Considers structural inertia in organizational populations as an outcome of an ecological-evolutionary process. Structural inertia is considered to be a consequence of selection as opposed to a precondition. The focus of this analysis is on the timing of organizational change. Structural inertia is defined to be a correspondence between a class of organizations and their environments. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for their activities are identified as important organizational competencies. This reliability and accountability are achieved when the organization has the capacity to reproduce structure with high fidelity. Organizations are composed of various hierarchical layers that vary in their ability to respond and change. Organizational goals, forms of authority, core technology, and marketing strategy are the four organizational properties used to classify organizations in the proposed theory. Older organizations are found to have more inertia than younger ones. The effect of size on inertia is more difficult to determine. The variance in inertia with respect to the complexity of organizational arrangements is also explored. (SRD)

Structural Inertia and Organizational Change

The growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern have made international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but also increasingly difficult. If decision makers are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a specific problem, how do they define state interests and develop viable solutions? What factors shape their behavior? Under conditions of uncertainty, what are the origins of international institutions? And how can we best study the processes through which international policy coordination and order emerge? While a variety of analytic approaches have been used to address the problems of international cooperation, the approaches have yielded only fragmentary insights. At its core, the study of policy coordination among states involves arguments about determinism versus free will and about the ways in which the international system is maintained and transformed. Among the overlapping topics of debate are whether national behavior is determined or broadly conditioned by system-level factors, unit-level factors, or some complex interplay between the two; whether state policymakers can identify national interests and behave independently of pressures from the social groups they nominally represent; and whether states respond consistently to opportunities to create, defend, or expand their own wealth and power, to enhance collective material benefits, or to promote nonmaterial values.' A related question of

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Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

The authors wish to thank Jeanne Brett, Larry Cummings, Joanne Martin, J. P. Miller, and the anonymousASQ reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This paper explores the case for a general threat-rigidity effect in individual, group, and organizational behavior. Evidence from multiple levels of analysis is summarized, showing a restriction in information processing and constriction of control under threat conditions. Possible mechanisms underlying such a multiple-level effect are explored, as are its possible functional and dysfunctional consequences.

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Threat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis.

This paper is a systematic analysis of the comparative method. Its emphasis is on both the limitations of the method and the ways in which, despite these limitations, it can be used to maximum advantage. The comparative method is defined and analyzed in terms of its similarities and differences vis-a-vis the experimental and statistical methods. The principal difficulty facing the comparative method is that it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases. Four specific ways in which this difficulty may be resolved are discussed and illustrated: (1) increasing the number of cases as much as possible by means of longitudinal extension and a global range of analysis, (2) reducing the property space of the analysis, (3) focusing the comparative analysis on “comparable” cases (e.g., by means of area, diachronic, or intranation comparisons), and (4) focusing on the key variables. It is argued that the case study method is closely related to the comparative method. Six types of case studies (the atheoretical, interpretative, hypothesis-generating, theory-confirming, theory-infirming, and deviant case analyses) are distinguished, and their theoretical value is analyzed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1955513.pdf

Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method

This paper proposes that crisis can be denoted with a specific meaning applicable to organizational behavior. A tentative series of interrelated propositions suggests how a crisis in an organization's external environment can activate behavior within the organization which hinders its response to the crisis. The propositions are illustrated with material from a range of political and nonpolitical studies. Some attention is directed to possible means of making the eight principal variables operational.' Charles F. Hermann is a doctoral candidate in the International Relations Program of Northwestern University's Political Science Department.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2390887.pdf

Some Consequences of Crisis Which Limit the Viability of Organizations

We are in a period of profound change in international relations and foreign policy. These developments call attention to the state of our knowledge about change processes in governmental decisionmaking. This essay reviews the contributions of several areas of conceptual literature and proposes a scheme for interpreting decisions in which a government decides to change policy direction. Foreign policy changes can be placed on a continuum indicating the magnitude of the shift from minor adjustment changes, through both program and goal changes, to fundamental changes in a country's international orientation. These degrees of change are examined with respect to four change agents: (1) leader driven; (2) bureaucratic advocacy; (3) domestic restructuring; and (4) external shock. The phases of decisionmaking mediate between sources of change and the magnitude of change in policy. The essay concludes with an examination of propositions that suggest conditions under which the phases of decisionmaking can increase the likelihood of major change.

Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy

International Crises: Insights from Behavioral Research

At the apex of foreign policy making in all governments or ruling parties are actors with the ability to commit the resources of the government and the power to prevent other entities within the government from reversing their position-the ultimate decision unit. Although this decision unit may change with the nature of the policy problem and with time, its structure will shape a government's foreign policy. In this paper we propose three types of decision units: predominant leaders, single groups, and multiple autonomous actors. Each of these exists in one of several conditions that help to determine whether the decision unit affects foreign policy largely through the pre-existing knowledge, beliefs, and style of those participating in the unit (a self-contained unit) or whether factors outside the decision unit must be taken into consideration in understanding the results of the decision-making process (an externally influenceable unit). The hypotheses that self-contained units will engage in more extreme foreign policy behavior than externally influenceable units and that single group decision units will show more extreme foreign policy behavior than those comprised of multiple autonomous actors are examined using data from twenty-five nations during the decade from 1959 to 1968. Who makes foreign policy decisions? What is the effect of the decision unit on foreign policy? An examination of how governments and ruling parties around the world make foreign policy decisions suggests that authority is exercised by an extensive array of different entities. Among the decision units are prime ministers, presidents, politburos, juntas, cabinets, inter-agency groups, coalitions, and parliaments. Moreover, within any one government the pertinent decision units often change with time and issue. When cross-national comparisons of governmental decision-making bodies are contemplated, as in the comparative study of foreign policy, the number of possible kinds of decision units becomes formidable. This essay examines one way of classifying decision units, showing how it enhances our ability to differentiate and account for governments' behavior in the foreign Author's Note: This research was funded by a National Science Foundation grant (SES-8618438), the Mershon Center, and the Ohio State University Instructional and Research Computing Center. We would like to thank Greg Peacock for his help with the data analysis as well as Bahgat Korany, Roy Licklider, Jerel Rosati, and Harvey Starr for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2600518.pdf

Charles F. Hermann

Papers

Some Consequences of Crisis Which Limit the Viability of Organizations

Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy

International Crises: Insights from Behavioral Research

Who Makes Foreign Policy Decisions and How: An Empirical Inquiry

New Directions in the Study of Foreign Policy