Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

We examine some issues in the estimation of time-series cross-section models, calling into question the conclusions of many published studies, particularly in the field of comparative political economy. We show that the generalized least squares approach of Parks produces standard errors that lead to extreme overconfidence, often underestimating variability by 50% or more. We also provide an alternative estimator of the standard errors that is correct when the error structures show complications found in this type of model. Monte Carlo analysis shows that these “panel-corrected standard errors” perform well. The utility of our approach is demonstrated via a reanalysis of one “social democratic corporatist” model.

/pdf/what-to-do-and-not-to-do-with-time-series-cross-section-data-3xne92hvli.pdf

What to do (and not to do) with time-series cross-section data

This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/marcus-1995-ethnography-in-of-the-world-system_the-emergence-of-multi-sited-ethnography.pdf

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ihistoricali and the irational choicei variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choiceis emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalismis emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on icritical juncturesi and on ipolicy feedbacks,i the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alternative to equilibrium and other approaches that separate the analysis of institutional stability from that of institutional change.

/pdf/historical-institutionalism-in-comparative-politics-3vixp29gwt.pdf

Historical institutionalism in comparative politics

Bringing Society Back In : Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions

Existing theories of the nature of the state in Western capitalist democracies have been mostly propounded from one of three major theoretical perspectives, each emphasising a particular aspect of the state: the 'pluralist', which emphasises its democratic aspect: the 'managerial', which emphasises its bureaucratic elements: and the 'class', which focuses on its capitalistic aspect. Each of these theoretical perspectives has contributed something to our understanding of the state, but each also has its limitations. In this book, Alford and Friedland evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each perspective and present a new, synthetic framework for a more comprehensive theory of the state. Impartially reviewing the major historical and empirical works within each theoretical tradition, they reveal how empirical study has been shaped by theoretical assumptions. They agree that each perspective has a distinctive 'power' to understand part of the reality of the modern state, although it is powerless to explain other parts. In each case, the part that can be explained is the perspective's 'home domain', or the aspect of the state that it emphasises, while other aspects are either rejected or reinterpreted. The authors argue that the state cannot be adequately understood unless full account is taken of each of these home domains, and they suggest how the contributions of each perspective to the explanation of its own domain can be integrated into a new, and more powerful, theory.

Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy

The article studies the causes of local and nonlocal interlocking directorates among the largest US industrial corporations in 1964 The authors hypothesize that interlocks are spatial phenomena‐ with spatial attributes and spatial determinants Consistent with this hypothesis, they find that local and nonlocal interlocks have different correlates Further, three spatial structures influence interlocking: the location of a corporation's headquarters vis‐a`‐vis other corporate headquarters and upper‐class clubs, the territorial distribution of a firm's production facilities, and the spatial configuration of a corporation's ownership relations This suggests that previous interlock research, which ignores spatial considerations, has been seriously misspecified

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231292

Lost in space : The geography of corporate interlocking directorates

We use the interorganizational and intraclass perspectives to examine how hypothesized causes and consequences of interlocking influence one stage in the process by which the interlock network connecting large U.S. corporations is reproduced over time-the reconstitution of disrupted ties. The results of our analysis suggest: 1) that only two of the organizational and class interests associated with interlocking in previous cross-sectional studies operate in the reconstitution stage -the level of interindustry resource constraint between nonfinancial and financial firms and the membership of firms' directors in the same local capitalist class segment, 2) that the interorganizational linkages and intraclass bonds in which ties may become embedded and which they may facilitate are also important determinants of this stage, and 3) that the interorganizational and intraclass perspectives provide valid and interrelated explanations of interlocking, and thus should be integrated in future studies.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095367.pdf

The Ties That Bind: Organizational and Class Bases of Stability in a Corporate Interlock Network

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics has become a religious obligation. For a new breed of religious nationalist the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. This essay seeks to accomplish four things. The first is to argue for an institutional approach to religious nationalism in order both to interpret and explain it. Second, I argue that religion and nationalism partake of a common symbolic order and that religious nationalism is therefore not an oxymoron. Third, the essay seeks to explain why religion has become such a potent political force in our time. And fourth--the task that will take up the bulk of the text--it seeks a principle of intelligibility in the semiotic order of religious nationalism that can comprehend its preoccupation with both women's erotic bodies and monies out of national control. Language: en

Roger Friedland

Papers

Bringing Society Back In : Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions

Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy

Lost in space : The geography of corporate interlocking directorates

The Ties That Bind: Organizational and Class Bases of Stability in a Corporate Interlock Network

Money, sex, and god: the erotic logic of religious nationalism