The Roles Of Institutions
First, please read chapter four of your textbook. Then read the following article by Doug North (winner of 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics), in which he describes the role of institutions in governing economic and business systems. After reading the article, please complete a summary and evaluation of the article: That is, summarize the content of the article in 1.5 pages, and in .5 pages evaluate its content. You can find the article here:
Remember that your evaluation should include problems/concepts/ or points that you think the author should have addressed but didn’t. These problems/concepts/points should also have an impact on the article’s conclusions – and you should explain the mechanisms by which they affect the author’s conclusions. (See the Summary and Evaluation description and rubric for an explanation.)
Requirements
Your summary and evaluation assignment will involve summarizing the article (in roughly 1 to 1.5 pages), and then writing your reaction to its content (in ½ to 1 pages). Your summary should highlight the key arguments and conclusions of the research paper in a logical manner. Your evaluation should then critique the article.
For your critique, you will need to do the following: (1) Identify a problem, concept, or a variable that the author did not address in his article, and (2) describe how that problem/concept/variable would impact the author’s conclusions. Note that this will require you to carefully read the article in order to understand exactly what arguments the author does (and does not) make to support the conclusions in their paper. You must then identify something that the article is missing that is relevant to the conclusions of the article. This will be quite difficult, and you should focus on one (no more than two) problems/concepts/variables that you think should have been addressed in the article.
The purpose here is for you to carefully read original academic research and to think critically about the arguments and conclusions contained within it. Each S&E should be (roughly) 2 pages long, with 1.5 spaced lines, 1-inch margins, and Times New Roman size 12 font. Please be prepared to discuss these readings in the session that they are due.
The attached rubric describes how these summary and evaluations will be graded. Each S&E is worth 100 points. The Summary part of the S&E will be based on three elements: Content, Organization, and Grammar. Your critique will be based on two elements: Actionable critique and Justification. Each of these elements is described below.
- Content: This refers to the information contained your summary. Your summary should only describe the key insights and contributions of the paper. In general, the articles will be somewhat long and your summaries short: Therefore, you must think carefully about which information should be included here. In short, you will want to identify all the key points of the article, and omit information that is only tangential to the conclusions of the paper.
- Organization: This refers to how well you convey the information contained in the summary. Here you are required to logically present the key information of the article, typically with a paragraph devoted to each of the main ideas. Paragraphs in your summary should follow the standard conventions of written English: For example, there should be a topic sentence that clearly orients the reader to the topic of each paragraph, there should be no run-on sentences, etc.
- Grammar: This is the simplest of all elements: Here, your paper should contain no typos or ungrammatical sentences. This element can usually be fulfilled by running spell-checker (in Microsoft word) and proofreading.
- The two elements below are used to grade your critique.
- Actionable Critique: This refers to whether you have identified a problem, concept or variable that is (1) not addressed in the article, but (2) has an impact on the conclusions of the article (at least one of the conclusions of the article).
- Justification: Here I am looking for how well you justify your critique of the article. That is, after you have identified something missing from the article, you need to carefully explain exactly how the factor you have identified would affect the author’s conclusions. Often, these papers will have several conclusions or insights, and it is fine if you identify a missing concept or variable that would only affect one of them – you just need to explain how.
