conservatism. Rather, villagers perceived (as did Western business interests) that property and
credit institutions in the early post-Soviet period were quite fragile. In this environment, the
most reasonable decision was to invest energy in building up highly dense and trusted personal
helping networks. The net result of this strategy, however, was to retard the development of
institutional arrangements that would have helped the growth of peasant household farms.16
One of the most important contributions of the New Institutionalism in Economics and
Sociology, is that it retains the assumption of an individual's rationality but views the rational
economic person as operating within institutional constraints that limit his or her choices. Thus,
individuals may make perfectly rational choices to survive within a given institutional
arrangement, even though in the aggregate these choices may be quite harmful and limit
community or national economic development. Scholars in this tradition recognize the
reinforcing relationship between institutions and the reward structure of social organizations
(from family to national organizations) that spring from those institutions.17 This in turn creates
a certain type of inertia that may result in a "path dependency"18 in which unintended
downstream consequences may emerge from institutional and social organizational
developments made at a much earlier period. In the next section, we will cite some serious
limitations of the path dependency concept. Nonetheless, the contribution of this concept is that
it directs our attention to the enormous constraints that make it difficult for individuals to change
course and participate in new types of bridging social networks, even when they will bring will
bring benefits to them.
In addition to the restraining effects of institutional and social organizational elements
that fall under the rubric of path dependency, an inherent obstacle to developing bridging ties is
that by definition such ties are more expansive and therefore typically involve more individuals