Institutional Theory

When people have contacts with the police, the fairness with which police are perceived to act affects citizens’ trust and confidence in the police and their sense that the police deserve to be obeyed – that is, the procedural justice that citizens subjectively experience affects the legitimacy of the police.  Translating this body of research into police practice is not straightforward, however.  The procedural justice with which officers act is typically not measured in police agencies, nor is it an outcome for which police managers are held accountable.  Conducting research in the Schenectady and Syracuse Police Departments, we addressed these questions:
• Does performance on these outcomes – procedural justice and citizen satisfaction – improve when information on these outcomes is incorporated into departments’ systems of performance measurement and accountability?
• What do police managers do with this information, and how (if at all) are field supervisors and patrol officers affected by it?
• Are survey-based measures of citizens’ subjective experiences valid measures of police performance, that is, do they reflect the procedural justice with which police act?
The findings from Schenectady rest on a broader foundation of data, so we begin with them and then consider the respects in which those findings are corroborated by the those from Syracuse.  In Schenectady, we observed in officers’ behavior moderate levels of procedural justice and low levels of procedural injustice. Officers’ patterns of procedural justice and procedural injustice are shaped in important ways by elements of the situations in which officers become involved and the behavior of citizens with whom officers interact.  Procedural justice was greater in incidents that involved violent crime or interpersonal conflict, greater when the citizen was Black, lower when the citizen was a suspect or third party rather than a victim or complainant, and lower when the citizen resisted the officer’s authority.  Procedural injustice was greater when the citizen was male, a suspect, intoxicated, resisted police authority, or disrespected police; injustice was lower when the citizen was Black. 
However, citizens’ subjective experiences are rather weakly related to the forms of officers’ overt behavior that comprise procedural justice.  Officers’ procedural justice and injustice together explained about 10 percent of the variation in citizens’ subjective experience in Schenectady.  Procedural injustice had the greater effect on subjective experience, by far, such that we found asymmetry in the effects of justice and injustice that parallel previous findings based only on survey data.  However, the Schenectady data suggest that this asymmetry stems not from the relatively strong effects of negative experiences but rather from citizens’ tendency to overestimate the procedural justice with which police act in their encounters.  Citizens tend to be fairly positive in their ratings of police performance, even when the procedural justice that we observed was fairly low, a pattern that may reflect the impact of citizens’ more general attitudes toward the police on their perceptions of police actions in individual encounters with police.
Citizens’ judgments about procedural justice are also affected by whether (if not so much how) officers exercise forms of police authority: conducting searches or using physical force.  Searches of citizens have strong effects on their assessments of procedural justice, unless citizens accede to them, while the use of physical force has a notable effect as well.  We did not make a distinction between legal and illegal searches, nor did we make a distinction between reasonable and unreasonable force, but extant evidence suggests that citizens’ judgments about the propriety of police action turns on their perceptions of procedural justice and not on the legality of officers’ behavior, per se.
Neither indicator of police performance – a survey-based indicator or an observation-based indicator – revealed consistent changes that ensued from the survey-based measurement of performance.  Overall, the month-to-month changes in measures of citizens’ subjective experience were by and large within a range of sampling fluctuation, and with no change that could be attributed to the introduction of performance measures to monthly Compstat meetings.  Given the weak connections between what officers do (and do not do) and what citizens later think about it, we might well see little or no change in survey-based measures of performance with good faith – even herculean – efforts by platoon commanders to manage their officers’ behavior in police-citizen encounters.  But neither did we see consistent changes in the observation-based measures of officers’ procedural justice.
Platoon commanders and first-line supervisors approached the management of this police outcome in different ways, which we characterized as forming a continuum.  Some gave regular attention during line-ups to the quality of police-citizen interaction, and in that context shared survey results that had been delivered at the monthly Compstat meeting.  They explained both what procedural justice means and why it is important.  On one platoon, this appeared to affect officers’ performance.  On others, however, commanders and supervisors either attended to the issue only intermittently, alluding to what it means for officers’ conduct but not its rationale, or were skeptical or even dismissive of the importance of “customer service.”
This continuum reflects a process of “sensemaking” on the parts of Schenectady’s lieutenants and sergeants – that is, the interpretation of what customer service or procedural justice represents and the appropriate emphasis to be placed on the quality of police-citizen interactions in the context of the demands of street-level police work.  Based on their interpretations, some were receptive to the administration’s emphasis on “customer service,” finding it quite appropriate, while others were more guarded in their willingness to embrace the ideas, or flatly opposed to it.  This same process of sensemaking played out among patrol officers.
In Syracuse we found patterns very similar to those in Schenectady on every score that we were able to measure.  Citizens’ subjective experiences were of a generally comparable nature, and they tended to bear the same relationships to other factors, including legitimacy, even though legitimacy was somewhat higher in Syracuse than Schenectady.  We also found similar patterns of variation in the management of procedural justice, and similarly mixed receptivity to a customer service emphasis among patrol officers and supervisors.

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 ...

Se analiza la capacidad institucional del Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara, México, respecto a la implementación de la política de vivienda a través de su Instituto Municipal de la Vivienda (IMUVIG). En primer lugar, para poder definir las capacidades institucionales se revisó la literatura, encontrando que su análisis es complejo porque quienes las han definido o medido, no han llegado a un consenso y, en general, se enfocan a aspectos ajenos a las instituciones. Es por ello que se propone un análisis centrado en el neo institucionalismo, a través del enfoque de la lógica institucional. Para su medición se compararon documentos orgánicos y programáticos desde dicho enfoque, encontrándose que la lógica institucional que persigue la organización es de corte estado centrista, mientras que en lo programático es mercantilista. Esta contradicción nos llevó a concluir que la contradicción en la lógica institucional del IMUVIG, provoca que este carezca de capacidad institucional para implementar la política de vivienda, aun poseyendo capacidades técnicas, políticas y administrativas suficientes.

Current explanations for franchising assume that managers only pay attention to firm-specific economic factors. In contrast, the authors submit that social factors described by institutional theory will enhance understanding. Using a sample of 1,300 franchisors active during 1980 through 2000, the authors find evidence that both environmental and internal institutional pressures influence firms’ propensity to franchise, but that responsiveness to internal institutional pressures declines as economic reasons to franchise increase. Overall, social factors appear to actively influence franchising, but their impact is muted by economic factors. The results also suggest that perhaps franchising is itself becoming an institutionalized norm. For researchers, institutional theory promises to be a fruitful avenue for increasing understanding about franchising. For franchisors, results highlight the value of systematic analysis of franchising decisions.

Canadian University Institutional Review Boards (IRB) assess action research proposals based on the ethical protection of participants, the methodology, and any potential implications for human participants involved in the qualitative study. There are more disadvantages than advantages through this ethical review process. This positional paper analyzes complex issues including: the implications that are intertwined with ethics in qualitative action research with human participants when assessed by IRBs; the challenges associated with autoethnography in terms of whether IRBs can ethically assess research proposals properly; and recommendations for the future review of qualitative action research within Canadian universities.

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...

Growing intensity of university—industry ties has generated an intense debate about the changing norms and practices of academic scientific work. This study challenges the protagonists’ views on the emergence of a dominant market ethos in academic science and growing influence of the ‘new school’ entrepreneurial scientists. It argues that academic scientists are active agents seeking to shape the relationships between science and business, and shows continued diversity in their work orientations. Drawing on neo-institutional theory and the notion of ‘boundary work’, the study examines how scientists seek to protect and negotiate their positions, and also make sense of their professional role identities. It identifies four different orientations: the ‘traditional’ and ‘entrepreneurial’, with two hybrid types in between. The hybrids are the dominant category and are particularly adept at exploiting the ambiguities of ‘boundary work’ between academia and industry. The study is based on...

The low-carbon energy transition is a form of socio-technical transition and, as such, it involves profound changes in the institutions that govern society. Despite the acknowledged importance of institutions in shaping the pace and nature of transition, a relatively small proportion of the academic literature on the topic applies institutional theory to the analysis of this transition in a systematic and detailed manner, and these accounts draw mainly on organizational and sociological institutionalism. This paper aims to demonstrate the benefits of applying a wider set of institutional theories to the study of the low-carbon energy transition. It draws principally, but not solely, on rational choice and historical institutionalism with selective reference being made to key concepts within social and organizational institutionalism as well as discursive institutionalism. The paper demonstrates the high degree of parallelism that exists between the literatures on socio-technical regimes and institutions, and also shows how the systematic application of institutionalism can provide a deeper understanding of socio-technical transitions. It concludes by outlining the main elements of a research agenda relating to the low-carbon energy transition.

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.

Using the Institutional approach from North as a reference, we describe and explain the formal and informal institutional factors that operate in the context of the family business, influencing its behavior, especially in the context of corporate governance. We first establish and define those institutions, analyze the existing literature and propose a theoretical model to be tested in future research. We finalize showing new routes to be considered in further studies.

Drawing on Baumol’s concepts of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship and relevant amendments, this book develops a conceptual framework which allows operationalising the concepts for empirical assessment. Using data from a longitudinal survey, the author further makes one of the first attempts to address these concepts empirically. The results show the importance of shifting the focus from firms’
activities to output on both, venture and societal levels, short and long term. Overall, the findings suggest that productive entrepreneurs are less involved in behaviour such as tax avoidance or illegal business and show a higher level of entrepreneurial orientation.

Como parte de mi actividad como profesor e investigador, en los últimos años he estado trabajando un proyecto sobre las instituciones de la modernidad. En este, he considerado hasta ahora la familia (Romo, 2016) y la empresa (Romo, 2018) como dos de los dispositivos más representativos de esta categoría y época. Para cerrar esta etapa de trabajo, presento ahora este sobre la escuela.
El tema de esta propuesta se enmarca en la línea de investigación que vengo desarrollando desde hace algunos años sobre organizaciones y análisis institucional, en la cual, en términos teóricos, siempre he observado, como central para explicar la conducta y la interacción humanas, la tensión entre la racionalidad, los intereses y la voluntad de los actores, y los aspectos más bien subconscientes, culturales, estructurales o sistémicos.
Estos últimos se vuelven centrales para el tema de este libro, en la medida en que se asuman dos conceptos: que la escuela los encarna de manera contundente y cotidiana, y que los sujetos se relacionan con ella, tanto en lo superficial como en lo trascendente, como representación o imaginario, en forma de organización o de institución (Romo, Romo y Ruiz, 2019).
Este proyecto representa la elaboración colectiva de un estado del arte sobre el tema. Para ello se invitó a académicos y especialistas que contaran con alguna de las siguientes dos características: que sus temas de indagación estén relacionados con la escuela (como institución de la modernidad) y que la puedan observar en un sentido institucional, o que las formas con que usualmente abordan sus objetos de estudio consideren relevantes los dispositivos de legitimación para la acción social (instituciones, imagina- rios, representaciones, etcétera) y puedan, en este caso, extender su interés a la escuela como tema.

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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L’Europe est marquée, depuis une vingtaine d’années, par d’importantes mutations institutionnelles (décentralisation, construction européenne, ouverture internationale, essor de la coopération inter-gouvernementale, tournant néo-libéral) qui contribuent à l’émergence d’un monde multipolaire. Les frontières entre espace public et sphère privée, entre acteurs locaux, gouvernements nationaux et institutions communautaires, se brouillent chaque jour un peu plus. Dans ce monde plus ouvert et plus fluide, axé sur la recherche du compromis, les "intermédiaires" voient leur rôle sensiblement réévalué. Ils participent aux arbitrages politiques, font circuler les idées, jouent un rôle de "passeur" entre tous les groupes et les institutions présents dans l’espace public. Les auteurs de ce livre, en s’intéressant aux trois principaux échelons de la vie politique (local, national, européen) et en croisant différentes approches de la science politique (analyse des politiques publiques, de la profession politique, de l’administration), montrent que l’on ne peut plus étudier l’action publique et la représentation politique en démocratie sans s’interroger sur ceux qui, dans l’ombre, fabriquent les compromis.

In the context of private ordering—where rule sets are relatively fluid, centrally controlled, and exist in the shadow of law and regulation—developing generalizable insights about comparatively superior governance mechanisms is difficult. I shed light on this question by characterizing cryptocurrency blockchains as a type of constitutional rule set that both defines and legitimizes the activities supported by the underlying distributed ledger technology. More specifically, I argue that cryptocurrency blockchains have led to new forms of competition in private governance, which include exit costs as an important competitive margin. My analysis not only identifies the choices in constitutional governance to which proposed cryptocurrency blockchain changes are analogous, but it also highlights the competitive gains expected to result from these changes. I further consider both the trade-offs in governance created by competition between cryptocurrency blockchains and the surprising ways in which these unique competitive margins may influence downstream outcomes.

Français
Le refus des élections politiques est devenu avec le temps un principe fondamental du mouvement anarchiste, au point de constituer aujourd’hui un élément important de son identité. C’est le cas à la Fédération anarchiste, où l’abstentionnisme fait figure de norme. En étudiant l’organisation comme une institution, l’article s’intéresse à la façon dont cette norme est appropriée, pour faire partie intégrante du rôle militant. Devenir militant de l’organisation signifie dès lors devenir abstentionniste, et tout manquement à ce principe est sanctionné par la désapprobation du groupe. Bien que difficile, la transgression n’est cependant pas impossible, même si elle tend généralement à demeurer secrète. Ce n’est que dans des circonstances exceptionnelles que certains militants s’autorisent à contester publiquement la norme anti-électorale. Ils s’appliquent toutefois à le faire au nom des objectifs mêmes de l’institution et à affirmer le caractère ponctuel de la transgression, ce qui diminue la portée de leur dissidence.

Anglais
English
Throughout history, the refusal to participate in political elections has become a basic rule of the anarchist movement. It is now part of its identity and it is therefore a core principle of the French Anarchist Federation. This article intends to study the organization as an institution by focusing on how activists’ roles are learned and enacted. It shows that non-voting is considered as a part of the role of every member in the institution, and that failing to play it correctly exposes the individual to strong disapproval from the group. But this does not mean that it is impossible to infringe the rule, although deviance tends to remain hidden most of the time. Only in exceptional circumstances can the general rule be challenged, but in order to be heard, those who challenge it can only claim to do so on account of the institution’s goals and in very specific conditions, which somehow weakens their undertaking.

This chapter discusses research on the policies, laws, and subsidies that create and shape the organizational
structures and practices that form the basis of the news media. The research reviewed treats news media
institutions as political actors and makes assumptions about journalism’s importance in a democratic society.
Although this line of research, with its emphasis on political economic and normative questions, often has been
marginalized in American mass communication scholarship, the authors explain its ongoing importance,
particularly in relation to the journalism crisis, and, suggest future directions.

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.

There is an ideological civil war taking place in the United States, and in western civilization overall. This is a battle that displays itself along political lines, social lines, academic lines, and along religious lines. This ideological civil war is most pronounced in the partisan political battles between left and right, though it also displays itself in other ways. Specifically, the battle for the soul of the church is a front in this battle, among many other fronts like media, academia, culture, and the sciences. In the church we see the same divide developing across the normal lines, left vs right. We see both sides attempting to push their political views in the church, and this is causing a polarization. What happens in the culture we see mimic itself in the churches. We see struggles in denominations between high and low views of scriptures, between biblical marriage and gay marriage, between social justice warrior progressives vs. traditional justice causes. We see people in the church wanting to step behind and advocate for President Trump, and we see people in the church trying to turn their movement into hashtag #resistance movement. In the various movements of the churches in western civilization, I've seen a growing divide along fairly partisan lines. There is a growing polarization, and it shows itself on social media, and in decisions by the leadership of various movements. We see traditional evangelical theology and liberal theology vying for dominance. We see homosexuality and LGBT ideology attempting to supplant traditional marriage and biblical teachings on gender.

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