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

Much of the prior research on interorganizational learning has focused on the role of absorptive capacity, a firm's ability to value, assimilate, and utilize new external knowledge. However, this definition of the construct suggests that a firm has an equal capacity to learn from all other organizations. We reconceptualize the firm-level construct absorptive capacity as a learning dyad-level construct, relative absorptive capacity. One firm's ability to learn from another firm is argued to depend on the similarity of both firms' (1) knowledge bases, (2) organizational structures and compensation policies, and (3) dominant logics. We then test the model using a sample of pharmaceutical–biotechnology R&D alliances. As predicted, the similarity of the partners' basic knowledge, lower management formalization, research centralization, compensation practices, and research communities were positively related to interorganizational learning. The relative absorptive capacity measures are also shown to have greater explanatory power than the established measure of absorptive capacity, R&D spending. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3094223.pdf

Relative absorptive capacity and interorganizational learning

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches, which are controversial, complex and unclear. This article tries to clarify the sit- uation, ''mapping the territory'' by classifying the main CSR theories and related approaches in four groups: (1) instrumental theories, in which the corporation is seen as only an instrument for wealth creation, and its social activities are only a means to achieve economic results; (2) political theories, which concern themselves with the power of corporations in society and a responsible use of this power in the political arena; (3) integrative theories, in which the corporation is focused on the satisfaction of social demands; and (4) ethical theories, based on ethical responsibilities of corporations to society. In practice, each CSR theory presents four dimensions related to profits, political performance, social demands and ethical values. The findings suggest the necessity to develop a new theory on the business and society relationship, which should integrate these four dimensions.

Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory

This article is intended to enhance the position of stakeholder theory as an integrating theme for the business and society field. It offers an instrumental theory of stakeholder management based on a synthesis of the stakeholder concept, economic theory, behavioral science, and ethics. The core theory—that a subset of ethical principles (trust, trustworthiness, and cooperativeness) can result in significant competitive advantage—is supplemented by nine research propositions along with some research and policy implications.

Instrumental stakeholder theory: a synthesis of ethics and economics

With which political and economic variables is change in international financial regulation robustly associated? I undertook multivariate regression analysis of this question using a quantitative measure of the regulation of international financial transactions. The measure was created by coding the laws of 64 nations. The associations between change in international financial regulation and measures of long-run economic growth, corporate taxation, government expenditures, and income inequality are estimated, using the models, methods, and data of Batro (1991), Deininger and Squire (1996a), Leamer (1983, 1985), and Levine and Renelt (1992). The findings point to a new agenda for research on international financial regulation.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400210952

The Correlates of Change in International Financial Regulation

We test whether capital account liberalization led to higher economic growth using de jure measures of capital account and financial current account openness for 94 nations, from 1950 (or independence) onward. We argue that measurement error, differing time periods used, and collinearity among independent variables account for conflicting results in prior scholarship. We use pooled time-series, cross-sectional OLS and system GMM estimators toexamineeconomicgrowthrates,1955‐2004.Capitalaccountliberalizationhadapositive association with growth in both developed and emerging market nations. We confirm that equity market liberalization has an independent effect on economic growth. (JEL F02, F43, P16) In this paper, we reexamine the effects of capital account liberalization on economic growth in the context of addressing the inconsistent and widely diverging results that have been reported in the scholarly literature over the last decade. (See the comprehensive review essays on the topic by Eichengreen, 2001 and Kose et al., 2006; henceforth KPRW.) We strive to untangle the reasons behind this inconsistency, and to situate our results in the broader literature on finance and growth. • We propose that conflicting prior results are associated in part with measurement error in capital account variables. We offer a new dataset that contains more precise de jure measures of capital account regulation for a wide sample of countries (94) for up to 50 years (1950 to 1999). The

Does Capital Account Liberalization Lead to Growth

Theory: We assess the determinants of the national regulation of international finance, or the comparative degree of national financial openness or closure. Hypotheses: Partisanship interacts with a nation's factor endowments to account in part for different international financial policies by governments of the same partisan hue. Methods: We offer a quantitative measure of international financial openness, or current and capital account regulation, for 21 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for 1950-88. We use regression analysis employing Panel Corrected Standard Errors to discover the determinants of financial openness. Results: Our main finding is that political partisanship substantially explains openness, but does so in complex ways. Differences in both political institutional arrangements and types of political economy also account for part of the differences in international financial regulation.

The Origins of Financial Openness: A Study of Current and Capital Account Liberalization

We develop a philosophical perspective on the moral obligations of managers, which we call agent morality, by examining the moral implications of agency theory. Our view is grounded in noninstrumental ethics, which we argue is logically superior to instrumental ethics. We show that the principal-agent model of the firm, once properly considered, requires that managers fashion business policies with reference first to certain moral duties and second to shareholder wealth.

An Agent Morality View of Business Policy

Researchers have available to them numerous indicators of financial openness and integration, many of which have yielded substantially differing results in past research, for example, on the relationship of financial openness or integration with economic growth. This article reviews the main indicators and finds that de jure vs. de facto indicators yield systematically different growth results. Among de jure indicators, sample differences account for much of the variation in growth results, with a weaker impact found in more recent data and among advanced economies. It also finds that many indicators capture different and useful facets of financial openness, such as intensive vs. extensive measures, and de facto vs. de jure. A small minority of indices suffer weaknesses that make them not useful for rigorous economic analysis, most notably the Investment Freedom Index by the Heritage Foundation.

Dennis P. Quinn

Papers

The Correlates of Change in International Financial Regulation

Does Capital Account Liberalization Lead to Growth

The Origins of Financial Openness: A Study of Current and Capital Account Liberalization

An Agent Morality View of Business Policy

Assessing Measures of Financial Openness and Integration