Chair and Panelist: Victor Zitian Chen; U. of North Carolina, Charlotte
Panelist: Jared Diamond; U. of California, Los Angeles (Pulitzer Winner)
Panelist: John Cantwell; Rutgers U. Institutions are the shared strategies, shared norms, and shared rules that guide human behaviors and exchanges in a society. We have a limited understanding about how these institutions evolve as a result of natural/biological conditions, cultures and traditions, formal legal and political structures, and scientific and technological progress, as well as how such a process is affected by interchanges between two societies (which we define as globalizations). Although we have seen continued empirical efforts to estimate the changing patterns of global institutional diversity, it remains unclear through what underlying theoretical mechanisms globalizations interact with local, indigenous factors and thereby influence the evolution in the structure of global institutional diversity. One major constraint on theorizing about globalization and global institutional diversity is that our observations have been truncated to a very short period in the modern world (i.e., usually after WWII), in which both globalizations and existing institutions have already become very complex and dynamic, while we have frequently overlooked their deeper (and simpler) historical roots, in which global institutional diversity is grounded. A longer-term evolutionary approach would enable us to study whether and in what ways our historical roots consist of many layers of institutional foundations or building blocks, which, like crust, came into existence sequentially, accumulate over time, and serve as enduring factors that give rise to and/or constrain newer institutions. The focus of this symposium is on an open-ended, cross-disciplinary discussion, at a relatively high level of generalization and abstraction, about whether there is a social evolutionary theory in which each new increase in complexity in global institutions in the world evolved from earlier, simpler forms, and if so, the role that each wave of globalization played in such evolution. our panelists have chosen their starting points of time in deep history to explore enduring roots: e.g., homo evolution from chimpanzees in about 2 million BC (Cantwell & Chen, 2015); pre-literate past (e.g., 11,000 BCE) (e.g., Diamond, 1997). The full proposal/program is at http://chenzitian.com/pub_files/aom2016_globinst.pdf. Search Terms: | institutional change , global institutions , diversity |
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