Asia

Abstract

Many scholars have argued that the standard neo-classical model of economies represents an inadequate description of economic processes. However, despite the many insights that other social sciences have provided into economic phenomena, they have not generated any full alternative to the standard economic model. This is a particularly serious problem for analysis of countries that do not share the cultural background of the English-speaking nations. This paper argues, however, that recent insights primarily from institutional theory allow the creation of a sort of meta-model that will describe basic elements of the social systems in which economies are situated, provide a more realistic sense of when the assumptions of standard economic theory can be expected to be valid, and offer a basic understanding of how the most influential elements of social systems change to make the standard economic model more or less valid. The paper offers first steps toward such a model, then discusses how such a model might help us understand some Asian phenomena.