Neo-institutional theory

Diversity, a ‘voluntary’ concern as seen through the Anglo-Saxon lens, and discrimination, a ‘legal’ mandated concern as seen through the same lens, have simultaneously been gaining popularity in France since 2003. In this respect, this country is undergoing a regulation process with various constituencies promoting new sets of rules to make French society more inclusive. Through three different explanatory lenses, I examine how published discourse regarding adoption of diversity practices is converted into action. These lenses, the Anglo-American business case, which insists on the economic rationality of such adoption, and neo-institutional theory, which views diversity management as a result of isomorphic change processes, is joined by French social regulation theory, which posits diversity management as part of a process of designing new rules. My data shows that mandated practices have higher adoption rates than voluntary practices, but there are important variations in terms of rates of adoption, within both voluntary and mandatory processes. Besides the perceived threats from not complying, French managers take into account levels of flexibility as well as implementation cost. In this sense, French organizational constituents mediate the various initiatives suggested to them by their environment and exert a form of autonomous regulation. Laws focus attention and trigger action, rather than constraining it.

The book focuses on the question of how national bilateral diplomacy is influenced and transformed by EU membership. It provides profound empirical evidence on the nature of this influence and the effect of this process. Its focus lies on the most classical element in the field of national bilateral diplomacy: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its network of diplomatic representations. This study’s object of investigation is Austria. Accordingly, it concentrates on developments and changes in Austria’s conduct of bilateral diplomacy during 20 years of EU membership. The investigation is conducted in the form of a case study, based on institutional theories of organizations and organizational analysis. In order to address developments in the field of bilateral diplomacy, the book considers structural elements, tasks and processes as well as elements of the professional identity of diplomats. Thereby, two fields of examination, bilateral diplomacy both inside and outside the EU, are analysed separately.

Il tema dell’etica ciclicamente riconquista il centro del palcoscenico nel dibattito sulla governance delle imprese, sulle ragioni dell’esistenza di queste e sulle loro finalità. Obiettivo del presente contributo è rileggere le problematiche di Business Ethics in una cornice ‘situazionista’ dell’impresa. Si propone così una visione processuale e dialettica del rapporto tra etica e morale nell’agire imprenditoriale che, pur non trascurando gli effetti dell’istituzionalizzazione pro tempore di regole morali - e dunque di un’etica d’impresa - non ne fa derivare la scomparsa della libertà individuale e del potere di agire eticamente - rivalutando la presenza di un’etica nell’impresa. La riflessione teorica è impiegata per rileggere la strategia di Banca Popolare Etica (BpE), unica impresa operante nel sistema finanziario italiano secondo logiche di finanza etica, attraverso due casi concreti di processi decisionali del CdA della Banca.

The third sector will play a major role in the reform of public services within the UK under the flagship rhetoric of the Big Society. There is a lacuna of research into third sector performance in comparison to the public and private sector, which renders this study relevant and timely. This three-paper PhD thesis makes an original contribution to knowledge in the field of performance management within UK third sector housing associations using a longitudinal, multiple case study analysis.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de participer à l’étude du changement des industries contemporaines et d’appliquer des outils de la science politique à l’analyse de l’économie. À travers l’étude du cas de la voiture électrique, nous nous interrogeons sur les causes des évolutions de l’industrie automobile. Notre hypothèse est que la construction du marché des voitures électriques entre 2008 et 2013 n’a pas produit la « Révolution » annoncée par les acteurs sociaux. Au contraire, elle a permis la reproduction des structures et des hiérarchies industrielles existantes. Pour le démontrer, ce travail tente de comprendre non seulement comment la question du développement des voitures électriques a été érigée au rang de problème public, mais aussi comment ce « problème » s’est institutionnalisé comme un cadre consensuel d’action des constructeurs automobiles. Par ce biais, nous  mettons en lumière l’importance des croyances et des représentations collectives sur l’activité économique, dans l’optique de déconstruire le mythe de la « Seconde Révolution automobile ». En outre, notre travail montre que la science politique, et plus précisément l’analyse des politiques publiques et la sociologie de l’action publique, peut apporter des outils analytiques heuristiques et des réponses concrètes au fonctionnement des industries et du capitalisme contemporain.

One of the most profound social scientific questions pertains to social order – the stability, change, and functioning of human societies. Two prongs to this question inform the background to operationalising any institutional theory: how a society can simultaneously maintain its integration and co-ordination (e.g., division of labour) and whether a society can be understood as more than the sum of its parts. The most influential contemporary tradition of institutionalism, known as neo-institutionalism, is no exception with regard to these interconnected questions. Celebrating a new era for institutionalism in the 1990s, some members of that school declared a ‘reconciliation agenda’ aimed at overcoming the vast gulf between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ thinking in the social sciences, a chasm that separates between traditions on the basis of their perspective on the problem of order. Moreover, the neo-institutionalist pursuit, as a more nuanced exercise, was intended to offer a foundation for social studies that consider society to be structured but still changing, in all its richness and variety, without being unnecessarily formalistic. While neoinstitutionalism today shows greater variety than ever, this reconciliation has not yet come about. In-depth study pinpoints this failure is rooted in neo-institutionalism’s theoretical premises and in the need for academic demarcation. That conclusion is based on critical reconstruction of two branches of neo-institutionalism: historical institutionalism (HI), which represents ‘system’ thinking, and so-called ideational scholarship (IS), representing the ‘lifeworld’ approach. The main problem with theoretical underpinnings is related to their background ontologies’ connection, on one hand, with dichotomies such as agent–structure and material–ideal and, on the other, with linear causal reasoning. For example, IS tends to create theoretical causal objects as tools for empirical enquiry (‘causal’ because science is based on causal reasoning and ‘objects’ since only ‘real’ things may possess causal powers). The task of explaining empirical cases entails giving these abstractions an ontological status, making them ‘things’ with inherent properties. This objectifying leads to ambiguous conceptions of how the social world operates, though. Imaginary causal objects may detach actors from their concrete conditions, or the entirety of institutional reality may be derived from individual cognitions. In general, the essence of institutions for neo-institutionalists typically involves a weird combination of mental states with unexplained ‘materialism’ or, alternatively, a mixture that includes rules, norms, cognitive frames, and other manifestations of the social relations behind institutions. Although neo-institutionalists’ adoption of a more fine-grained and empirically based approach to institutions has addressed some shortcomings of earlier work, the ‘social’ denominator of the equation still appears to be neglected. Research into the highly debated issue of how to explain the institutional nature of society in a manner beyond the system–lifeworld dichotomy seems to suggest that the common denominator involves proceeding from social relations. A project was undertaken to revitalise the reconciliation agenda through reconstruction of further theoretical approaches. The selection used these three criteria: 1) having a direct or indirect connection with neo-institutionalism; 2) tackling the problem of order as a concrete issue as it serves as a point of reference for all the approaches; and 3) applying relevant neo-institutionalists’ development aspirations, such as Paul Pierson’s research agenda, according to which HI should address ideology theories. Among the traditions investigated were the social system theory of Talcott Parsons, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s social constructionism, and the critical ideology theory of Projekt Ideologietheorie (PIT). Both HI and IS were considered in light of these traditions and, thereby, supplemented, complemented, and challenged by them. In addition, independent consideration of the various traditions and original readings were carried out. The social system theory reconstructed in the project complements HI with a coherent structure to the theory. The perspective formed by a new reading of Parsons as a relational theorist offers a detailed description of institutional integration mechanisms also. The reconstruction of social constructionism, in turn, spotlights the problems of cognition-based lifeworld theories. Rather than describe institutionalisation, accounts in this tradition seem to focus on the (historical) formation of actors’ experiences. That formation is a key issue in all the traditions examined. One element of departure, in contrast, is that all the ones mentioned above assume people’s equilibrium-seeking behaviour, while PIT turns this around. It asks how modern capitalist societies have held together notwithstanding their internal contradictions (where these contradictions stem primarily from capitalist competition relations that, while beyond individuals’ control, form very real conditions for each individual acting in market relations). Accordingly, PIT presents capitalist society as a contradiction-rich whole, where various groups, with differing interests, must come together to sufficient extent to maintain or challenge the prevailing order. Ideology theory describes the contradictory nature of society and explains how social relations produce disorder as an unintended consequence of mundane, institutionalised practices. To synthesise the findings on all of these traditions and their underpinnings, the dissertation project’s outputs include a synthesis of social relations that extends beyond the system–lifeworld division in examining how a society may operate as more than the sum of its parts.

This study explores how extremist groups use propaganda as a form of strategic communication. The theoretical foundation used was an adaption of neo-institutional theory for strategic communication. The sample was an issue of Dabiq, an online propaganda magazine, from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The qualitative method employed was ethnographic content analysis. The study found ISIL used Dabiq as a form of strategic communication to achieve organizational goals in compliance with neo-institutional theory. Furthermore, ISIL used strategic communication in a similar manner as nonextremist groups; it sought to advance its organization as being superior to rival ones. These findings indicate that neo-institutional
theory can further understanding of how extremist groups use propaganda, as strategic communication, to achieve organizational goals. This is accomplished
by analyzing the functions specified in neo-institutional theory that propagandists attempt to fulfill. In general, this study offers evidence that the academic field of strategic communication offers significant potential to advance propaganda theory. If neo-institutional theory, as adapted for strategic communication, can explain and predict what a propagandist does, other strategic communication perspectives might offer the same ability to analyze propaganda and develop propaganda theory.

This dissertation examines the local construction of law on the street regarding immigrants. Local agencies play a key role in immigration enforcement and in providing services to immigrants. They are increasingly the face of the state to immigrants, a face that varies across localities and regions and ranges from friendly to hostile. In the context of climate change, immigration to the United States is likely to increase and place greater pressure on public services in many areas. While much attention has been focused on punitive responses to immigration, this dissertation’s basic thesis is that many local government agencies have adopted surprisingly welcoming policies toward immigrants. The dissertation develops this thesis in three phases. First, it develops the concept of welcomeness of public agencies toward immigrants. Welcoming policies are policies and practices that are designed to improve interactions between local administrative agencies and immigrants, encourage immigrants to settle in the community and protect undocumented immigrants from being victimized or harassed. Second, the dissertation develops a framework for measuring the degree of welcomeness of particular agencies. Third, it examines how widely local agencies are welcoming (or unwelcoming) to immigrants and what are the conditions that shape the degree of welcomeness. Drawing on nationwide surveys of local police departments and public libraries and interviews with department leaders and frontline employees, the dissertation shows that many agencies have consciously and deliberately developed policies and practices that are intended to develop positive relationships between the agency and immigrants, encourage immigrants’ use of the agency and help immigrants integrate into the community. While libraries, as a service agency, might be expected to emphasize equality of service, police departments’ mission is regulatory and they might be expected to adopt a more punitive (and thus less welcoming) orientation. The evidence that welcoming policies are widespread in both settings suggests that welcomeness is not confined to the service context. The dissertation shows that in both settings professionals are pulled between political pressures that are often hostile to immigrants and professional norms favoring equal service to all in the community. How much a local agency is welcoming or unwelcoming depends on the balance between these opposing forces. Professional norms help organizations resist political pressures. The dissertation suggests that welcoming policies and practices are likely to gain increased significance as climate change contributes to increasing immigration.

This paper addresses the shaping of diversity management in France using a neo-institutional perspective, through which non-discrimination in the workplace is viewed as an organizational field structured around the problem of discrimination and the challenge of diversity management. The analysis draws on the process approach, together with the institutional change model as an analytical framework. By analysing the conditions in France, the authors contribute to the understanding of how diversity management has been managed over time. They also show how the environmental context, the position of institutional entrepreneurs, practices and boundaries affect institutional dynamics in a given organizational field.

Purpose-Public Relations continues to struggle for a voice in Nigeria as it still fails to be recognized as a respectable profession and practice. The overall aim of the doctoral project on which this paper is based is a study of the tensions arising from the contradicting Public Relations (PR) understanding and practices of organizations, Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) and PR educators in Nigeria that are viewed as actors in this study. The findings of my pilot study indicate that these tensions relate to (1) organizations' perceived practitioner incompetence, (2) predominant one way communication PR practices, (3) inter-profession jurisdictional battles, and (4) inconsistent PR education scope and curricula. More specifically, this paper will demonstrate how Engeström's (2006) Activity Theory (AT) framework can be applied for studying the contradicting PR practices in Nigeria. Theoretical framework – The Interdependences and interactions between the actors and their environment, and professionalization processes within organizational contexts necessitate a complex theoretical framework that draws from neo-institutional theory and the sociology of professions. Research Design – Yin's (2014) single case study with an embedded design is employed for the study, within which the AT framework is applied to critically analyze and discuss the interdependences, contradictions, tensions as well as their implications for each actor and the Nigerian PR environment they share. Contribution/originality – The study contributes an empirical holistic study of PR practices in Nigeria that goes beyond anecdotal evidence or focus on single actors. The study also introduces and demonstrates how Activity Theory (AT) could be applied to studying PR practices within specific contexts.

Background: Policies generate accountability in that they offer a standard against which government performance can be assessed. A central question of this study is whether ideological imprint left by policy is realized in the time following its adoption. National mental health policy expressly promotes the notion of deinstitutionalization, which mandates that individuals be cared for in the community rather than in institutional environments. Methods: We investigate whether mental health policy adoption induced a transformation in the structure of mental health systems, namely psychiatric beds, using panel data on 193 countries between 2001 and 2011. Results: Our striking regression results demonstrate that late-adopters of mental health policy are more likely to reduce psychiatric beds in mental hospitals and other biomedical settings than innovators, whereas they are less likely than non-adopters to reduce psychiatric beds in general hospitals. Conclusions: It can be inferred late adopters are motivated to implement deinstitutionalization for technical efficiency rather than social legitimacy reasons.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

Article on the causes, dynamics of development and institutional forms of economic cycles. We study the institutional patterns associated with the formation, development and completion of economic cycles from the standpoint of an exogenous approach. The author proves the thesis about the relationship of formation of new institutions of economic behavior as a cause of the economic crisis and the formation of new institutions as the primary sign of transition to a new economic cycle. This article is an attempt to prove the relationship of economic and institutional cycling.
Статья о причинах, динамике развития и институциональных проявлениях экономических циклов. Исследуются институциональные закономерности, связанные с формированием, развитием и завершением экономических циклов с позиций экзогенного подхода. Автор обосновывает тезис о взаимосвязи формирования новых институций экономического поведения в качестве причины экономического кризиса и о формировании новых институтов в качестве основного признака перехода к новому экономическому циклу. В статье делается попытка доказать взаимосвязь экономической и институциональной цикличности.

The paper provides an initial international comparative empirical assessment of international branch campuses (IBCs) worldwide. Building on neo-institutional theory and organizational ecology, it sheds light on the new organizational form by analyzing their founding age of the home university and IBC mortality. Furthermore the paper analyzes the organizational form of home institutions that establish such an international branch abroad, in terms of size, age, ranking positions and range of disciplines, and peeks into an educational hub with a high density of international branch campuses. The analysis shows that all forms of universities maintain branch campuses, none is more likely to establish a branch, but the age of the universities that establish a branch campus increases the likelihood of the survival of the branch in times of increased competitive pressures. Additionally, the analysis reveals that educational hubs are very narrow competitive environments of program offers for a diversity of home institutions. These results point to the conclusion that home institutions adopt the strategy of establishing an international branch campus even when the environment is highly competitive and the strategy appears unlikely to succeed.

This article looks at the strategies religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) with strong transnational linkages use to maintain a continued presence in mainland China. It does so by utilizing neo-institutional theory as an instrument for analysis, with an emphasis on outlining the coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures RNGOs face. One of the key findings of the study is that there is creative circumvention of isomorphic pressures by working with local agents, fostering trust with the local government, and keeping a low profile. Moreover, RNGOs dealt with the uncertain institutional environment in China through staff exchanges, denominational supervision, tapping into global platforms, and undergoing a professionalization process. KEY Words: China, NGOs, religion, neo-institutional theory, isomorphism

The Emerging Church movement (ECM) is sociologically interesting—not due to the size of its membership or the centrality of its congregations. Rather, the ECM is significant because it provides an opportunity to generate new concepts for the study religious innovation and social change. Using theoretical language, the ECM consists of institutional entrepreneurs who drive their religiously concerned movement by continually deconstructing and reframing beliefs, practices, and identities from " mainstream " Christianity while at the same time promoting newly formulated and broadly resonant religious imperatives. As Emerging Christians cultivate new or altered religious practices, these must be continually legitimized. Furthermore, their renegotiated beliefs (heterodoxies) require new forms of organization (alternative congregations). Such action is not the work of isolated individuals, nor is it independent of societal conditions. Ultimately, the ECM consists of Emerging Christians who creatively operate through diffuse network structures across wide geographic spaces and among disparate social groups to enact a collective institutional entrepreneurship that seeks to reimagine the assumptions of conventional Christian congregational life.

Embedded in the definition of CSR is the idea that individual agents deliberately create and implement rules beyond what is made compulsory by law. This is for instance reflected in the European Commission's Green Paper : " voluntarily integrating social and environmental preoccupations to business and relationships with stakeholders in order to fully meet the legal constraints but also to go beyond and invest more in human capital and environment " Underlying is an assumption about what is compulsory and what is not in order to define social responsibility as a purely voluntary process. Our point of view is that this definition corresponds to an Anglo-Saxon ideal-type where laws are few but generally well implemented. This ideal-type tends to make the assumption that there is a fine separation between the legal norm, and voluntarism. Our contribution's purpose is to use two theoretical frameworks in organizational sociology : social regulation (Reynaud, 1997) ; neo-institutionalism (Di Maggio and Powell, 1983) in order to challenge this conception of CSR and the dividing line between 'compulsory' and 'voluntary'. We will discuss the implications of both frameworks on CSR both as content and as process.

Colin Hay's constructivist institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt's discursive institutionalism are two recent attempts to theorize ideas as potential explanations of institutional change. This new attention to the causal role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmidt do not take into consideration the constitutive and structural aspects of ideas. Instead they reduce ideas to properties of individual conscious minds, scanting the respects in which ideas are intersubjectively baked into the practices shared by individuals. This aspect of ideas—arguably, the institutional side of ideas—is developed in post-structuralist thought, which therefore demands a place in ideational research.

El neoinstitucionalismo presenta múltiples explicaciones acerca de las variaciones que imponen las organizaciones, como formas alternativas de coordinación, sobre el mercado Cabe esperar que tales formas ocasionen luego distintos poderes de mercado. Así mismo, la existencia de seudomercados al interior de las organizaciones, y en general todo su andamiaje de reglas y jerarquías, implica posiciones competitivas distintas. La discusión del proyecto inicia por definir un concepto tácitamente citado en la literatura al respecto, pero sobre el cual no hay una definición precisa: Mecanismo de mercado. Son sentidas las dificultades de investigación originadas en esta indefinición, puesto que, al intentar observar la realidad de algunas organizaciones en particular, no es evidente cuáles situaciones corresponden a un mecanismo de mercado y cuáles no.

Contrary to the claims of charter school leaders and to leaders' chagrin, charter school teachers work longer hours for less pay and without job security, leading to what's called " churn and burn. " I describe this as a case of unplanned, adverse organizational strategy in which an organization creates a strategy without deliberation that undermines their technical goals. Using a 20-month ethnographic study of a high performing charter school pseudonymously called Achievement College Prep, I investigate how such an employment system arose in one school and how it could have arisen among charter schools generally. Achievement fits the mold of churn and burn, with an annual turnover rate between 30 and 50 percent, a 60-80 hour work week, lower than average compensation, systematic job insecurity, and little prospects for advancement. Rather than being systematically planned or happening through uncontrollable conditions, I argue the churn and burn system emerged from many disparate decisions over time. These disparate decisions converged on the churn and burn system because teachers and administrators share a set of beliefs about who teachers are and should be. These beliefs; that teachers are Type-A perfectionists, high achievers, and true believers; led the staff to choose and support the long hours, low wages, and insecurity. I conclude by arguing that these conditions are likely to be found in other charter schools, particularly No Excuses charter schools where these beliefs about teachers are more common, and may explain how the general pattern of churn and burn took shape in the field.

This study focuses on the roles of rhetoric and of the various actors in institutionalisation and
deinstitutionalisation attempts. Our paper jointly investigates the process whereby budgeting became
institutionalised between 1930 and 1960 and the attempts of the CAM-I to deinstitutionalise it from 1990.
Paradoxically, the same two arguments have been used to support the institutionalisation of and the attempts to
deinstitutionalise budgets. Firstly, in the 1930’s the turbulence of the environment is used a rhetorical argument
to support the implementation of budgeting. Since 1990, the turbulence of the environment has generated a
feeling that budgeting should be abandoned. Secondly in the 1930’s and 1950’s budgets contributed to the
emancipation of managers, while since 1990 they have been deemed as rigid frameworks preventing managers
from acting freely. These contradictions reveal that we can not explain such changes by the rhetorical schemes
alone. The network of actors in which these schemes are embedded has a large part in the influence of rhetoric in
the change from one institutional order to another. It is particularly the actors to whom these rhetorical schemes
are addressed which give them their meanings. Finally, the similarities between the rhetoric used can be
explained if we analyse it as the means to transcend the fluctuating contradictions of institutional logics.

This was a presentation in Public to the Kettering Stamp and Philatelic Society. It explores printed covers 纪念封 relating to space exploration. This presentation is geared towards people interested in postage stamps.

This on-going work is based on materialism and Derridan epistemology in a neo-institutional context, including social network analysis.

It is to be presented more fully at the Sino-Russian Forum of the British Interplanetary Society on 3 June 2018 and the British Postgraduate Network for Chinese Studies' conference at the Oxford China Centre on 22 June 2018.

If interested please email me for copies of these presentations.

This paper examines how the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has been interpreted and used in Denmark. Drawing on interviews with suppliers and users of the BSC, the paper shows how these different actors have interpreted and attached meaning to the BSC concept. The BSC’s ‘interpretive space’ and ‘boundary object’ characteristics lead to different interpretations and mobilizations of the concept in practice. There is a multiplicity in terms of what the concept means on both the supply side and the demand side. Two main interpretations can be identified in Danish practice: the BSC as (1) a ‘performance measurement system’; and (2) as a ‘strategic management system’. Interestingly, there is a mismatch between how consultants and user organizations interpret and attach meaning to the concept. While suppliers interpret and promote the BSC as a strategic management system, users appear more likely to interpret and use the concept as a performance measurement system. The paper discusses possible explanations for these differences.

El proceso de Bolonia, una de las políticas educativas que partiendo de algunos estados miembros elementos ha asumido la Unión Europea, se puso en marcha para crear un Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES), es decir, armonizar la educación superior y fomentar la movilidad de estudiantes y fuerza de trabajo en Europa. Bolonia podría considerarse un ejemplo perfecto de la globalización según la concepción neo-institucional de Stanford. Este paradigma mantiene la existencia de una cultura e ideología educativa mundial que sustentan la difusión-globalización de modelos o mitos racionalizados, creando un isomorfismo educativo global. Empero, el mantenimiento del heteromorfismo es evidente en uno de los objetivos centrales de la reforma, la formación de profesores de secundaria (FPrS). Como demuestra el análisis histórico-comparativo de los casos alemán y español, las diferentes constelaciones políticas, la cultura académica regional y nacional, y la inercia institucional reprodujeron las diferencias en la FPrS de ambos países y entre estados alemanes. En la práctica, las reformas del FPrS implementadas bajo la égida de Bolonia, más que la difusión de un modelo global o europeo, podrían entenderse como respuestas locales idiosincráticas a las reformas de la escuela secundaria que tuvieron lugar en ambos países durante las décadas anteriores.

The Bologna Process aimed to create a European Space of Higher Education i.e., to harmonize the European universities and fostering the mobility of students and workers across Europe. The Bologna process could be construed, as the European Union itself, as an example of the conceptions of globalization proposed by the Stanford Neo-institutional approach. This approach maintains the existence of an imperative world-level educational culture and ideology sustaining the diffusion and transfer of rationalized educational models, creating therefore a world-wide educational isomorphism. However, one of the arguably central objectives of the reform, the Secondary teacher training, maintains a high degree of heteromorphism throughout Europe almost two decades after the Bologna Accord was signed. As the comparison of the German and Spanish cases show, the national and regional academic cultures, the different power constellations and institutional inertia and path dependence re-created the national and (in Germany) regional differences. The secondary teacher training reforms implemented under Bologna´s aegis rather than a diffusion of a global or European model could be understood as idiosyncratic responses to the secondary education reforms that took place in both countries in previous decades.

Over the past decades China has experienced unprecedented economic liberalization, industrialization, mass migration, urbanization, and privatization, which have contributed to the rise of China as an emerging economic superpower. At the same time, China is also facing unprecedented challenges, including rising unemployment, socio-economic disparity, corruption, and environment degradation. Spotlight on China aims to bring together international scholars with contributions from new and established scholars to explore the profound social and economic transformation that has resulted from the market economy and its concomitant impact on education and society in China. The series includes authored and edited collections offering multidisciplinary perspectives and most contemporary and comprehensive analyses of recent social and educational changes in China.

Child marriage, commonly defined as the marriage of children under the age 18, became an issue of concern over the past several decades. Today, the majority of countries have laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 years old. What explains this global legislative shift that started haltingly in the 1960s and 1970s and intensified greatly in the 1990s? This is one of the major research questions addressed in this dissertation. In addition to this global legislative trend, starting in the late 1990s, child marriage became a focus of concern for many international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and multilateral organizations. How did child marriage come to be defined as a major global problem? This is the second major question examined in the dissertation. I address these questions through a mixed methods study. In the first section, I utilize qualitative methods such as interviews and document analysis to examine global cultural scripts that constitute the discourse against child marriage. Second, I conduct quantitative analyses of factors influencing legislation setting the minimum age of marriage at 18. I analyze time-series data for 167 countries from 1965 to 2015. By means of survival analysis techniques, I examine factors that help explain which countries were early adopters of legislation. By using logistic regression, I analyze factors that help explain whether or not a country ever adopted a minimum-18 marriage law in the 50 years of my analysis. Both qualitative and quantitative findings indicate that world cultural scripts are crucial for understanding the global fight against child marriage, in terms of both legislative reforms and the international movement. Country characteristics matter comparatively little; it is largely the global system that has shaped the process.

Please follow this link for full text: http://discovere.emory.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do;jsessionid=F65DA5341991053483B871C0857E0535?tabs=detailsTab&ct=display&fn=search&doc=01EMORY_ALMA51354428970002486&indx=1&recIds=01EMORY_ALMA51354428970002486&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbrVersion=&vid=discovere&institution=EMORY&vl(4439115UI0)=any&query=any%2Ccontains%2Cebeturk&libsearch=woodruff&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28repo%29%2Cscope%3A%2801EMORY_ALMA%29%2CEmory_PrimoThirdNode&vl(freeText0)=ebeturk&dstmp=1597834201930

Theoretical work about independent local lists in Croatia is in the beginning stages. Due to an underdeveloped theoretical situation, lack of systematised empirical data, and very strict legal regulation, only the legal definition of independent lists can be exploited for the moment.

The first part of this paper reviews several explanatory paradigms on public policies in democracies that political science has developed in recent years, highlighting some frameworks and concepts that are particularly useful for analysing the emergence of compacts and consensuses. The second part presents a model consisting of four elements that are relevant to the analysis: i) individual and collective actors that ratify and influence the decision-making process; ii) those actors" strategies and practices, with the understanding that these unfold in specific contexts where repeated interaction generates recurring patterns and forms of negotiation, confrontation and deliberation that play a central role; iii) inertial factors (both circumstantial and institutional) that contribute to, condition or even determine a final outcome, regardless of the intentions or initial objectives of the actors; and iv) ideas or conceptual frameworks specific to social policy as a sector of public policy in a given moment and context. These conceptual elements range from general ideas and values about the role of the State, social protection and the understanding of citizenship and democracy to very concrete technical instruments and management models for implementing actions and interventions of social policy. These ideas and frameworks shape the way reality is molded by the actors, influence the preparation of strategies and discourse with reference to certain public policy models and help explain dissemination and imitation phenomena between and within countries. Lastly, the third part concludes with some questions to guide the analysis.

This article is about the emergence of consolidated financial statements in France at the beginning of the 1970s. French firms were already using US GAAP and not the recommendations of French standard-setters as they used to do. We also provide a financial statement analysis. Most studies about accounting choice have been conducted under the agency theory. More recently, alternative theories like the new institutionalism in organizational theory have also been used by researchers. We feel it could be productive to explain the phenomena in the lens of institutional theory. We document the decisive role of auditors such as Price Waterhouse in the emergence of accounting practices. We also insist on the use of accounting in the transformation of corporations into conglomerates. In conclusion, our data show that the use of internationally accepted standards is not an innovation, simply an imitation. Furthermore, our cases suggest that the mimesis theory of Rene Girard subsumes institutional theory.

Ownership is the essence of economic citizenship. Beyond actual possession, a sense of personal welfare and proprietorship, or at least the hope of achieving them, constitute a necessary and important complement to being stakeholders in a society. Together with efficacy and legitimacy, these are necessary attributes of political agency. In this chapter we examine the interplay between democracy, social opportunity and economic security, drawing upon survey data to explore popular perceptions of India’s new economic policy. The article first situates itself within the context of new theoretical literature on the multidimensional nature of poverty and how to measure it, then identifies aggregate indicators of the performance of Indian states and the overall achievements and failings of India in terms of poverty alleviation. In the second half, the article identifies what seems to be the lack of a ‘politics of poverty’ in India and the various cultural, historical, political explanations that have been proffered for this apparent anomaly. Finally, the impact of democracy on poverty reduction is examined through the programmes that have been launched and which aim at creating a level-playing field, but which nevertheless have the potential to degenerate into highly populist measures.