Theoretical developments of Economic Sociology revisited

Abstract

Institutions are considered one of the important factors that shape innovation. Institutional arrangements are expected to determine the innovation capacities of countries, regions and to yield social outcomes. The social studies on innovation have placed institutions in a significant position of the research agenda. Theoretical approaches and empirical studies have increased substantially, resulting in a very complex multidisciplinary landscape built from sociology, economics and policy sciences, among others. As a consequence, it is very difficult to figure out what we really know about the role of institutions on innovation. Two important gaps are the lack of consensus on the meaning of institutions, and the popularity of innovation as a catch-all concept applied to phenomena of diverse nature. The goal of this article is to provide a review of the literature on the topic. Our research questions are: 1) what are the conceptual foundations of research traditions?; 2) how the relationships between institutions and innovations are studied?; 3) what are the major achievements? We conducted a bibliometric analysis of the literature published in the Web of Science followed by a qualitative review of significant works. We used 806 documents to explore the knowledge base and the current research fronts. Because of their usefulness to identify social networks, we used ¿author co-citation analysis¿ and ¿author bibliographic coupling analysis¿. The preliminary results show several clusters that represent the intellectual and social map. We have found that the structure of the field is built on the different conceptualizations in economics and sociology about the meaning of both institutions and innovation. In the paper we identify the research communities and analyse their contributions to the current state of knowledge.