Institutional Change

Twitter makes visible some of the most fundamental divides in professional journalism today. It reveals tensions about what constitutes news, the norms guiding journalists providing it, professional identity, and public service. This article argues that these tensions result from a clash between the institutional logic of professional control (Lewis, 2012) and an ethic of transparency. Drawing from extensive research on a political press corps, involving observation, interviews, and analysis of tweets, this study witnesses the adoption of Twitter in the everyday working practices of reporters. It thereby also provides reasons why Twitter has been so successful in journalism. Tensions between professional control and transparency in journalism may, furthermore, be emblematic for divides in other professions today.

Abstract: In this paper, we outline a number of features of an interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to economics. As a suitable example of how an interdisciplinary cooperation can unfold, we focus attention on the relations between institutional economics and psychoanalysis. In the first ...

Emerging with increased intensity since the 1990s, peace-building and reconstruction of post-conflict and war-torn societies have become central to today's international relations and assistance agendas. When we are talking about reconstruction of collapsed states, we have to keep in mind two models: an external model which rests on building institutions which promote stability through checking the exercise of power, and an internal model where domestic actors produce change and which hinges on re-establishing power.

The term ‘inertia’ is often used to describe a kind of irrational resistance to change in individuals or institutions. Institutions, ideas and power structures appear to become entrenched over time, and may become ineffective or obsolete, even if they once played a legitimate or useful role. In this paper I argue that there is a common set of problems underlying the occurrence of resistance to change in individuals, social structures and the development of knowledge. Resistance to change is not always irrational or problematic; it is also necessary to allow stable personal identities and social structures to survive in a constantly changing world. I offer a historical and theoretical framework for the question of inertia. Finally, I argue that philosophy has often seen its task to be the critique of ossified, inert or obsolete ideas and social structures, but that it has neglected the positive dimension of resistance to change.

Universities play a central role in addressing key challenges of social, economic and environmental sustainability. For this role to be delivered effectively it is critical to identify not only what strategies are most productive but also how to ensure they are successfully led and implemented. This project seeks to apply the proven change leadership framework developed in the ALTC's 'Learning Leaders in Times of Change' project to the distinctive area of effective turnaround leadership for sustainability in higher education. The project is being undertaken in a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney, the Australian National University, the Sustainable Futures Academy and the University of Gloucestershire. It will produce a validated change leadership framework for building Education for Sustainability (EfS) successfully into the core activities of our universities, as well as a package of leadership development resources for use in individual recruitment, promotion, development and performance management activities. It will also document a range of successful practice models.

In this study of the last three UEFA European Football Championship (2000, 2004, 2008), we identify institutional entrepreneurs and examine the strategies they use to influence the institution they are part of (UEFA) through the introduction of new information technologies (e-ticketing, online and mobile broadcasting). We build on the literature related to institutional theory and field-configuring events to propose a framework of field configuring institutional change. Our preliminary results suggest that institutions are at play at several levels. For instance, a central key institution, the UEFA, is being maintained through the introduction of new practices (buffer institutions) such as e-ticketing during mega-events (EURO). We describe the type and nature of institutional work used by institutional entrepreneurs involved. Dans cette etude des trois derniers championnats d'Europe de football (2000 2004 2008), nous identifions des entrepreneurs institutionnels et examinons les...

Borana pastoralists in southern Ethiopia are faced with the challenge of developing more efficient and sustainable use of natural resources. In past decades poorly adapted development interventions and inadequate land-use policies aggravated by population growth have weakened pastoral rangeland management. Ignoring pastoralists’ technical and organizational capacities has contributed to progressive land degradation, the erosion of social structures and poverty. The Endogenous Livestock Development concept recognises pastoralists’ indigenous knowledge-based strategies and priorities, and uses them as the bases for further development of their production system and social relations, to be utilized, improved and combined with modern technologies. This paper explores the Borana pastoralists’ adaptive strategies for improved utilization of natural resources and the manner in which they respond to environmental risk and external influences such as water development and new formal administ...

The research activity of this doctoral study condenses in the three articles here presented. Each text makes a theoretical and empirical exploration –from a distinct logic of analysis-- of the relationship between two groups of variables and different possible directions of causality between them: the territorial distribution of resources and competences within a Compound State and the territorial distribution of power within political parties that there operate. The first paper aims to understand those factors that facilitate harmonization of interests between governments that share the same partisan label. The second examines what effect may changes in the territorial structure of the state --particularly its decentralization—may have on changes observed in political parties. Finally, the third paper aims to have a better understanding of the potential effects that changes in the balance of power within political parties may have on the level of interest that each of these organizations has in promoting changes in the distribution of territorial resources and competences between different levels of government. The methodological strategy used allows to tackle the endogeneity problem present in the phenomenon of study. This is attempted by analyzing groups of variables in the model from both a static and a dynamic perspective, considering variables at some point of the analysis as exogenous and later as endogenous. The research challenges the idea that institutions have a linear effect on the behavior of political actors, to suggest that under certain conditions political behavior may itself promote institutional change. One of this research’s main findings is that the electoral performance of a party organization and its leadership ability to prevent fractures in the governing coalition are found to be factors that can enhance or --failing that - minimize the relationship between the groups of variables of interest.

This article reviews new literature on the development of China's private sector. Since this sector's development is embedded in and characterised by a wider institutional environment, several general characteristics of China's capitalist transformation are discussed. Insights drawn from political science help in the understanding of the strategy of "wearing a red hat" and the emergence of China's private sector. The closely interwoven relationships between private companies and the Party-state that have taken place since the 1990s are also examined. The review indicates that focusing on state/capital relationships at different administrational levels contributes to a better understanding of China's private sector. The main conclusion is that although the development of the new private enterprises enabled the ruling elite to form and consolidate a hegemonic project that provided relative societal coherence, the project's continuity is threatened by a tendency for crises to occur.

The authors develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. The authors find that more frequent alternation in power is associated with the emergence of better governance in post communist countries. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that firms seek durable

RÉSUMÉ
Comme toute innovation sociale, le commerce équitable (CÉ) est confronté au défi de son institutionnalisation sans que soit dénaturé son idée initiale (introduction). L’analyse de la trajectoire du CÉ permet de rendre compte de son processus d’institutionnalisation et des stratégies adoptées par les organisations du commerce équitable face au risque de dénaturation (partie 1). Le processus d’institutionnalisation est traversé par des tensions autour d’enjeux, lesquelles appartiennent à trois grandes familles de tensions (partie 2). À chaque famille de tension correspond un microprocessus de gestion de la tension auquel les acteurs ont recours face aux tendances qui tirent le CÉ trop loin de son projet initial. Mais force est aussi de reconnaître qu’il existe un double processus de réinvention de l’innovation et de reconfiguration institutionnelle (conclusion).

ABSTRACT
As every social innovation, Fair Trade faces the challenge of institutionalization without altering its initial idea (introduction). The analysis of the trajectory of the Fair Trade movement reveals the process of institutionalization and the strategies adopted by organizations to prevent the risks of alteration and dilution (part one). The process of institutionalization is subject to multiple tensions around the issues at stake, which can be aggregated into three broad families of tensions (part two). Each family of tensions corresponds to a micro-process of tension management that can be used by actors and stakeholders to control forces pulling the Fair Trade movement too far away from its initial project. These frameworks of analysis instruct us on the double process at play, where the innovation’s re-invention meets the institutional reconfiguration (conclusion).

Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico

Oxford University Press (January 2017)


How do societies negotiate the apparently competing agendas of environmental protection and social justice? Why do some countries perform much better than others?

Democracy in the Woods addresses these question by examining land rights conflicts—and the fate of forest-dependent peasants—in the context of the different forest property regimes in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. These three countries are prominent in the scholarship and policy debates about national forest policies and land conflicts associated with international support for nature conservation. This unique comparative study of the trajectories of their national forestland regimes, challenges the received wisdom that redistributive policies necessarily undermine the goals of environmental protection.  It shows instead that national environmental protection efforts take on either an inclusive (as in Mexico) or an exclusive form (as in Tanzania and, for the most part, in India), depending on whether dominant political parties are compelled to create structures of political intermediation, which help channel peasant demands for forest and land rights into the policy process.

The political analysis of the control over and the use of nature presented in this book opens up new avenues for reflecting on how legacies of the past and international interventions interject into domestic political processes to produce specific configurations of outcomes of environmental protection and social justice.

This book offers three different tests of this theory of political origins of forestland regimes: First, India’s most radical forestland reforms became possible because of the opening of a unique political opportunity structure, which enabled forestland rights movements to successfully press for long-awaited institutional reforms needed to address land rights conflicts.  Second, it successfully explains the rather counter-intuitive local outcomes of the programs for formalization of land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. Third, it offers a coherent explanation of why each of these three countries proposes a significantly different distribution of the benefits of forest-based climate change mitigation programs being developed under the auspices of the United Nations. Democracy in the Woods offers a theoretically rigorous argument about why and in what specific ways politics determine the prospects of a socially just and environmentally secure world.

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Paper delivered at the Prague Colloquium on Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Political inertia is the tendency of institutions to become rigid, entrenched or ossified and to resist development or adaptation to changing circumstances. It is often argued that the political systems in the US and EU are currently inert in this sense. On the other hand, Hartmut Rosa and others have argued that social and technological change is accelerating, and that this acceleration is causally related to the experience of political inertia. In this paper I analyze the notion of political inertia with reference to work by Rosa, Francis Fukuyama and David Graeber.

Currently water resources management is undergoing a major paradigm shift. Water resources management has a strong engineering tradition based on controlling environmental problems with technical solutions. The management of risks relied on the ability to predict extremes and limit their impact with technical means such as dikes, dams and reservoirs. In this paradigm, belief systems, human attitudes and collective behaviours are perceived as external boundary conditions and not as integral part of management. However, the situation has started to change dramatically. Over the past years, integrated water resources management has become the reigning paradigm. The importance of governance and cultural adaptation has become a major issue of concern. At the same time, there is a paucity of adequate scientific concepts that would allow addressing these issues. This paper introduces a concept for social learning developed in the European project HarmoniCOP and discusses its implications for the cultural and institutional context of water resources management. It aims to contribute to the new paradigm of integrated resource management by discussing the importance of processes of culture and social learning for environmental resources management, in general, and water resources management, in particular.

In the context of complex and unprecedented issues of global change, calls for new modes of knowledge production that are better equipped to address urgent challenges of global sustainability are increasingly frequent. This paper presents a case study of the new major research programme " Future Earth " , which aims to bring 'research for global sustainability' to the mainstream of global change research. A core principle of Future Earth is the co-production of knowledge with extra-scientific actors. In studying how the principle of co-production becomes institutionalised in the emerging structure of Future Earth, this paper points to the existence of three distinct rationales (logics) on the purpose and practice of co-production. Co-production is understood as a way to enhance scientific accountability to society ('logic of accountability'), to ensure the implementation of scientific knowledge in society ('logic of impact'), and to include the knowledge, perspectives and experiences of extra-scientific actors in scientific knowledge production ('logic of humility'). This heterogeneous conception of knowledge co-production provides helpful ambiguity allowing actors with different perspectives on science and its role in society to engage in Future Earth. However, in the process of designing an institutional structure for Future Earth tensions between the different logics of co-production become apparent. This research shows how logics of accountability and impact are prominent in shaping the development of Future Earth. The paper concludes by pointing to an essential tension between being inclusive and transformative when it comes to institutionalising new modes of knowledge production in large research programmes.

This article contrasts two English solicitors' styles of file work and aims to spell out some of the styles' respective practical and ethical implications. What I call ‘elaborate style’ relates to the file as the primary means of casework, while the ‘minimalist style’ relates to the file in terms of a compulsory exercise. The contrasts in style are further explored by attempting a set of explanations for them. The paper seeks explanation by relating the styles to the respective cases filed, to gender differences in the legal profession, and to the professional habitus of either solicitor. In conclusion, the inquiry suggests an explanation involving the legal discourse served. There are good reasons for either style under certain pre-trial and trial procedures. To stick habitually to one style while moving towards another procedure may cause unwanted consequences.

What happens to informal institutions and practices when political actors decide to implement democratic institutional reforms aimed at relieving formal institutions of informal constraints? Does informality disappear, or do the elites and affected populations continue to apply and abide by informal rules? What do we know about the relationship between institutional reforms and informal institutions? This book seeks to improve our understanding of how, when, and under which conditions democratic institutional reforms affect informal institutions and practices in countries transitioning to democracy, also known as hybrid regimes. With an empirical focus on three transitional post-Soviet regimes—Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine—this book aims to explain the contentious relationship between democratic institutional reforms and informality in the broader post-Soviet context. These findings have implications not only for hybrid regimes, but also for the majority of other post-Soviet, as well as other post-communist, countries. This book engages with a large and growing body of literature on informal institutions and practices and offers theoretical insights relevant to comparative politics, democratization and institutional development studies, political sociology, human geography and political economy.

How do societies negotiate the apparently competing agendas of environmental protection and social justice? Why do some countries perform much better than others on this front?

Democracy in the Woods addresses these question by examining land rights conflicts--and the fate of forest-dependent peasants--in the context of the different forest property regimes in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. These three countries are prominent in the scholarship and policy debates about national forest policies and land conflicts associated with international support for nature conservation. This unique comparative study of national forestland regimes challenges the received wisdom that redistributive policies necessarily undermine the goals of environmental protection. It shows instead that the form that national environmental protection efforts take--either inclusive (as in Mexico) or exclusive (as in Tanzania and, for the most part, in India)--depends on whether dominant political parties are compelled to create structures of political intermediation that channel peasant demands for forest and land rights into the policy process. This book offers three different tests of this theory of political origins of forestland regimes. First, it explains why it took the Indian political elites nearly sixty years to introduce meaningful reforms of the colonial-era forestland regimes. Second, it successfully explains the rather counterintuitive local outcomes of the programs for formalization of land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. Third, it provides a coherent explanation of why each of these three countries proposes a significantly different distribution of the benefits of forest-based climate change mitigation programs being developed under the auspices of the United Nations.

In its political analysis of the control over and the use of nature, this book opens up new avenues for reflecting on how legacies of the past and international interventions interject into domestic political processes to produce specific configurations of environmental protection and social justice. Democracy in the Woods offers a theoretically rigorous argument about why and in what specific ways politics determine the prospects of a socially just and environmentally secure world.

We live in a time of unprecedented, constant change: COVID-19, global warming, evolving technology, death and divorce, business failings and successes—yet many people today are at a loss as to how to deal with change in healthy ways. Often, the stress of quick and excessive change leads to exhaustion, distraction, procrastination, depression, and more.

Nature Breakthroughs reveals forgotten, age-old methods for understanding and dealing effectively with change. Through research, storytelling, and visualizations, readers will discover the patterns underlying change and our reactions to it. The five steps of my Nature Breakthrough Method offer a simple, strategic countdown for harnessing change to create positive results.

This book is for anyone who is feeling stuck, in need of change, facing transition, or actively ushering one in. It’s a contemporary guide on how to become purposefully unstuck based on ancient methods of transformation, as well as a call to action to save both ourselves and the planet amidst the rapid cycles of change we are facing today.

Over the last decades, the rail sector has seen considerable reform in the European Union (EU). The overreaching goal has been to revitalise this sector and to make it more competitive to attract traffic from firms operating in other transport markets. By retrieving information from the OECD’s ETCR database, this paper focuses on the rail freight service market and answers the following research question: have liberalisation reform policies increased the market share of rail freight services in the EU? By contributing to the existing literature on the empirical assessment of liberalisation policies in the EU, our findings indicate a positive impact of liberalisation on the market shares of rail freight services. Nevertheless, the paper suggests that merely relying on these policies to sustain the economic growth of rail-freight firms might not suffice alone and that might be important to combine them with other policy solutions such as more environmental-friendly regulations.

Societies are systems composed of a great number of various social institutions that interact and change, which results in that the whole structure of societies changes. This is what social evolution is – the process of structural change. Evolution does not have any particular
direction: any significant, that is, transforming change is evolutionary. Along with complexity measured in levels of political integration, societies as systems of social institutions have yet another fundamental characteristic that can be called a ‘basic principle of societal organization’. The principle of organization a society embodies depends on the way its institutions relate to one another. Specifically, two basic principles can be distinguished here: heterarchy, whereby elements are unranked or can be ranked in different ways, and its opposite – homoarchy, whereby elements in most contexts are ordered mainly according to one principal hierarchical relationship. Homoarchy and heterarchy represent most universal, ‘pure’ (generalized) principles and basic trajectories of socio-cultural organization. There are no universal evolutionary stages: cultures can be (generally) heterarchical or homoarchical and have an equal level of complexity. A culture can change its basic organizational principle without changing its current complexity level. There also exist alternatives within each of the two types. The heterarchy – homoarchy dichotomy runs throughout the whole of human history: it is observable on all levels of social complexity in all historical periods and culture areas, including the globalized world of our time. Transformations in the ways social institutions and complexes thereof, that is, societal subsystems, are ranked (either homoarchically or hetrarchically), on the one hand, and changes in culture complexity overall, on the other, are two different, largely unrelated processes. The heterarchy – homoarchy dichotomy has, to a
considerable degree, predetermined the non-linear and non-fixed nature of the global sociocultural process. An adequate understanding of human socio-cultural history does not appear possible unless one takes into consideration the possibility of alternative basic principles of
societal organization, their complementary and competitive co-existence, and their interrelated dynamics throughout human history. Also, considering this possibility enables discussion of the future of the present-day globalized world as not fixed but variable, where homoarchical and heterarchical principles may intersect in various ways and at different levels – national, international, and transnational.

Общества представляют собой системы, состоящие из большого
числа разнообразных взаимодействующих и изменяющихся социальных институтов. В результате их взаимодействия и трансформации происходит изменение структуры обществ в целом. Это и есть социальная эволюция – процесс структурного изменения. Эволюция не имеет определенного направления:  любое значимое, т.е. трансформирующее общественную структуру в любом направлении, изменение является эволюционным. Помимо степени сложности, определяемой количеством уровней политической интеграции, общества как системы социальных институтов имеют еще одну фундаментальную характеристику, которую можно назвать базовым принципом организации. То, какой принцип воплощает общество, зависит от характера взаимоотношения социальных институтов в нем. Можно выделить два базовых принципа организации обществ: гетерархический (взаимоотношение институтов, при котором они неранжированы
или обладают потенциалом для того, чтобы быть ранжированными различными способами) и гомоархический (взаимоотношение институтов, при котором они жестко ранжированы единственным образом и не обладают значительным потенциалом для того, чтобы стать неранжированными или ранжированными другими способами, по крайней мере, без кардинального изменения всего общественно-политического устройства). Гомоархия и гетерархия представляют собой наиболее универсальные «идеальные» (обобщенные) принципы и базовые траектории социокультурной организации. Не существует универсальных эволюционных стадий: общества могут быть (преимущественно) гетерархическими или гомоархическими, имея одинаковый уровень сложности. Общество может изменить базовый принцип своей организации, не переходя на иной уровень сложности. Альтернативность существует и внутри каждого из двух типов обществ. Дихотомия гетерархии и гомоархии проходит через всю историю человечества: ее можно наблюдать на всех уровнях социальной сложности во все исторические периоды и во всех географических регионах, включая глoбальный мир нашего времени. Трансформации способов ранжирования социальных институтов и их комплексов – подсистем общественной организации (гомоархического или гетерархического), с одной стороны, и изменения общего уровня социокультурной сложности – с другой, – есть два разных, в целом не связанных друг с другом процесса. Дихотомия гетерархии и гомоархии в значительной степени обусловила неоднолинейную и альтернативную сущность глобального социокультурного процесса. Адекватное понимание социокультурной истории не представляется возможным без учета альтернативности базовых принципов организации обществ, их взаимодополняющего и конкурентного существования и их взаимной динамики на всем протяжении истории человечества. Учет этого также позволяет рассматривать будущее современного глобального мира как не предопределенное, но имеющее несколько возможных сценариев, в которых гомоархический и гетерархический принципы могут по-разному соотноситься на
различных уровнях – национальном, международном и транснациональном.

This paper proposes and illustrates a framework for analysis of the recent events in Middle Eastern and North African countries (the so-called Arab Spring) by bringing into dialogue recent theoretical advances in democratization theory with the comparative-historical literature on the political development of the MENA region. We advocate two analytical shifts from conventional approaches in the analysis of the Arab Spring: first, reconsider the temporalities of democratization processes; second, focus on struggles over specific institutional arenas rather than over the regime as a whole. The former recommendation draws attention both to the strategies used by key actors in the political, economic, and civil society spheres, and to the historical legacies that built the influence and resources of these actors over time. The latter allows us to consider the institutional safeguards for old elites that are likely to be included in the post-authoritarian regimes emerging in the region. Even though some of these safeguards are clearly anti-democratic, historical examples show that they do not necessarily preclude democratization. Indeed, in some cases, their introduction might be necessary to achieve democratic openings in other arenas. We illustrate these theoretical points with reference to the case of Egypt.

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the intelligence democratization process in new democracies comparing three South American countries: Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina. With a background of authoritarian legacies(‘political police’style intelligence agencies controlled by the military) under particular political circumstances and changing strategic environments, these countries experienced disparate trajectories, prescriptions, and outcomes in their efforts to reform their intelligence communities. Drawing on new institutionalism, historical moments and relevant events shaping the dynamics of intelligence democratization are highlighted for each case, depicting failures and successes, and identifying drivers of change.

Successfully managing the process of transition into university involves acknowledging that students in all their diversity come to us to learn and that we are responsible not just to keep them, but for creating environments where active learning can take place. Curriculum renewal embracing these aspects underpinned by a constructivist philosophy provides only one part of a successful approach to transition. The second part is to establish coordinated, curriculum- mediated transition practices across the administrative and academic areas of the university so that students successfully engage with their learning experience. Based on an enabling strategic infrastructure and extensive curriculum renewal, this paper describes a program that seeks to embed transition practices systematically across a large university.

This paper presents a comprehensive change and development model used as the basis in successfully transitioning an organization to baccalaureate status from a community college environment.  The model utilizes a system-wide approach, allowing a strategic plan to be used as the basic foundation. The model establishes departmental plans and objectives, links planning and decision making to assessment and analysis, assists in building budget priorities, and integrates the campus academic planning process, program review recommendations, and assessment results.