Recent iir_z_ccop items

Why Do Church-State Relations Change? Politics, Institutions, and Federal Funding for Parochial Schools in Australia and America, 1945-1985

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While church-state relations are increasingly theorized as an important independent variable in sociology, the processes whereby they change remain undertheorized. In this paper, I consider three existing theories in light of the divergent experiences of Australia and the United States since World War II. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, both nations passed legislation to improve science facilities in secondary schools. This legislation constituted the first significant federal involvement in education policy for each country, and both bills provided financial support for both public and private (mostly religious) schools. Whereas in Australia, this legislation paved the way for large-scale government support for religious schools, the American legislation had no such effect. I argue that, while common structural forces favoring federal support for religious schools were at work in both nations, these forces were stymied in the United States by an inhospitable institutional...

Markets as Producers and Consumers: The American and French Bicycle Markets, 1890-1910

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Markets as Producers and Consumers: The American and French Bicycle Markets, 1890-1910

Recruitment Agencies in Nurse Migration: Constructing Vital Pipelines through Profitable Business

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, I analyze the important but as yet little studied role of private recruitment and placement agencies in the social organization of modern labor migration. Examining the case of Philippine nurse migration bound for the United States, I present data collected from 35 agencies that connect nurses with employers for profit. These commercial agencies can be found in both the sending and receiving countries and they represent a core of the formal migration industry—a key actor in many of today’s international migration movements. I contend that commercial agencies not only build bridges between places, but they also profoundly shape the structure and process of international migration, from immigrant selection to integration. In this capacity, commercial agencies play a key role in several important, though less talked about procedures of migration such as the selection of employers as well as workers, the disciplining of these two sets of clientele, and the creation...

Homophily or Homomisia: Owner Gender and Gender Wage Inequality in Small Businesses

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Women’s disadvantages in labor market outcomes are often attributed to the preponderance of male dominated networks in the workplace. This suggests that the presence of more women in positions of power would ameliorate gender differences in wages by providing women with the connections they need to succeed. However, there is little work evaluating these ideas, and the work that does so is unable to match individual workers to those in positions of power over them. This study considers these questions using a survey of several thousand small businesses, and examines how gender differences vary among establishments with male and female owners. We find no systematic differences between men and women owners in terms of gender wage inequality among their employees.

Environment or Accountability? Disentangling International Influences over States' Efforts to Combat Polio

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Environment or Accountability? Disentangling International Influences over States' Efforts to Combat Polio

State and Economic Informality in a Comparative Perspective

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article undertakes an analysis of internationally comparable data to examine the relationship between state regulation and the informal economy at the macro level across a broad set of countries. The findings shed light on the question of why economic informality is more prevalent in some nations than others. The author shows that the regulatory environments within which economic activities operate vary across countries in terms of the degree of state’s regulation of economic activities (low vs. high), and the quality of legal enforcement (effective vs. ineffective). The reason why some countries have less informality in their economies than others has much to do with the prevailing regulatory environment. It is in regulatory environments combining a low regulatory load with effective law enforcement institutions where we find the size of the informal economy to be smallest. Conversely, the highest levels of informality are found in countries that have a high degree of regulation...

When Workers Leave: Turnover and Industrial Expansion

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When Workers Leave: Turnover and Industrial Expansion

Economic Experts and Neoliberal Policy Changes: A Case Study of North American Free Trade

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Existing research shows that economists play central roles in neoliberal policy changes, particularly when they rise to high-level positions of formal authority as bureaucrats or politicians. This paper improves on previous studies of economists’ influence by showing that, no matter what the formal authority of their posts, they still need to persuade powerful constituencies to support them for their policy agendas to become politically feasible. Previous studies have not fully explained how economists actually do that. Using a case study of North American economic integration in the 1980s and early 90s, I examine how economic experts successfully influence the policy priorities and stances of political and economic elites. But they frame their advocacy of liberalization using arguments with which they themselves disagree, in efforts to appeal to those other elites. This analysis therefore demonstrates both the power of economic experts and the limits of their power, and identifies...

Testing the No Child Left Behind Act: analyzing assumptions about the link between teacher quality and student achievement

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Testing the No Child Left Behind Act: analyzing assumptions about the link between teacher quality and student achievement

Understanding the Differing Governance of EU Emissions Trading and Renewables: Feedback Mechanisms and Policy Entrepreneurs

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper presents a comparative study of two central EU climate policies: the revised Emissions Trading System (ETS), and the revised Renewable Energy Directive (RES). Both were originally developed in the early 2000s and revised policies were adopted in December 2008. While the ETS from 2013 on will have a quite centralized and market-streamlined design, the revised RES stands forward as a more decentralized and technology-focused policy. Differing institutional feed-back mechanisms and related roles of policy entrepreneurs can shed considerable light on these policy differences. Due to member states’ cautiousness and contrary to the preferences of the Commission, the initial ETS was designed as a rather decentralized and ‘politicized’ market system, creating a malfunctioning institutional dynamic. In the revision process, the Commission skillfully highlighted this ineffective dynamic to win support for a much more centralized and market-streamlined approach. In the case of...

The Global, the Local, and Population Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Despite pronatalist governments and populations, starting in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, one sub-Saharan African country after another announced national population policies aimed at reducing population growth through fertility limitation. I use country-level data for the period 1984-2003 to describe the diffusion of population policy across the continent and to determine why some governments were willing to take the risky move of adopting a population policy but not others, and why some governments did so earlier than others. My treatment of this subject rests on an understanding of policymaking in the African context as one that is mediated by a variety of actors at the global and local levels, including African governments but also multilateral and bilateral organizations. Unlike the standard diffusion story, in which the most modern actors play the role of innovators, I find that the first countries to adopt policies actually had lower levels of governmental...

Restructuring in the Toyota Keiretsu during the Asian Financial Crash: An Ethnographic Perspective into Neo-liberal Reforms and the Varieties of Capitalism

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Asian economic crash of 1997 lead to widespread restructuring of corporate organizations in Japan. This paper uses ethnographic field work and historical documents to examine how this played out inside one company, Toyota, when management implemented a restructuring plan to improve the profitability of its companies during the period of 1996 to 1999. The restructuring policies are discussed within the framework of the varieties of capitalism debate. A hallmark of the current discussion on Japanese organizations is that Japan is converging toward the American model of capitalism. I argue that although Japanese companies have adapted to worsening economic conditions by incorporating neo-liberal market reforms, restructuring during the Asian crash reveals that changes in the Toyota organization were based on hybrid policies that fused both liberal and coordinated market economics within the context of the unique institutions of Japanese welfare corporatism.

The Rise and Fall of Financial-Industrial Groups: The Genesis of Russian Capitalism

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Rise and Fall of Financial-Industrial Groups: The Genesis of Russian Capitalism

Coming Clean...and Cleaning Up? Examining the Effects of Self-Policing

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As regulators increasingly embrace cooperative approaches to governance, voluntary public-private partnerships and self-regulation programs have proliferated. However, because few have been subjected to robust evaluation, little is known about whether these innovative approaches are achieving their objectives. In the context of a nationwide self-policing program that encourages companies to voluntarily self-disclose regulatory violations, we examine the behaviors of facilities and regulators to gain empirical insights on the theoretical promise of self-policing. We find that regulators reduce their scrutiny over selfpolicing facilities, and especially over facilities with strong past compliance records. We also find that self-policing is associated with subsequent improvements in compliance records.

Institutions and Corporate Strategies for Reorganization: A Case Study of Corporate Reorganization by Siemens in the United States and Germany

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Institutions and Corporate Strategies for Reorganization: A Case Study of Corporate Reorganization by Siemens in the United States and Germany

Economic integration in Danish business history, 1850-2000

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Economic integration in Danish business history, 1850-2000

State-building and the Origins of Disciplinary Specialization in Nineteenth Century Germany

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Scholars have long debated why the sciences became organized into specialized disciplines during the nineteenth century. The Prussian university reforms and the institutionalization of research in the German universities have occupied a central position in these discussions. Using records of the appointments of full professors in the life sciences at German universities from 1770 to 1880, this paper investigates whether the Prussian and other reforms led professors to specialize into disciplines and universities to hire from an open academic labor market. The results show that the reforms did not encourage competition and disciplinary specialization across the German universities. Until the 1840s, reforms encouraged professors to pursue scientific research to the exclusion of traditional subjects, but not to specialize within single disciplines. Outside of Prussia, Baden, and Bavaria, university hiring practices also continued to favor the internal promotion of students until...

It takes more than one network to tell the whole story: An initial view at multiplex embeddedness

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Networks have recently acquired a prominent spot among the mechanisms used to understand differences between organizations. This is probably a due response to the need for understanding an economic world which is increasingly relational in nature. In many of these studies, the focus has been on the association between the organization and the network in which it is embedded, defined for one of the relationships which are deemed critical for the organization (such as a communication network or an advice network). However, while this work helps in exploring the effects of network structure on organizations, it does not capture the fact that within the same organizational network each actor is simultaneously involved in many relationships, which all at the same time affect its choice of action.

The goal of this work is to bring this multiplexity into the picture. I am doing so by investigating the effects of multiplex embeddedness (defined as the degree of an organization’s...

Creating the Modern American Fiscal State: The Political Economy of U.S. Tax Policy, 1880-1930

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper is an initial draft of an early chapter of my dissertation. The dissertation, which is tentatively entitled “The Creation of the Modern American Fiscal State: The Political Economy of U.S. Tax Policy, 1880-1930,” investigates the multitude of forces that affected, and were affected by, U.S. fiscal policymaking at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, my project explores the questions of how and why the modern federal income tax emerged when it did, and what role tax policy played in the changing status of American statesociety relations. The hypothesis guiding my research is the contention that democratic pluralism – that is, a broad cross-section of the American population and not any one social or class group – predominated in implementing tax reform policies.

My dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is an intellectual history of the economic and legal theories undergirding turn of the century tax policy. Part II is an institutional...

Toward an Understanding of the Role of Social Networks on Employees' Performance

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In my dissertation, I analyze the role of social networks on worker’s post-hire outcomes in a large retail bank in the United States. More specifically, I am exploring the precise theoretical mechanisms by which a common organization practice ¾the hiring of new workers via employee referrals— shapes employees’ productivity. I argue that social networks not only play an important role in the hiring of employees but also have important effects on post-hire job outcomes which have not been satisfactorily examined. Thus, I seek to deepen our understanding of social ties as a social process that might make employee referrals perform better at work than non-referral hires, other things being equal. I also investigate the level of interdependence among the post-hire attachment and performance of referred employees.

For the first time in this line of empirical research, I present a model of employee performance correcting for the turnover of hires within organizations. I show...

Bypassing the Gatekeepers: Selling Prescription Drugs Directly to Consumers

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Prior to 1989 prescription drug manufacturers rarely used consumer advertising, spending less than $5 million between 1985 and 1988. The manufacturers’ reluctance was largely due to physicians, which bitterly opposed their use of consumer advertising. However, by 1996, a mere seven years later, the situation had reversed itself, as drug manufacturers spent over $790 million on the marketing, despite continued physician opposition. Over the course of those seven years physicians lost their influence vis-à-vis consumer advertising, and explaining why is the central goal of this paper. Towards that end I address four questions: (1) Why were physicians opposed to consumer advertising?; (2) Why did this opposition influence drug manufacturers prior to 1989?; (3) Why did the opposition cease to deter the drug manufacturers in the 1990’s?; (4) How did drug manufacturers work to overcome physician opposition? In the end I will argue that physician influence was diminished by two factors:...

Change in Leadership in Germany Inc.: The German Business Elite in Transition, 1960-2005

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Change in Leadership in Germany Inc.: The German Business Elite in Transition, 1960-2005

Corporations and the Management of Information Technology, 1964-2000

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In an analysis of data on the failed institutionalization of a top management position for Management Information Systems (MIS), among 430 large American public companies between 1964 and 1994, I find an effect of both rhetorical advocacy for MIS and technological change. While factors associated with functional demands for MIS can explain some of the variance in the diffusion of MIS positions among corporate offices, media promulgation of MIS, the rise and fall of strategic planning, and the steep rise of microcomputer use affect the adoption pattern over time. The likelihood for office creation varies with the extent to which management knowledge entrepreneurs promulgated MIS as a fashion. In the 1980s, public support for MIS began to fade. Data processing experts proved unsuccessful in sustaining top executives’ interest for this organizational technique. MIS had aroused top management attention through an emphasis on the benefits of computers for strategic planning. When executives’...

Class and the Politics of the Personal in America

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This study examines the extent to which class repertoires of everyday personal evaluation translate into political judgments. It compares Michèle Lamont’s accounts (1992, 2000) of class patterns in personal boundary-drawing practices with thematically similar political evaluations recorded in National Election Studies surveys conducted between 1972 and 2004. The evidence suggests that working class people are comparatively likely to translate everyday ethical judgments into policy-related evaluations. In contrast, middle class people are more likely to apply personal judgments to political candidates. In addition, working class people seem more disposed to evaluate policies according to their distributional import, while middle class people are comparatively likely to look to politics as an arena in which individual values can be inculcated.

How do new and alternative forms of organizations maintain critical characteristics during growth?

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How do increasingly rationalized or bureaucratic structures affect a growing organization’s retention of characteristics that are felt to be critical to the organization and its output? Most organizational research and theory suggest that as organizations develop, their structures inevitably undergo rationalization or bureaucratization, regardless of the organizations’ initial structures. This dissertation examines which bureaucratic structures destroy, enhance, or have little discernable effect upon an expanding organization’s essential characteristics.

This chapter examines how a developing organization has nurtured certain characteristics while undergoing growth and some aspects of Weberian bureaucratization. Past researchers have examined how some organizations have striven to exist, and even thrive, based on value-rational structures constructed explicitly to counteract the presumed pitfalls of rational-legal bureaucratic structures. When subjected to both internal...

Stable Conflict in the San Francisco Homeless Policy Field

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article combines network analysis and cognitive frame analysis to explain the institutionalization of homeless politics in San Francisco into a stasis of organized stable conflict. The persistence of stable conflict within the San Francisco homeless policy field brings into question the widespread notion within sociology that the stable ordering of a social field or institutional arena emerges when a group of incumbents or elites comes to dominate that arena and impose their conception of the world onto it. The San Francisco homeless policy field shows that even in the absence of a dominant organizing conception of the world, stable order within an institutional arena can still be achieved through a complex equilibrium of ideas, relationships, power, and resources.

Using Fiction Sociologically

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This article argues that narrative fiction can be used as a rich source of data about culturally patterned emotions and evaluations that are difficult to study in other ways. It first reconsiders the research which has led sociologists to be increasingly pessimistic about drawing conclusions about wider cultural meanings from cultural objects. After sketching a theory of how fiction works psychologically, the author provides concrete guidelines for sampling fiction for analysis. Using examples drawn from the author’s own research on short stories in American and French women’s magazines during the 1950s, the article demonstrates how to analyze the content of fiction so as to tap its unique strengths as a medium for communicating the ethical truths of culture.

The Social and Cultural Construction of the Work Life - Private Life Boundary in Three Countries: A Comparative Study of the Evening Hours in the Lives of Norwegian, French, and American Elite Professionals

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper analyzes results from a study of the practices and orientations associated with the 5-9 PM hours. Drawing its data from a set of in-depth interviews carried out with comparable groups of elite business professionals in Paris, Oslo, and San Francisco, the study reveals the different ways in which this period is handled by the three groups of respondents. In each of the three countries, this slice of time is appropriated differently. In the San Francisco case, these hours can be used either for working life or for private life, depending on the life circumstances of the individual and his or her occupational and organizational affiliation. In Paris and Oslo, however, supra-organizational and supra-occupational temporal conventions assert themselves, contributing to a different kind of evening habitus. While the Parisian respondents are likely to approach these hours as a special kind of facetime reserved for the professional elite, the Oslo respondents treat this period...

Creating the Citizen Saver: Financial Institutions, Working Households, and State Development in the Northeastern United States, 1830s-1930s

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introductory Note:

My dissertation examines the origins, development and regulation of the financial institutions that arose to serve “ordinary” people in modern America. Why and how did mid-twentieth century Americans gain access to and come to rely on a system of financial institutions for saving and borrowing over their life courses when a little over one hundred years earlier formal financial services had been primarily reserved for the commercial needs of elite merchants and tradesmen? The question of how the expansion of access to financial institutions took place has some relevance for current social scientific and public policy debates on working and poor people’s access to financial institutions. Yet this history has received relatively little scholarly attention. The few studies that have examined the question focus narrowly on the costs and risks of financial intermediation and contracting between savers and borrowers as the key to the...

The New Labor Market Landscape: Comparative Case Studies of Labor Market Intermediaries in Silicon Valley

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The New Labor Market Landscape: Comparative Case Studies of Labor Market Intermediaries in Silicon Valley

The formation and transformation of a transnational field

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Students of global governance have documented that non-state actors have become key players in world politics as they form part of transnational governance networks that constitute “spheres of authority” beyond the control of states. Research on expert groups in International Relations theory (IR) has specified a key mechanism through which such nonstate groups can exercise influence as they persuade and teach states to change behavior and re-define their interests by reference authoritative knowledge claims. While these two strands of literature share a focus on the role of non-state actors, there is little cross-fertilization between them. This is unfortunate as a strong case can be made that advancing insights in one field will be greatly facilitated by drawing on the other. What is lacking is a conceptual apparatus that can bring the two strands of research together and move them beyond their current limitations. I argue here that field theory offers such a conceptual apparatus....

Pay Disparities within Firms: The Role of Chief Executive Officers

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper analyzes pay disparities between executive managers and rank-and-file workers at large United States corporations. Most existing studies on income inequality examine pay at individual employee level. This paper departs from this approach and analyzes inequality at firm level. Based on the view that organizations reflect the nature of the social and political relationships in which top decision-makers are embedded, this paper focuses on the role of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in shaping the pay structure within their firms. Using a sample of the 254 largest U.S. corporations during the period of 1992-2005, the analysis suggests that CEOs’ power and functional backgrounds affect pay disparities between top-five executive managers and average workers within companies. Firms managed by CEOs with longer tenure paid executives more, paid workers less, and had greater pay disparities compared to firms with shorter-tenure CEOs. Similarly, firms with CEOs recruited from...

Turning Themselves In: Why Companies Disclose Regulatory Violations

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a recent trend toward more cooperative relations between regulators and industry, novel government programs are encouraging firms to monitor their own regulatory compliance and voluntarily report their own violations. In this study, we examine how enforcement activities, statutory protections, community pressure, and organizational characteristics influence organizations’ decisions to self-police. We created a comprehensive dataset for the “Audit Policy”, a United States Environmental Protection Agency program that encourages companies to selfdisclose violations of environmental laws and regulations in exchange for reduced sanctions. We find that facilities were more likely to self-disclose if they were recently inspected or subjected to an enforcement action, were narrowly targeted for heightened scrutiny by a US EPA initiative, and were larger and thus more prominent in their environment. While we find some evidence that state-level statutory immunity facilitates...

The Politics of Innovation: High Technology Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in Japan

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Japan has often been described as a “network society.” Business networks are said to succeed as alternatives to markets and hierarchies through fostering cooperation and competition among members. Interpretations of existing business networks in Japan share two main characteristics. First, studies have focused on networks between the central state and big business. Second, existing theories fail to examine underlying power asymmetries in business networks. These power asymmetries have been masked by assumptions of “trusting” relations between large firms and small. In essence, in Japan most networks are in fact hierarchies.

Contrary to existing interpretations, the most innovative business networks have been those formed by small and medium size firms, independent from both big business and the central state. These networks have been most successful while serving as “enabling institutions” for firms in which local governments play a supportive role.

The paper begins...

Green Expectations: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Implementing A Voluntary Environmental Management System

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past two decades, many corporations appear to have embraced a new approach to dealing with environmental issues. The nature and consequences of this corporate environmentalism has provoked lively debates in the academic and popular literature. This paper uses insights from organizational theory to reframe current debates on corporate environmentalism, focusing particularly on the voluntary implementation of environmental management codes. Models of organizational behavior are used to analyze organizational motives for adopting voluntary environmental management codes. These models are then evaluated with respect to the specific experience of the Mexican subsidiary of a transnational pharmaceutical corporation in implementing a voluntary environmental management system.

Embedded Transactions and Market Consequences: Interorganizational Dynamics in the American Legal Services Industry

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sociological research on status attainment has increasingly recognized the role of social networks. The bulk of extant scholarship on networks and stratification, however, deals exclusively with the information and control benefits of network embeddedness. Organizational scholars, on the other hand, have paid increasing attention to another, relatively unexplored, aspect of social networks, which has to do with the conferral of status via network affiliations. The argument is that because of the inherent uncertainty surrounding product or service quality, potential consumers often rely on the status of the producer’s (provider’s) past or existing transactional partners as a proxy for the focal actor’s capacity to deliver high-quality goods (services). In this paper, I import this key theoretical insight to the study of income stratification among Chicago lawyers. I hypothesize that a lawyer benefits not only from having access to social capital that provides timely information...

Reciprocity in the Russian Labor Market: Its Role in the Transition from State Socialism

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Reciprocity in the Russian Labor Market: Its Role in the Transition from State Socialism

Hybrid intellectuals: Toward a social praxeology of U.S. think tank experts

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Drawing on archival records, interviews, and an original database of the educational and career backgrounds of policy experts, this paper develops both an objectivist topography and a constructivist phenomenology of the growing space of American think tanks. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of field, I argue that think tanks make up an emergent, constitutively hybrid “proto-field” that traverses, links, and overlaps the divergent worlds of academics, politics, business, and journalism. Think tank-affiliated experts understand their distinctive social role in terms that mirror their intermediate structural location, through the competing idioms of the academic scholar, the policymaker, the business entrepreneur, and the journalist. The study of think tanks destabilizes the category “intellectuals” and thereby challenges the common notion that they are a negligible presence in American politics. Instead, it points to the existence of a highly developed, differentiated,...

Material and Spiritual Conceptions of Development: A framework of ideal types

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

By many accounts a global revival of religion is afoot – not simply a revival of individual religious belief, but of the public role of religion. Correspondingly, development scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that we must reconsider the meaning of national development in light of religious worldviews. However, scholars have yet to fashion an empirically grounded, synthetic framework for understanding the range of approaches to development, both material and spiritual, that are at play in the world today. This paper presents such a framework, drawing on 200 interviews with development practitioners sampled from across 9 countries in the global south.

'The State in Disguise of a Merchant': Extractive Administration in British India, 1784-1834

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

An argument in state formation theory—particularly the development of the state's fiscal infrastructure—holds that the form of a state's administration is shaped by rulers' attempts to maximize resource extraction as constrained by local social structure. This view, however, does not adequately account for the variation in administration in British colonial India ca. 1784-1834. The British developed at least two systems for extracting land revenue. To account for this variation, I offer an approach derived from pragmatist theories of action which emphasizes contingent administrative development and fluid standards adjudicating between competing models of rule. Further, I suggest administrative variation was at least partially formed by struggles between administrations over visions of the imperial bond with Indian subjects and that this struggle had a fractal structure.

State Coercion and the Rise of U.S. Business Unionism: The Counterfactual Case of Minneapolis Teamsters, 1934-1941

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines a key shift within the U.S. labor movement in the 20th century, whereby the worker upsurge of the 1930s led to the emergence of the conservative “business union” model as the dominant organizational form in the postwar period.

Against deterministic arguments that view this transformation as an unavoidable result of organizational development or of deeply ingrained American ideological beliefs, I show that it was in fact the outcome of a political battle between competing models of working-class organization. I also argue that accounts that emphasize internal anticommunist faction fights or long-term legal processes overlook an important factor: state coercion. I contend that at certain critical junctures, coercive state intervention shaped the labor movement by cutting off other potentially viable trajectories.

I develop this argument through a deviant case analysis of a key local of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Minneapolis...

Governing Without Commands or Controls: The Emergence of Self-Regulation as Reform and Justification

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Governing Without Commands or Controls: The Emergence of Self-Regulation as Reform and Justification

The Consequences of Collective Action: The Blue-Green Coalition and the Emergence of a Polanyian Social Movement

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Consequences of Collective Action: The Blue-Green Coalition and the Emergence of a Polanyian Social Movement

The Davids Go Global: The Politics of High-Technology Industrial Development in Peripheral States

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Davids Go Global: The Politics of High-Technology Industrial Development in Peripheral States

Why Do Universities Patent? The Role of the Federal Government in Creating Modern Technology Transfer Practice

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Academic science, once relatively insulated from market forces, has seen the Mertonian ideal of communistic science partially displaced by an argument that science, in order to be fully applied, must often be privately owned. In keeping with this logic, universities have been patenting faculty inventions in increasing numbers for the last several decades. Much of this increase has traditionally been attributed to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which gave universities an explicit legal mandate to commercialize federally-funded research through patenting. But recent research shows that university patenting was on the rise well before the Bayh-Dole Act and argues that the Act’s impact was not as large as has generally been assumed. This paper claims that state actors were nonetheless critical in creating modern technology transfer practice in universities. I suggest we see the Bayh-Dole Act as the culmination of a larger project of patent policy liberalization that was driven by federal...

Making the Market: How the American pharmaceutical industry transformed itself during the 1940s

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Between 1940 and 1950 the American pharmaceutical industry transformed itself from a collection of several hundred, small, barely profitable firms to a small group of large, highly profitable firms. The object of this paper is to use this case to understand how an industry evolves and, more specifically, to determine how a single industry comes to be dominated by a few large firms. This is in the tradition of recent studies that have examined the role of political, organizational, and social variables in the evolution of American industry(Dobbin 1994; Fligstein 2001; Perrow 2002). The intent here is to analyze different predictors of success following a population-level change, in a new case, one where firm success was previously considered the product of economic efficiency (Temin 1979; Temin 1980). To answer my specific question I employ a random-effect regression analysis on longitudinal data collected on the population of public firms between 1935-1955. I find that while the...

The Passive Revolutionary Route to the Modern World: Italy and India in Comparative Perspective

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Most scholars argue that states are central to modernization in countries lacking a classic bourgeois social revolution. Through an analysis of Italian fascism and Indian nationalism, this essay explains a form of non-social revolutionary transformation that we call passive revolution, in which parties rather than states are the driving agents of change. We argue that India and Italy shared two conditions that led to a passive revolutionary route to the modern world: weak old regimes, and peasant and working class insurgency. The absence of a strong old regime coupled with a real or perceived threat from below, led agrarian and industrial elites in these cases to establish nationalist mass party organizations that mobilized against the state, while remaining conservative in their aims. We further contrast the cases in terms of the dominant tactic used by the mass party. In Italy the tactic of the fascist party was paramilitary violence, while in India the dominant tactic of Congress...

From Rights to Land: Chapter Two of Knowledge Production or Construction?: A Comparative Analysis of Census Taking in the West.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From Rights to Land: Chapter Two of Knowledge Production or Construction?: A Comparative Analysis of Census Taking in the West.

Public Science, Private Science: The Causes and Consequences of Patenting by Research One Universities

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Public Science, Private Science: The Causes and Consequences of Patenting by Research One Universities

Concept vs. Content: The Institutionalization of Labor Self-Regulation in the Global Apparel Industry

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Concept vs. Content: The Institutionalization of Labor Self-Regulation in the Global Apparel Industry

Risk, Reason and Technology: Prediction and Calculative Rationality in Global Financial Markets

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Risk, Reason and Technology: Prediction and Calculative Rationality in Global Financial Markets

Gambling on Global Gaming: Corporate Lotteries and Casinos in South Africa

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Gambling on Global Gaming: Corporate Lotteries and Casinos in South Africa

Tracing the Trail of Table Grapes: A Commodity Chain Study of Sonoran Table Grapes in the Global Economy

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

troduction This paper is intended to provide update on dissertation research currently underway. Overall, my research focuses on the relationships between the growers, distributors, marketers and consumers participating in the commodity chain of a particular product, table grapes, as they are sourced from a single region and marketed throughout the world. Specifically, I am following the path of table grapes from fields near the city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, through re-packing and distribution centered in the border city of Nogales, Arizona, to their ultimate destination in American supermarkets and homes. I am particularly interested in the role of U.S.-based transnational corporations involved in the global sourcing and marketing of fresh produce, including produce companies such as Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita, as well as supermarket chains including Wal-Mart, Kroger and Safeway. By focusing on a single region’s production of table grapes, and then examining the local...

How 'Nothing Works' Was Won: The End of Treatment and Fracturing of the Asylum

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How 'Nothing Works' Was Won: The End of Treatment and Fracturing of the Asylum

Backstage at the Campaign: The Race, Gender, and Education of National-Level Political Professionals

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Backstage at the Campaign: The Race, Gender, and Education of National-Level Political Professionals

Tell Them We Are Equal: Oppositional Cultural Capital, Organizational Capacity, and the Zapatistas’ Challenge to Transnational Social Movement Theory

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tell Them We Are Equal: Oppositional Cultural Capital, Organizational Capacity, and the Zapatistas’ Challenge to Transnational Social Movement Theory

Mutually Canceling Social Forces in Welfare States: Public Pension Generosity in OECD countries, 1980-2002

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Mutually Canceling Social Forces in Welfare States: Public Pension Generosity in OECD countries, 1980-2002

The Mediated Public Sphere: A Model for Cross-National Research

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This study tests Habermas’s contention that greater commercialization undermines the media’s capacity to serve as a public sphere, that is, to promote rational-critical public debate involving the widest possible citizen participation. Hypotheses about commercial and state effects on news production are tested via comparison of the commercially dominated American media and the state dominated French media. In news coverage of comparable protest events, the French media are more participatory, less rational in certain aspects and equally critical. The mezzo-organizational environment of the “journalistic field” is shown to mediate external pressures, accounting more fully for cross-national differences and similarities.

Judging a book by its cover: survival analysis of independent and branch bookstores

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Following the organizational ecology tradition, I view independent and chain organizations as two distinct organizational forms, each with potentially separate functions within the community (Hannan and Freeman 1986; Hawley 1986; Rao 2002). The marked dissimilarities between these forms exist to attract unique resources, providing sustenance to that particular form. I test hypotheses regarding what these resources are and how they influence organizational survival. I find support for the models, providing insight into the diversity of an organizational population and the cultural factors that attenuate its heterogeneity. The empirical setting is retail bookstores in California from 1990-2003.

Institutionalized Pluralism: Advocacy Organization Involvement in National Policymaking

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How do advocacy groups become actively involved in national policymaking? Why are some of these non-governmental organizations able to become major players in Congress, the administration, and the courts while others remain peripheral participants in American politics? Current research, using surveys of organizations or case studies, emphasizes mobilization and strategy. Scholars seek to understand influence on policy outcomes but have yet to determine the factors that generate its precursor, active involvement in policymaking. I present an alternative theoretical and empirical approach. Adapting organizational and institutional theory, I argue that advocacy organizations succeed in Washington by becoming taken-for-granted position advocates in policy debates as representatives of public constituencies. An organization’s longevity, the scale of its Washington presence, the scope of its political agenda, and its formal ties to public supporters and policy expertise will govern...

ADHD: BIOLOGICAL DISEASE OR PSYCHOSOCIAL DISORDER? Accounting for the French-American Divergence in Ritalin Consumption

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Psychostimulants (such as Ritalin) are drugs that physicians prescribe to children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Following their introduction in the United States, the use of psychostimulants grew rapidly. However, this has not been the case everywhere, for the US represents 80-85% of the world’s psychostimulant consumption. Moreover, some countries, such as France, recognize ADHD as a medical condition but rarely treat it with medications. The aim of this article is to shed light on the American case. Towards that end, I compare the diagnostic systems used by American and French clinicians, an analysis that yields two important findings. First, the American diagnostic system has a much more liberal definition of ADHD, which leads to higher diagnoses and greater psychostimulant consumption. Second, where the American diagnostic system favors a biological understanding of ADHD and the use of medications to treat it, the French system emphasizes a psycho-social...

Access Isn't Everything: State Permeability, Class Capacities, and the Formation of U.S. and Canadian Labor Regimes, 1934-1948

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Access Isn't Everything: State Permeability, Class Capacities, and the Formation of U.S. and Canadian Labor Regimes, 1934-1948

The Inversion of Morals in Markets: Death, Benefits, and the Exchange of Life Insurance Policies

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Inversion of Morals in Markets: Death, Benefits, and the Exchange of Life Insurance Policies

Changing Roles and Relationships of Lawyers in Silicon Valley

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Changing Roles and Relationships of Lawyers in Silicon Valley

States and Markets in an Era of Globalization

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Globalization is transforming the relationship between states and markets. Even as some authors predict the demise of the state in the face of increasingly global markets, others focus on the role states play in constructing markets themselves and making sustainable market interactions possible. As the times change so do our theories, generating new concepts which can be used to better understand the previous period. This paper undertakes such a project. I argue that state, market and society are embedded in each other and constructed by their interactions with one another . The paper briefly reviews world-systems and comparative political economy analyses of the relation between states and markets. This review provides the framework for a discussion of the variety of models of state-market interaction in the postwar 'Golden Age' of capitalism. Finally I review the challenges which globalization poses to these models and consider contemporary experiments with state-market relations...

Contesting Governance in the Global Marketplace: A Sociological Assessment of British Efforts to Build New Markets for NGO-Certified Sustainable Wood Products

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Recent years have seen an explosion of new attempts to develop and implement voluntary third-party certification programs to encourage environmentally and socially responsible production practices for globally traded commodities. This study seeks to shed light on the nature and potentials of these new para-regulatory forms by using a sociological institutional approach to examine one of the most long-standing and successful attempts to develop a market for certified products. A close look at the British effort at building new markets for certified wood products contrasted against the relative failure of its counterpart in the United States reveals that causal factors from three analytic dimensions-- political economy, regulatory style/conventions, and diffuse cultural attributes-- together offer a compelling explanation for the recent British success. The findings suggest that the analytical approach adopted here may be of use in explaining trajectories of efforts in other...

The Corporate Transformation of American Health Care: A Stud in Institution Building

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

In the last three decades, the American health care system has undergone revolutionary change. What was for much of the 20th century a cottage industry dominated by a monopolizing medical profession is now a sprawling, price-competitive market dominated by large, integrated health care firms. Medicine's traditional ethos of community service and fiduciary ethic seem to have given way to the unbridled spirit of corporate capitalism. And the organizations that now populate the landscape of the health care system seem radically unfamiliar. Gone are the autonomous community hospitals and solo medical practices that most Americans grew up with. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have replaced them with a whole menagerie of integrated delivery systems, managed care plans, provider networks and national health care chains.

Perhaps the most striking changes are in the medical profession. For much of the 20th century, medicine was an heroic exception to the otherwise waning...

The Institutionalization of European Administrative Space

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Not so very long ago it was impossible to interest students of comparative politics in law and courts which they thought had little or nothing to do with the politics of the nations they studied. Simple propositions that were truisms among law and courts specialists, such as that litigation was an alternative form of interest group lobbying, were foreign to comparativists who largely stuck to the standard layman's view that courts are or ought to be "independent" and "neutral" that is separated from politics and policy making. Americanists, of course, knew better, but that generally was attributed to the peculiar place of the U.S. Supreme Court's power of constitutional judicial review in American politics. Three changes in the real world have now begun to persuade comparativists of the political functions of law and courts. One is the spread of successful constitutional judicial review to a large number of Western European states. If judges declaring laws unconstitutional...

More Than Shock Therapy: Market Transition, Employment, and Income in Russia, 1991-1995

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

We assess 14 predictions from market transition theory using survey data on employment, earnings, and income in Russia, during the first five years of market reform. Although the private sector has grown, self-employment is still rare. Incomes are down, and unemployment is up. Some entrepreneurs and managers have achieved dramatic success, while most Russians have steadily lost ground to hyper-inflation. The upshot is a distended income distribution and unprecedented income inequality. Distinctive features of late Soviet-era stratification persist: low returns to education, a gender gap in earnings, and low earnings among professionals. The Russian market transition offers more opportunity in trade, consumer services, and speculation and fewer in manufacturing than do other emerging markets. This dynamic corresponds to the image of "merchant capitalism" and contradicts the predictions of market transition theory.

Fields, Power and Social Skill: A Critical Analysis of the New Institutionalisms

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

"New Institutional" theories have proliferated across the social sciences. While they have substantial disagreements, they agree that institutions are created to produce local social orders, are social constructions, fundamentally about how powerful groups create rules of interaction and maintain unequal resource distributions, and yet, once in existence, both constrain and enable actors in subsequent institution building. I present a critique of these theories that focuses on their inadequate attention to the role of social power and actors in the creation of institutions. An alternative view of the dynamics of institutions is sketched out based on a more sociological conception of rules, resources, and social skill.

The Institutionalization of Sex Equality for Europe: Women Activists and the European Court

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

In the last forty years, we have witnessed the evolution of an unprecedented form of supranational governance in western Europe. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has played a powerful integrative force in this transformation. This chapter examines how the ECJ has operated to expand the integration project and has done so by serving as a forum for political action by national and transnational social movements. This analysis studies this integrative dynamic through the evolution of sex equality policy in the European Union (EU). The purpose of this chapter is two fold. First, I will examine the Court's expansive development of this EU policy sector through its case law. In particular, I will evaluate whether the policy preferences of national governments have significantly impacted the Court's judicial decisions. Second, I will examine the relationship between the Court and private litigants and women's groups and how this leads to the construction of EU policy through litigation....

Economic Action and Embeddedness: The Problem of the Structure of Action

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I attempt to contribute to the development of foundations for a sociological theory of economic action. Such a theory, it is argued here, has to make a substantial break with the teleological structure that informs both rational actor theory and normative theories of action. Informed by the tradition of American pragmatism I propose to base the understanding of action in economic contexts on a "non-teleological interpretation of intentionality" (Joas 1996). Such a theoretical conceptualization brings the interpretative acts of intentionally rational actors to the center. It finds its justification in the observation that the complexity and novelty inherent in economic contexts create an uncertain environment for actors which rules out optimizing decisions and provokes the question as to how actors make such an environment intelligible for intentionally rational decisions. I will argue that meaning and perceptions of rationality are established intersubjectively...

Globalization or Europeanization: Evidence on the European Economy Since 1980

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

At the core of the European Union, has been the gradual creation of the "single market" across western Europe. The European Union began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and expanded to become the European Economic Community (EEC). The original intent of the ECSC was to stabilize the production of steel across Europe in order to prevent ruinous competition. The EEC formed to expand the activities of the alliance to cooperation in agricultural policies and various industrial policies. The Treaty of Rome which produced the EEC, had the goal of reducing tariffs and other trade barriers, thereby promoting free trade and economic growth. Both Schumann and Monet, the principal intellectual architects of the EEC felt that if the European societies had economies that were more integrated, governments would be less tempted to engage in military activities that would end up in war.

The Rationalization of the Political Field: Beyond the State and Society-Centered Theories of Policy Change

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Much of the field of political sociology is defined by a confrontation between state- and society-centered theories of policy making. State-centered theories (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985; Finegold 1995; Orloff, Orloff and Skocpol 1988; Shefter 1994; Skocpol 1979; Skocpol 1992; Skowronek 1982) emphasize the effects of autonomous political actors, institutions, or opportunities on the outcomes of policy- making processes, whereas society-centered approaches (Baldwin 1990; Dahl 1961; Domhoff 1983; Domhoff 1996; Esping-Andersen 1990; Lipset 1963; Moore Jr. 1966) focus on the interests and motivations of collective actors in civil society. Research has benefited greatly from the insights generated by both schools, yet current scholarship suggests that the distinction between state and society can be misleading (Somers 1995).

Engineering a Link Between Universities and Vocational Schools? The Divergent Role of Professional Associations and Business Interests in the Formation of Systems for Technical Education in Germany and the USA

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Germany and the USA both industrialized between 1860 and 1925, but they developed different systems for industrial and technical education. The Germans developed a more comprehensive, system, with three distinct levels; lower, middle and higher education. The higher engineering schools were separate from the traditional universities but granted equal status. Industrial education in Germany was primarily part of a mobilization for technik, industrial growth, social unity and nationalism. Engineering education was used to establish a link between vocational schools and academic education. The American field of technical education around 1925 consisted largely of engineering colleges, which to a large extent was integrated in the traditional university system. Engineering colleges had multiplied as in no other country, and the training of artisans, foremen and technicians had been neglected. There was a clear social distinction between engineering schools and institutions for...

The Institutionalization of the Treaty of Rome

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

With the Treaty of Rome, European states designed a set of policy domains related to trade and the regulation of markets, a complex of governmental organisations, and a binding set of substantive and procedural rules to help them achieve the construction of a European Economic Community (Fligstein and McNichol, 1998). Although the Treaty traced the broad outlines of this new Community, it was the purposeful activities of representatives of national governments (Moravcsik 1999), of officials operating in the EC's organisations, like the Commission (Pollack 1998) and the Court (Burley and Mattli 1993; Stone Sweet and Caporaso 1998a; Weiler 1991, 1994), and of leaders of transnational interest groups (Mazey and Richardson, eds., 1993) that subsequently produced the extraordinarily dense web of political and social networks that now functions to generate and sustain supranational governance (Wallace and Young 1998; Héritier 1999; Sandholtz and Stone Sweet, eds., 1998).

Judicialization and the Construction of Governance

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I present a model of the emergence and evolution of governance, conceived (narrowly) as the continuous resolution of dyadic conflicts by a third party. The model is comprised of three core elements: normative structure, dyadic contracting, and triadic dispute resolution. I demonstrate that a move to triadic dispute resolution leads the triadic dispute resolver to construct, and then to manage, specific causal relationships between exchange, conflict, and rules. Once established, triadic governance perpetuates a discourse about the rulefulness of individual behavior, and this discourse gradually penetrates and is absorbed into those repertoires of reasoning and action that constitute political agency. In this way, political life is judicialized. The model further predicts that, under certain specified conditions, the triad will constitute a crucial mechanism of (micro and macro) political change. I then illustrate the power of the model to explain judicialization and the dynamics...

Is Globalization the Cause of the Crises of Welfare States?

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Economic globalization refers to three related processes: 1) the growth in the world economy, 2) the change in the relations between first and third world countries that has resulted from the use of information technologies to reorganize production nationally and globally, and 3) the integration of world financial markets. These processes are often held responsible for deindustrialization in advanced industrial societies, increases in income inequality, and pressures on welfare states to transform worker protection and benefits. I demonstrate that the changes in the world economy are much smaller, more gradual, and unevenly spread across societies than the globalization thesis suggests. More importantly, the links between globalization and its alleged negative outcomes are tenuous at best. The Paper then explores what is generating the crises, particularly in Europe.

Estimating a Mixed Strategy: United and American Airlines

Fri, 15 Mar 2002 00:00:00 +0000

We develop a generalized maximum entropy estimator that can estimate pure and mixed strategies subject to restrictions from game theory. This method avoids distributional assumptions and is consistent and efficient. We demonstrate this method by estimating the mixed strategies of duopolistic airlines.

A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 00:00:00 +0000

A Theoretical Agenda for Economic Sociology

Creating a National Medical Field: The Associated Apothecaries and Surgeon-Apothecaries, The Provincial Medical and Surgical Assocation, and the First Professional Project

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Creating a National Medical Field: The Associated Apothecaries and Surgeon-Apothecaries, The Provincial Medical and Surgical Assocation, and the First Professional Project

The Transmission and Persistence of`'Urban Legends': Sociological Application of Age-Structured Epidemic Models

Fri, 1 Mar 2002 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes two related epidemic models of rumor transmission in an age-structured population. Rumors share with communicable disease certain basic aspects, which means that formal models of epidemics may be applied to the transmission of rumors. The results show that rumors may become entrenched very quickly and persist for a long time, even when skeptics are modeled to take an active role in trying to convince others that the rumor is false. This is a macrophenomeon, because individuals eventually cease to believe the rumor, but are replaced by new recruits. This replacement of former believers by new ones is an aspect of all the models, but the approach to stability is quicker, and involves smaller chance of extinction, in the model where skeptics actively try to counter the rumor, as opposed to the model where interest is naturally lost by believers. Skeptics hurt their own cause. The result shows that including age, or a variable for which age is a proxy (e.g....

Social Skill and the Theory of Fields

Thu, 28 Feb 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The problem of the relationship between actors and the social structures in which they are embedded is central to sociological theory. This paper suggests that the "new institutionalist" focus on fields, domains, or games provides an alternative view of how to think about this problem by focusing on the construction of local orders. This paper criticizes the conception of actors in both rational choice and sociological versions of these theories. A more sociological view of action, what is called "social skill", is developed. The idea of social skill originates in symbolic interactionism and is defined as the ability to induce cooperation in other. This idea is elaborated to suggest how actors are important to the construction and reproduction of local orders. I show how its elements already inform existing work. Finally, I show how the idea can sensitize scholars to the role of actors in empirical work.

Globalization or Europeanization? Evidence on the European Economy Since 1980

Thu, 28 Feb 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Globalization or Europeanization? Evidence on the European Economy Since 1980