As a complement to the literature on learning in firms, we investigate learning in markets, a nascent area of study that focuses on how learning occurs between, rather than within, firms. The core idea behind our framework is that networks shape knowledge transfer and learning processes by creating channels for knowledge trade and reducing the risk of learning. In developing our framework, we elaborate on the knowledge transfer capabilities of different types of social ties, the informational properties of public and private knowledge, and how types of knowledge transfer and forms of learning follow from the networks within which firms embed their exchanges. We conducted fieldwork at Chicago-area banks to examine our framework's plausibility and application to learning in financial lending markets, a setting relevant to most firms. Findings indicate that learning is located not only in actors' cognitions or past experiences, but also in relations among actors, and that viewing learning as a social process helps solve problems regarding knowledge transfer and learning in markets.Embeddedness, Networks, Social Capital, Learning and Knowledge

The determination of prices is a key function of markets, yet sociologists are just beginning to study it. Most theorists view prices as a consequence of economic processes. By contrast, we consider how social structure shapes prices. Building on embeddedness arguments and original fieldwork at large law firms, we propose that a firm's embedded relationships influence prices by prompting private-information flows and informal governance arrangements that add unique value to goods and services. We test our arguments with a separate longitudinal dataset on the pricing of legal services by law firms that represent corporate America. We find that embeddedness can significantly increase and decrease prices net of standard variables and in markets for both complex and routine legal services. Moreover, results show that three forms of embeddedness—embedded ties, board memberships, and status—affect prices in different directions and have different magnitudes of effects that depend on the complexity of the legal service.

This article analyzes the outcomes of employment discrimination lawsuits filed in federal court from 1988 to 2003. It goes beyond previous research by examining case filings rather than published opinions and by treating case outcome as a sequential variable. Our analysis is informed by four theoretical models: formal legal, rational action/economic, legal mobilization, and critical realist. We employ a discrete-time event-history model with random effects to estimate whether a case will end at a particular stage. We find that employment discrimination litigation consists overwhelmingly of individual cases, a majority of which end in a small settlement. The outcomes of cases are difficult to predict at the outset of litigation. Legal representation and collective legal mobilization have powerful effects on outcome, but collective legal mobilization is rare. These results are most consistent with the critical realist perspective. Our analysis suggests that employment discrimination litigation maintains law's jurisdiction over claims of workplace discrimination while not providing a significant remedy or an authoritative resolution in most cases.

In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of quantitative evaluative social measures in the field of law as well as society generally. One of these measures, the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools, has become an almost obsessive concern of the law school community, generating a great deal of speculation about the effects of these rankings on legal education. However, there has been no attempt to systematically ascertain what, if any, effects these rankings have on the decisionmaking of students and schools in the admission process. This article documents some of these effects by conceptualizing rankings as a signal of law school quality, investigating (1) whether students and schools use this signal to make decisions about where to apply and whom to admit, and (2) whether the creation of this signal distorts the phenomenon—law school quality—that it purports to measure. Using data for U.S. law schools from 1996 to 2003, we find that schools' rankings have significant effects on both the decisions of prospective students and the decisions schools make in the admissions process. In addition, we present evidence that the rankings can become a self‐fulfilling prophecy for some schools, as the effects of rank described above alter the profile of their student bodies, affecting their future rank. Cumulatively, these findings suggest that the rankings help create rather than simply reflect differences among law schools through the magnification of the small, and statistically random, distinctions produced by the measurement apparatus.

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