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"Zunft"
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The European guilds : an economic analysis
\"Guilds ruled many crafts and trades from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, and have always attracted debate and controversy. They were sometimes viewed as efficient institutions that guaranteed quality and skills. But they also excluded competitors, manipulated markets, and blocked innovations. Did the benefits of guilds outweigh their costs? Analyzing thousands of guilds that dominated European economies from 1000 to 1880, The European Guilds uses vivid examples and clear economic reasoning to answer that question. Sheilagh Ogilvie's book features the voices of honorable guild masters, underpaid journeymen, exploited apprentices, shady officials, and outraged customers, and follows the stories of the \"vile encroachers\"--Women, migrants, Jews, gypsies, bastards, and many others--desperate to work but hunted down by the guilds as illicit competitors. She investigates the benefits of guilds but also shines a light on their dark side. Guilds sometimes provided important services, but they also manipulated markets to profit their members. They regulated quality but prevented poor consumers from buying goods cheaply. They fostered work skills but denied apprenticeships to outsiders. They transmitted useful techniques but blocked innovations that posed a threat. Guilds existed widely not because they corrected market failures or served the common good but because they benefited two powerful groups--guild members and political elites.\"--Jacket.
BOOK
CLANS, GUILDS, AND MARKETS
In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a preindustrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprentices from the old. Institutions such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the market organize who learns from whom. We argue that medieval European institutions such as guilds, and specific features such as journeymanship, can explain the rise of Europe relative to regions that relied on the transmission of knowledge within closed kinship systems (extended families or clans).
Journal Article
Culture, Marketization, and Owner-Manager Agency Costs: A Case of Merchant Guild Culture in China
This study explores cultural influence on corporate behavior employing the case of merchant guild culture in China and further the moderating role of Marketization. Using hand-collected data on merchant guild culture, we find that merchant guild culture is significantly negatively associated with owner-manager agency costs, suggesting that merchant guild culture in ancient China still has its continuous and remarkable effects on managerial behavior in contemporary corporations. This finding also implies that merchant guild culture motivates managers to upgrade the efficiency of controlling operating costs, reduces agency conflicts between management and shareholders, and eventually mitigates owner-manager agency costs. Moreover, provincial Marketization level attenuates the negative association between merchant guild culture and owner-manager agency costs. Above results are robust to a variety of alternative measures of merchant guild culture and owner-manager agency costs. Furthermore, our findings are still valid after controlling for the potential endogeneity between merchant guild culture and owner-manager agency costs.
Journal Article
The Economics of Guilds
Occupational guilds in medieval and early modern Europe offered an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the economic pie and redistributing it to themselves at the expense of the rest of the economy. Guilds provided an organizational mechanism for groups of businessmen to negotiate with political elites for exclusive legal privileges that allowed them to reap monopoly rents. Guild members then used their guilds to redirect a share of these rents to political elites in return for support and enforcement. In short, guilds enabled their members and political elites to negotiate a way of extracting rents in the manufacturing and commercial sectors, rents that neither party could have extracted on its own. First, I provide an overview of where and when European guilds arose, what occupations they encompassed, how large they were, and how they varied across time and space. I then examine how guild activities affected market competition, commercial security, contract enforcement, product quality, human capital, and technological innovation. The historical findings on guilds provide strong support for the view that institutions arise and survive for centuries not because they are efficient but because they serve the distributional interests of powerful groups.
Journal Article
Emergence of chambers in the Turkish history: the case of Dersaadet Chamber of Commerce (DCC) as a public-agent meta-organization, 1882–1929
Purpose
Building on previous historical works, this study aims to develop a framework to represent chambers as meta-organizations and present the case of Dersaadet Chamber of Commerce (DCC), based on this framework, during its emergence and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Design/methodology/approach
In the study, a historical narrative was constructed from primary and secondary data. To complement data collected from the archives a systematic content analysis was used to explore the discourse of the chamber within its serial magazine.
Findings
It was found that the first chamber of the Ottoman Empire, DCC, was established according to the public law model as an extension of the economic context and the guild order, and it was observed that it increasingly conformed to this model between 1882 and 1929.
Originality/value
In this study, chamber models are examined for the first time according to the designated features of meta-organizational forms, built on the historical work on chambers. The case of DCC suggested that it adopted a public law model and displayed much continuity, even when significant transitions were observed during the modernization process from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic.
Journal Article
Institutional Change: Abolishing the Guild System in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt
The present article outlines a 15-year body of research in institutional economics investigating the influence of institutions on economic growth and development processes. The study explores whether institutional changes act as a catalyst for significant economic and social developments, using the abolition of the guild system in two neighbouring states of the Confederation of the Rhine and since 1815 of the German Confederation – Hesse-Darmstadt and Hesse-Nassau – as a case study.
Journal Article
Agency and Institutional Change: The Dissolution of the Guild System in the 18th Century Rhineland
Employing concepts from institutional economics and institutional organisation theory the article challenges the institutions-as-rule perspective by centring on endogenous institutional change through entrepreneurship. The empirical case is the dissolution of the guild system in 18th-century Rhineland, which is usually understood as a regime shift effect of the Napoleonic wars and the integration of the Rhineland into the French state. A close inspection of the developments in the woollen cloth industry in the Aachen region shows that the formal abolition of the guilds by the French concluded an erosion process that had already begun in the early 18th century and which had substantially undermined guild regulations. I suggest that entrepreneurship helps understand and explain this process: Institutional entrepreneurs found loopholes and bent or broke the guild regulations to the extent that they no longer harmed their expansive strategies.
Journal Article
Spatial competition, innovation and institutions
This paper considers the possible contribution of spatial competition to the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence. Rather than exclusively focusing on the incentives of producers to adopt labor-saving technology, we also consider the incentives of factor suppliers’ organizations such as craft guilds to resist. Once we do so, industrialization no longer depends on market size per se, but on spatial competition between the guilds’ jurisdictions. We substantiate our theory’s claim of spatial competition being an important channel for industrialization (i) by providing historical evidence on the relation between spatial competition, craft guilds and innovation, and (ii) by showing that the calibrated model correctly predicts the timings of the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence.
Journal Article
Proto-CSR Before the Industrial Revolution: Institutional Experimentation by Medieval Miners' Guilds
In this paper, we argue that antecedents of modern corporate social responsibility (CSR) prior to the Industrial Revolution can be referred to as \"proto-CSR\" to describe a practice that influenced modern CSR, but which is different from its modern counterparts in form and structure. We develop our argument with the history of miners' guilds in medieval Germany—religious fraternities and secular mutual aid societies. Based on historical data collected by historians and archeologists, we reconstruct a long-term process of pragmatic experimentation with institutions of mutual aid that address social problems in the early mining industry, and thus before the rise of the modern state and the capitalist firm. Co-shaped by economic and political actors, these institutions of mutual aid have influenced the social responsibility programs of early industrialists, modern social welfare legislation, and contemporary CSR. We conjecture that other elements of proto-CSR might have evolved according to similar trajectories.
Journal Article
The Efficiency of Occupational Licensing during the Gilded and Progressive Eras: Evidence from Judicial Review
This paper proposes a novel approach to assessing the efficiency and distributional consequences of occupational licensing statutes during the Gilded and Progressive eras, based on the practice of judicial review. At the time, state judges ruling on the constitutionality of police powers regulation operated under powerful legal norms that militated against redistribution and class legislation. Evidence presented in the paper strongly suggests that judges were significantly more likely to uphold, on constitutional grounds, occupational licensing legislation for occupations with important information asymmetries, suggesting that constitutional review promoted efficiency in occupational markets. These findings have implications for current policies regarding occupational licensing.
Journal Article