What’s the big idea? Ideas about development were heavily influenced by the historical process described as “modernization” in the West (Europe and Areas of Recent Settlement), Japan, and (to a lesser but still significant extent) Russia. A key idea was that large scale cooperation needed to be rules based and impersonal–and this was true in the economy (the managerial revolution to “scale and scope“), in politics (democracy with institutionalized political parties), in administration (bureaucracy to run the affairs of government–enforcing regulation and delivering services), and to more equal treatment across members of nation-states (with the “imagined community” of nationalism supplanting more local and regional identities). Robert Putnam’s work on Italy (which was early on regarded as a typical “under-developed” country) suggesting that government worked better, even in prosaic bureaucratic services like delivering the mail, in regions where Italians had more “social capital” was a hugely influential idea. The idea that formal structures and organizations work not because of their formal legal structures but (only) to the extent these are embedded in widely accepted social norms and that tension between those norms and formal structures was often resolved in favor of the norms rather than the “law” has become an important theme of research in development.
“Cents and Sociability: Household Incomes and Social Capital in Rural Tanzania.”, Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 47 no.4, July 1999. (with Deepa Narayan).
“Voice Lessons: Evidence on Social Organizations, Government Mandated Organizations, and Governance from Indonesia’s Local Level Institutions Study.” In Membership Based Organizations of the Poor, Ravi Kanbur ed.(also BREAD Working Paper #29), 2007. (with Anna Wetterberg and Vivi Alatas).
“World Bank Economists and Social Capital: Scenes from a Marriage” In A. Bebbington, S. Guggenheim, Olson and M. Woolcock eds. The Search for Empowerment: Social Capital as Idea and Practice at the World Bank. Kumerian Press, 2006. (with Jeff Hammer).
“Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era.” Economic and Political Weekly, August 2010. (with Devesh Kapur, Chandra Bhan Prasad and Shyam Babu).