The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

Science in action

Based on Whitley's “national business systems” (NBS) institutional framework, we theorize about and empirically investigate the impact of nation-level institutions on firms’ corporate social performance (CSP). Using a sample of firms from 42 countries spanning seven years, we construct an annual composite CSP index for each firm, based on social and environmental metrics. We find that the political system, followed by the labor and education system, and the cultural system are the most important NBS categories of institutions that impact CSP. Interestingly, the financial system appears to have a relatively less significant impact. We discuss implications for research, practice and policymaking.

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What drives corporate social performance? The role of nation-level institutions

This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.

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Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation

Offers a comprehensive critique of the spread of auditing in both the public and private sectors and shows how to achieve a better balance between audits and other forms of accountability. Michael Power is Professor of Accounting at the LSE. ‘A rare attempt to stand back and question the very notion of auditing and the place it has assumed in our society.’ Financial Times

The Audit Explosion

Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity—the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured—offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequences, both intended and unintended, of public measures. The article first identifies two mechanisms, self‐fulfilling prophecy and commensuration, that induce reactivity and then distinguishes patterns of effects produced by reactivity. This approach demonstrates how these increasingly fateful public measures change expectations and permeate institutions, suggesting why it is important for scholars to investigate the impact of these measures more systematically.

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J. Michael Sauder

Papers

Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds