My Ph.D. dissertation examined small firms in "industrial districts" in Emilia-Romagna (Italy) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany). My main goal was to bring together rational choice theories of institutional change with the emerging literature on trust and trustworthiness. I wanted to show how different institutional frameworks could be associated with different patterns of trust and cooperation, and how institutional change could affect cooperation. I've written a number of shorter pieces on this topic, and I'm currently writing a book-length monograph.
 | Henry Farrell, "Trust, Distrust, and Power." Distrust, ed. Russell Hardin (Russell Sage Foundation, 2004). Available here. |
| Henry Farrell and Jack Knight, “Trust, Institutions and Institutional Evolution: Industrial Districts and the Social Capital Hypothesis,” Politics and Society, 31,4: 537-556 (2003). Available here. |
| Henry Farrell and Ann-Louise Lauridsen, "Collective Goods in the Local Economy: The Packaging Machinery Cluster in Bologna." To be published in Local Production Systems in Europe: Reconstruction and Innovation, ed. Colin Crouch, Patrick Le Galès, Carlo Trigilia and Helmut Voelzkow (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Available here. |