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The upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence. Such open access orders, however, are not the only norm and equilibrium type of society. The middle and low-income developing countries today, like all countries before about 1800, can be understood as limited access orders that maintain their equilibrium in a fundamentally different way. In limited access orders, the state does not have a secure monopoly on violence, and society organizes itself to control violence among the elite factions. A common feature of limited access orders is that political elites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, the elite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time. Adequate stability of the rents and thus of the social order requires limiting access and competition-hence a social order with a fundamentally different logic than the open access order. This paper lays out such a framework and explores some of its implications for the problems of development today.

Collective --- Corporate Law --- Corporations --- Disability --- E-Business --- Individuals --- Institutional structures --- Labor Policies --- Law and Development --- Limited --- Monopoly --- Political parties --- Private Sector Development --- Public Sector Corruption and Anticorruption Measures --- Social Protections and Labor --- Societies --- Society --- Union

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of "intimate speculation," a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption's outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption-and the families it produces-possible.

Interracial adoption --- 21st century. --- adoption agency. --- adoption process. --- america. --- anticipation. --- class. --- domestic adoption. --- expectant mothers. --- family. --- ideologies. --- institutional structures. --- intimate speculation. --- investment. --- mediating relationships. --- observation. --- power dynamics. --- professionals. --- prospective adopters. --- race. --- social inequality. --- social workers. --- transracial adoption. --- united states. --- who can have a future.