Frans van Waarden

TL;DR: In recent decades, a number of changes in the forms and mechanisms of governance by which institutional and orga- nizational societal sectors and spheres are governed, as well as in the location of governance from where command, administration, management and control of societal institutions and spheres were conducted as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a refined and systematic concept of state business relations based on the "policy network" idea, where the major dimensions of policy networks are presented as (1) number and type of actors, (2) function of networks, (3) structure, institutionalization, (5) rules of conduct, (6) power relations, (7) actor strategies.

Abstract: How much did national competition policies converge between 1950 and 2000, and what were the forces behind this? These are the questions the paper attempts to answer, for three countries whose competition policies differed substantially at the outset: Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. The paper measures the degree of convergence of national competition policies, and concludes that there has been convergence towards the stricter EU anti-trust norms. This can be explained by neither negative ('the market') nor positive ('the state') integration, as competition policy is one of the few policy areas where the EU has never explicitly tried to harmonize national legislation. Other forces must have been at work. We investigate the role of various actors, which each play a role in three theories of European integration: institutionalism, which stresses the importance of the central European institutions; neofunctionalism, which focuses on international business; and the epistemic community approach, which hig...

TL;DR: In this paper, the influence of an ideal-typical institution, law and regulations, on innovation, both directly and indirectly, through its influence on the organizational structure of firms that may engage in innovation is investigated.