Corporations in the Flow of Culture

As an anthropologist, coming out of three decades of research among indigenous Brazilian populations, I naturally saw modern for-profit business corporations as tribes—the collective bearers of adaptive cultural know-how. They appeared to me to be the entities housing the culture needed to produce commodities, to trade commodities on the open market, or both. I was also, of course, aware of the legal concept of the corporation as fictive person capable of owning property and having standing in court cases, which I thought of as akin to the anthropological corporation insofar as both recognized the group as social actor. However, it came as something of a surprise that the existence of corporations—or, more properly, “firms”—posed an intellectual challenge for economists. I knew that Adam Smith was critical of the old joint stock companies, like the East India Company, for a variety of reasons. But I hadn’t understood that economists, who viewed the world in terms of individual rational actors engaged in market transactions, might regard corporations as a violation of market efficiency principles, which they evidently are—or at least were until Ronald Coase’s classic 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm. It is his paper that brought together my anthropological understanding of corporations as social groups carrying cultural know-how with the economic model of the firm

Corporations in the Flow of Culture

As an anthropologist, coming out of three decades of research among indigenous Brazilian populations, I naturally saw modern for-profit business corporations as tribes—the collective bearers of adaptive cultural know-how. They appeared to me to be the entities housing the culture needed to produce commodities, to trade commodities on the open market, or both. I was also, of course, aware of the legal concept of the corporation as fictive person capable of owning property and having standing in court cases, which I thought of as akin to the anthropological corporation insofar as both recognized the group as social actor. However, it came as something of a surprise that the existence of corporations—or, more properly, “firms”—posed an intellectual challenge for economists. I knew that Adam Smith was critical of the old joint stock companies, like the East India Company, for a variety of reasons. But I hadn’t understood that economists, who viewed the world in terms of individual rational actors engaged in market transactions, might regard corporations as a violation of market efficiency principles, which they evidently are—or at least were until Ronald Coase’s classic 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm. It is his paper that brought together my anthropological understanding of corporations as social groups carrying cultural know-how with the economic model of the firm

The Editor’s Two Cents

The Editor’s Two Cent

The Editor's Two Cents

The Editor's Two Cent

City of Gloucester Harbor Plan & Designated Port Area Master Plan, July 2009

A harbor plan is a waterfront land and water use plan intended to establish the community’s objectives, standards, and policies for guiding public and private utilization of land and of water within and adjacent to the commonwealth’s jurisdiction. The 1999 Gloucester Harbor Plan was chiefly focused on infrastructure improvements for both maritime and visitor oriented industries along the waterfront as a central means of recharging the harbor’s economic engine. Many of the improvements have been completed in the wake of this plan. However, it largely ignored the confusing web of land use regulations that has since emerged as the central force stagnating much of the waterfront’s revitalization. Gloucester Harbor is the center of one of the country’s most important commercial fishing communities; its docks lined with vessels of various types and its waterfront dominated by facilities and services associated with seafood industry. In recent decades, as the groundfish stocks have declined and management measures designed to rebuild the stocks have reduced the size and effort of the fleet, the infrastructure has deteriorated and businesses that depend on groundfish have struggled

Calibration Uncertainty for Advanced LIGO's First and Second Observing Runs

Calibration of the Advanced LIGO detectors is the quantification of the detectors' response to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves incident on the detectors cause phase shifts in the interferometer laser light which are read out as intensity fluctuations at the detector output. Understanding this detector response to gravitational waves is crucial to producing accurate and precise gravitational wave strain data. Estimates of binary black hole and neutron star parameters and tests of general relativity require well-calibrated data, as miscalibrations will lead to biased results. We describe the method of producing calibration uncertainty estimates for both LIGO detectors in the first and second observing runs.Comment: 15 pages, 21 figures, LIGO DCC P160013