The Research Spine: Agreements as Economic Infrastructure
Applied economics has a measurement blind spot: we model outcomes but rarely instrument the invisible infrastructure that produces them—the enacted agreement layer that governs how work actually gets done in business ecosystems and value flows (Adner, 2017; Iansiti & Levien, 2004; Jacobides, Cennamo, & Gawer, 2018; Ritchie-Dunham, 2014).
In field settings, fragility first appears as agreement debt: silent compensation, shadow work, recurring rework loops, and risk pushed to the least powerful actors. This debt can accumulate while formal performance narratives remain plausible because many indicators capture effects downstream—after the system has already paid the price in friction, delays, and learning loss (Phillips & Ritala, 2019). When “bridge people” leave, the hidden costs surface: slowed execution, degraded learning, and weakened ecosystem capacity to coordinate under stress (Ritchie-Dunham et al., 2024).
My PhD targets the missing layer: the agreement field—the enacted rules that determine who can decide, what counts as “quality,” and who absorbs the downside when reality hits. I operationalize this through agreement footprints (observable residues of enacted agreements) and an agreement research integrity metric, E³: Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day—a way to quantify the gap between brochure claims and lived practice (Ritchie-Dunham, 2024). This is also how “culture” becomes measurable without reducing it to feelings: footprints are evidence, not opinion.
Methodologically, this is CAESI (Case-Informed, Action-Engaged Systems Inquiry): rigorous, triangulated inquiry that builds working explanations from episodes, traces, and artifacts—strong enough for publication yet close enough to practice to remain economically relevant in complex adaptive ecosystems (Phillips & Ritala, 2019). It holds up a mirror without becoming “the fixer,” because the unit of progress is not advice but testable insight.
At the regional level, this becomes an applied economic contribution: earlier risk detection (before financial events), faster cross-border learning, and SME ecosystems that generate resilience rather than extraction—because the agreement field becomes measurable, discussable, and redesignable (Ritchie-Dunham et al., 2024). Concretely, the output is a regional research instrument set: a shared measurement logic that links ecosystem functioning to well-being and value generation, plus repeatable diagnostics that regional partners can use to compare patterns across sectors without imposing one discipline’s worldview on the rest (Lee, Kubzansky, & VanderWeele, 2021; VanderWeele, 2019).
References
Adner, R. (2017). Ecosystem as structure: An actionable construct for strategy. Journal of Management, 43(1), 39–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206316678451
Iansiti, M., & Levien, R. (2004). The keystone advantage: What the new dynamics of business ecosystems mean for strategy, innovation, and sustainability. Harvard Business School Press.
Jacobides, M. G., Cennamo, C., & Gawer, A. (2018). Towards a theory of ecosystems. Strategic Management Journal, 39(8), 2255–2276. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2904
Lee, M. T., Kubzansky, L. D., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2021). Measuring well-being: Interdisciplinary perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities. Oxford University Press.
Phillips, M. A., & Ritala, P. (2019). A complex adaptive systems agenda for ecosystem research methodology. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 148, 119739. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119739
Ritchie-Dunham, J. L. (2014). Ecosynomics: The science of abundance. Vibrancy Publishing.
Ritchie-Dunham, J. L. (2024). Agreements: Your choice. Vibrancy Ins, LLC.
Ritchie-Dunham, J. L., Chaney Jones, S., Flett, J., Granville-Chapman, K., Pettey, A., Vossler, H., & Lee, M. T. (2024). Love in action: Agreements in a large microfinance bank that scale ecosystem-wide flourishing, organizational impact, and total value generated. Humanistic Management Journal, 9(2), 231–246.
VanderWeele, T. J. (2019). Measures of community well-being: A template. International Journal of Community Well-Being, 2, 253–275. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42413-019-00036-8
