John Padgett and Walter Powell have brought together an impressive array of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and constructed a tour de force. Drawing key insights from evolutionary theory, modern chemistry, and organizational sociology, the authors focus on the emergence of novelty and invention in a remarkable range of cases. Rather than simply addressing how institutions change, the core question facing the multiple chapters in this book concerns when, why, and how new forms of organization arise: “For organizational innovation to become organizational invention, new products, new skills, new relational protocols, and new people must flow through new organizations, bringing them to life” (p. 120).

The volume opens with a set of chapters that introduce the key theoretical concept, autocatalysis. This organizing concept was first developed and formalized by the chemists Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster to explain the emergence of prebiotic life. “Abstracted from its chemical origins,” Padgett and Powell tell us, “autocatalysis can be defined as a set of nodes and transformations in which all nodes are reconstructed through transformation among nodes in the set” (p. 8; italics in original). In other words, in some cases, the interaction of the units (or nodes in a system) can build emergent properties and thus new outcomes. The core argument of the volume is that this kind of emergence can also be the source of novelty and in social, political, and economic organizational forms. In short, the evolution of organizations and markets can be understood as a product of processes that are also discovered in the origins of life.

Undoubtedly, some political scientists will object to the import of concepts from biology and chemistry to the social sciences. This reader has no such issues and instead finds Padgett and Powell’s arguments interesting, challenging, and important. The authors astutely avoid the red herring of sociobiology, presenting instead a nuanced and persuasive argument explaining how evolutionary theory “builds on top of, rather than displaces, the biochemical foundations of complexity and life” (p. 92).

The fourth chapter is where this connection between the disciplines is most explicit. “The key difference,” Padgett argues, “between the chemical and the social is language, with all that that implies” (p. 92). The evolutionary puzzle in biology as well as in social systems, he argues, is how successful systems change and adapt to heterogenous and changing distributions of resources. The answer, he suggests, is through rule transfer and communication. Seeing the puzzle in this way allows Padgett and his coauthors to analyze the evolutionary processes at the most basic level and then build more nuanced and sophisticated models that can be used to explain (or at least shed light on) highly complex real-world cases.

The influence of the Santa Fe Institute, where both Padgett and Powell have long been associated, is obvious. This is not always the volume’s greatest strength. As indicated previously, in the very definition of the central concept, autocatalysis, this is not an easy read. It is a volume to be studied. There are many points where the reader is forced to work slowly through the arguments and evidence supporting the editors’ ambitious theses. Perhaps the volume could have been written in somewhat plainer language. But given the theoretical reach and range of topics addressed, the authors can be forgiven for presenting both technical and stylized arguments. The reader is, to be sure, offered a large number of useful descriptive graphs that do help illustrate the complex arguments presented herein. In my view, The Emergence of Organizations and Markets is worth the effort.

Part II explores the co-evolution of states and markets in early Europe. The cases here range from the emergence of banking and finance in Medici-dominated Florence, to the construction of a unified Germany in nineteenth-century central Europe. Though substantively diverse, the chapters are held together through their focus on the autocatalyitic processes of organizational genesis and innovation. In each case Padgett, and his coauthors show how networks of individuals classes, families, and interests were catalyzed into new organizational forms. Many readers will find these chapters particularly interesting even if they are not persuaded by the full ambition of the evolutionary arguments made.

Part III examines the aftereffects of the fall of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century. Again, the chapters are diverse, but each offers the author the opportunity to explore the ways in which networks emerge to bring about new forms of political and economic organization. Using network analysis, agent-based models, and classical historical and sociological methods, the authors demonstrate how organizational death is an important contributor to the emergence and the evolution of organizational life. The chapter by David Stark and Balázs Vedres is particularly insightful in the way it analyzes the interaction between domestic and international actors in the emergence of new networks and systems.

The last section of the volume examines the co-evolution of modern science, capitalism, and invention. The closing six chapters explore cases of both success and failure in the creative and dynamic worlds of life sciences and information technology, offering multiple insights into the origins of organizational diversity and, ultimately, institutional change.

All edited volumes struggle with coherence, and given the remarkable reach and scope of The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, the authors can be forgiven if not every chapter speaks directly to the central themes laid out by Padgett and Powell. However, given the range of these subjects analyzed—from detailed examinations of the origins of chemical life to sophisticated network analyses of foreign investment networks in postcommunist Hungary, the emergence of money in Renaissance Florence, and regional inventor networks in the Silicon Valley, California—the extent to which this volume holds together is impressive, to say the least.