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The liberal international order is a fragmented institutional complex, comprising often disparate elements. One of these is a distinctive institutional approach to the global organization of cultural difference. This approach combines universal Westphalian sovereignty (and the pluralist interstate order it facilitates) with international human rights norms that seek to protect the cultural freedoms of individuals. I term this institutional amalgam “global pluralism”. Like many elements of the liberal order, such pluralism is now under challenge, confronted by resurgent ethno-nationalism, politicized religion, and civilizational chauvinism. The key question is whether global pluralism has the adaptive capacities to withstand such challenges. This article develops a theoretical framework for comprehending these institutional capacities. Conceiving global pluralism as a “diversity regime,” I argue that such regimes always rest on social “recognition contracts,” and that these give them certain structural characteristics: configurations of political authority and modes of cultural recognition. Focusing on these characteristics, I compare global pluralism with past Western and non-Western diversity regimes, and clarify the adaptive strengths and weaknesses of different institutional forms. This contractual-structural analysis exposes the historical uniqueness of global pluralism but also its structural vulnerabilities. While global pluralism has distinct advantages over past diversity regimes—principally, that it does not itself generate unstable cultural cleavages and hierarchies—it requires complex forms of social contracting to sustain, and its individualist mode of recognition struggles to accommodate collectivist cultural claims. Such contracting is essential, however, if global pluralism is to withstand current challenges, all of which involve collectivist claims.

Fontan-associated protein losing enteropathy is a challenge to treat and is a major contributor to morbidity and mortality in patients with palliated single ventricle. Numerous strategies for management have been proposed, with confusion as to how best to stratify and implement care among the many treatments available. Medical management can be helpful in some, while novel lymphatic interventions hold potential for remission with good results. We review our institutional approach to protein losing enteropathy after Fontan operation and provide a suggested algorithm and pathway for effective care.

Theory of mediatized war asserts that the study of contemporary wars must consider the role of the media in it. However, while the focus of the mediatization of wars is usually on the power dynamics between the military, the media, and the audiences, the institutional approach to mediatization invites us to consider the role of the media as educators and providers of moral orientation. Thus, the study of mediatized war needs to consider the moral work of news in articulating an ethical solicitation for spectators to reflect upon their responsibility to the suffering of distant others during wartime. Following Judith Butler’s call to reflect on the cultural frames through which ethical solicitation emerges, this article studies Al-Jazeera English’s coverage of the 2008 Gaza War and points to the discursive and performative means through which news constructs distant deaths as grievable and fosters cosmopolitan sentiment.

© 2015, © 2015 Union for Radical Political Economics. Land reform has become particularly prominent in development discourse in recent times. Advocates emphasize its importance for poverty reduction in underdeveloped economies. However, how reform comes about and evolves and what it is and does is situated, not universal, as neoclassical economists suggest. This paper sheds light on the meaning, evolution, and outcomes of land reform in Ghana. It draws on historical and contemporary socio-legal and political-economic sources of evidence, analyzed within a critical postcolonial institutional framework. It shows important features of continuity and change in both colonial and post-colonial land reform. While pre-colonial land tenure relations are misrepresented as entailing no market activities, the concerted effort to introduce “capitalist markets” into the land sector to produce “socially efficient outcomes” has led to contradictory results.

This article examines the reactivation of dormant ties in Japan and the United States. Using the institutional approach to culture developed by Yamagishi et al., it is hypothesized that respondents living in Japan will be less likely to reconnect with dormant ties when prompted than respondents living in the United States. It is further hypothesized that interaction with kin and work ties will help to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States. To examine these hypotheses, we developed a field experiment in which 95 adults living in Japan and 68 adults living in the United States were prompted by a smartphone application to reconnect with dormant ties. The results of this study show strong support for the hypothesis that respondents living in Japan are less likely to reconnect with dormant ties than respondents living in the United States when prompted. There is also mixed support for the hypothesis that interaction with kin and work ties helps to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States.

How effective is unilateral presidential power? Recent developments have shifted presidential scholarship in the direction of a more institutional approach, and one of the most important tenets of this work holds that the president has the ability to make policy on his own. However, there is significant anecdotal evidence suggesting that agency responsiveness to executive orders is not at all guaranteed. This study leverages a unique data set tracing the implementation of executive orders across 10 government agencies, and the results indicate that despite conventional wisdom, presidential directives are not universally implemented, and a host of factors come to bear on an agency’s decision as to whether they will respond. This project represents among the first quantitative empirical assessments of the utility of unilateral power and suggests that the field may benefit most from shifting toward a bargaining-based model similar to those used in legislative scholarship.

This study explores the paradoxical consequences of social welfare reforms in South Korea since the 1997 financial crisis. Despite efforts to implement a comprehensive social insurance system (SIS), the South Korean government did not succeed in providing access to people who qualified for aid. This study examines the dynamics of the implementation of the SIS in relation to the policy domains of labour markets and inter-firm relations, rather than a narrow focus on social welfare policies. This study shows how the implementation of the SIS becomes self-eroding as a result of various actors' exploitation of tensions between the SIS and other institutional domains.

Green innovation incorporates technological improvements that save energy, prevent pollution, or enable waste recycling and can include green product design and corporate environmental management. This type of innovation also contributes to business sustainability because it potentially has a positive effect on a firm’s financial, social, and environmental outcomes. However, the specific effect of green innovation on these outcomes can be highly influenced by the national context in which firms develop their activities. Using an institutional approach and employing a sample of 88 green innovative firms and 70 matched pairs (green innovative and non–green innovative firms), we find that green innovative firms are situated in contexts characterized by more stringent environmental regulations and higher environmental normative levels.Nevertheless, when compared to non–green innovative firms, we observe that green innovative firms do not experience improved financial performance. In focusing on green innovative firms, we note that the intensity of green innovation is positively related to firm profitability. Finally, we study whether national institutional conditions (stringency of environmental regulations and normative levels) impose a moderating effect on the relationship between green innovation intensity and the financial performance improvement of innovative firms. Our results show that regulatory and normative dimensions do not have the same influence on that relationship, creating implications for academia, managers, and policy makers.

The idea that modern economics is necessarily based on market capitalism continues to dominate in scientific-scholarly discourse. The objective of this article is to present institutional matrix theory, or X- and Y-theory, as an alternative systemic institutional approach to economic and political development. It puts forward some new arguments to explain “grassroots resistance” to the deep marketization in many societies and answers the question why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else.JEL Classification: P51, B52, A13

This article stems from an awareness that the ‘European social model’ is marked – in the discourse that proposes it and in the policies that attempt to implement it – by an original combination of the dimensions of economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Today, this combination is in the midst of a crisis whose nature and outcome are variously interpreted, in politics as in social sciences. The current debate would have much to gain from the use of several classic analytical categories, which, though well enough known, are rarely if ever applied in this context. After a schematic presentation of the characteristics that discussion of the European model has now assumed, an institutional approach to interpreting it will be proposed which revolves around the Weberian concept of ‘legitimate order’. Particular attention will be devoted to the organizational means whereby policies are formulated and pursued, and the territorial dimension of policies and their effects will be discussed. The concluding remarks will present policy implications and considerations concerning the present crisis and possible developments of the European model, elaborated on the basis of the proposed methodological approach.

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis.

Public acceptance is often seen as a key reason why water-recycling technology is (accepted or) rejected. A common assumption is that projects fail because the general public is unable to comprehend specialist information about risk and the belief that if the public were better informed, they would accept change more readily. This article suggests that rhetoric about acceptance is counterproductive in progressing sustainability as it does not address issues relating to institutional arrangements and reinforces a dichotomy between expert and lay groups. Instead, it is argued that institutional change is needed to build opportunities for constructive public engagement. The failure to implement sustainable water use through recycling can be understood as the result of several factors including present cost structures for water, institutional conservatism, administrative fragmentation, and inadequate involvement of communities in planning. Achieving sustainable water use through recycling may require better coordination between agencies and integrated government policies.

Cooperation between small firms in “industrial districts,” where the production process may be radically dis-integrated, poses an important challenge to current political science theories of trust and cooperation. In this article, the author suggests that the problems posed by these districts—the existence of apparently irrational forms of trust in the political economy and of high-trust forms of cooperation in societies with low levels of interpersonal trust—may be explained if one adopts a more sophisticated institutional approach. The author shows how institutions may affect trust between economic actors and thus cooperation in two case studies of industrial districts, mechanical engineering in Bologna, Italy, and Stuttgart, Germany, and shows that empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that trust may depend on institutions and vary with institutional context.

The evaluation of foreign aid is thoroughly integrated into the work of aid agencies. It is argued that evaluations contribute to organizational learning and are used to support change in policies and operations. How the use of evaluation is understood, however, depends on the organization perspective applied. Various organization perspectives are relevant. This article discusses the different approaches and looks at organizational practices and a number of case studies to address the question of how evaluation is used. The findings suggest that the use of evaluation for learning in agencies may be less important than other inputs, and evaluation results only partly support policy and operational changes. One single perspective on an organization cannot explain its evaluation processes and use. Different elements of the evaluation appear to be dominated by specific organization perspectives.

This article deals with social policy development in South Korea and Taiwan. The focus of analysis is on the time variation in the extension of entitlement to health insurance to the non-wage-earning population, one of the most contentious social policy issues in the two countries. The article contends that the existing explanations of East Asian social policy are too general to provide sufficient insight into the historical dynamics of social policy development in the two countries. It argues for a historical institutional approach, since this allows an analysis of the particular role played by the political systems and culture of South Korea and Taiwan in social policy development, aspects which have often been neglected by earlier studies. In both South Korea and Taiwan, direct presidential elections and the diffusion of international norms are central to an understanding of the motives behind and forms for the extension of entitlement to health insurance to the non-wage-earning population.

In a recent paper in this journal, Simon Guy and John Henneberry (2000) proposed an institutional approach to property markets that emphasises exceptional behaviour on the part of particular market agents. Using this cultural approach, they claimed to have evidence that London-based property investors deliberately underinvest in British property outside southern England. This paper criticises their dismissal of pre-existing economic and institutional property market analysis and questions the validity of their empirical conclusions.

Social and environmental problems attributed to current electricity sector restructuring structures are spelled out. The energy source choices and market power of large industrial and commercial users versus residential consumers are compared. An institutional analytic approach is used to reveal the best option to alleviate the social and environmental problems associated with electricity restructuring. Community aggregation emerges with great potential to achieve meaningful social and environmental improvement.

Because macromarketing is macro, its domain is necessarily broad. The question of how broad it is has not been adequately answered. This article proposes an institutional approach to the teaching of macromarketing. Although markets are, themselves, institutions, what is proposed here is examining the antecedent institutions for the development of markets. The set of antecedents proposed here includes economic, political, and technological institutions. The role of each in the development of market societies and the sustainability of such societies is critically examined. In each of the texts used in the course, it is argued that sustainability is tied directly to the economic, political, and technological institutions that underlie the market institutions that evolve. This approach expands the domain of macromarketing from agorology, the study of the market as an institution, to thesmology, the study of institutions.

This is Part I of a two-part study on paradigms used to study marketing and economic development. In this part, a systematic examination of the three paradigms (modernization, institutional, and radical) most commonly used in analyzing marketing and economic development is undertaken. Criteria for evaluating efficacy of the paradigms are drawn from the marketing and economic development literature. An analysis of the three paradigms based on six evaluative criteria suggest that the institutional approach has key advantages and that the other two paradigms have significant deficiencies. In Part II, each paradigm is used to frame the study of a developing economy to verify the conceptual results of Part L

Reorganization is one of the most common activities of government, but it is not adequately understood, either by practitioners or by scholars. This article applies three broad approaches in administrative theory—purpo sive action, environmental determinism, and institutionalism—to the study of reform in industrialized democracies. Each of these three broad approaches is further divided into a number of more specific approaches. The article evaluates all the available approaches, and ends by arguing in favor of the institutional approach.

The changes in the Canadian broadcasting policy between 1968 and 1991 in terms of the role of the public sector in broadcasting are discussed. The shift from an institutional approach to a market-driven approach and from funding public sector institutions to funding provincial institutions is seen as the result of the unsatisfactory performance of public sector broadcasters.

The premise of this paper is that the revision of the stages metaphor for the public policy-making process is best undertaken from an institutional rather than individualist approach to analysis. The theoretical linkage between policy formulation and information - including feedback about performance at other stages as well as the results of social research - is mediated at the level of the policy formulating institution by complex learning and adaptation processes. Together these processes constitute a guidance mechanism for managing error and making course corrections. Different types of mechanisms, however, will admit different kinds of information which, in turn, will condition how the institution adapts to changing circumstances. The analytical features of guidance mechanisms are related to knowledge utilization, normative theories of policy-making and implementation, and to policy design.

This paper argues for an institutional approach to state analyses. It notes that in general the Marxist literature on the state has paid little attention to the different types of state administration (departments, statutory authorities), and the effect of administrative forms on the ability of state agencies to conduct activities, or engage in struggles within the state. By contrast, there is an extensive and insightful body of writings to be found in traditional administrative literature on different forms of administration. This literature remains conservative in orientation and rarely directs itself to the broader concerns of theories of the state. This paper attempts to bring these two bodies of writings together by focusing on `quasi-government' bodies such as statutory authorities. It is argued that these administrative forms raise in an acute form the Marxist concerns with struggles, conflicts and allegiances within the state.

This essay assesses the usefulness of Max Weber's sociology, particularly his writings on China, for the analysis of East Asian industrialisation. Many scholars writing about modern Asia criticise Weber's views on the relation between Confucian values and the development of capitalism. This essay suggests that many of these critics misinterpret Weber's writing on China Acknowledging that Weber made errors in interpreting China, the authors, nonetheless, argue that Weber's perspective is most valuable in analysing Asian economic development because of the institutional approach he developed Weber's institutional approach is outlined and briefly applied in a comparison of Japanese and Chinese industrialisation.

This article identifies elements of an institutional approach to marketing to supplement the presently dominant paradigm based on the neoclassical economic theory of resource allocation. An important part of the political economy of marketing systems is the interplay of the three main social and economic control mechanisms: markets, politics, and hierarchies. The institutional framework is applied to areas such as comparative marketing and performance indicators for marketing systems.

This article examines the major approach to the study of allocation in British public housing, i.e. the institutional approach. It argues that the approach is unsatisfactory because it ignores factors which originate from outside of the institutional context and also the interaction between the individual household and the institution. These drawbacks can be remedied by focusing on the choices facing households, by using household choice models similar to those used in studying the movement of households in the private market. It is only by using this approach that the major problems of allocation in British public housing will be identified.

This article attempts, in the loose context of a review of Soviet scholar's R. Ulyanovsky and V. Pavlov's book Asian Dilemma A Soviet View and Myrdal's Concept, to outline some of the concepts and themes of central interest in Soviet development research, as well as to examine Swedish economist G. Myrdal's work in the light of Marxist criteria. Certain central methodological problems which arise in the course of this discussion are examined, with particular attention being paid to, on the one hand the Marxist theory of a multistructural social pattern, and on the other Myrdal's "institutional approach". Myrdal's Dilemma and Soviet Development Studies: a review article of Ulyanov sky, R. and Pavlov, V.: Asian Dilemma: A Soviet View and Myrdal's Concept. Progress Publishers, Moscow 1973, 169 pp.