Book ChapterDOI
International Institutions: Two Approaches
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In this article, it is pointed out that in situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16).Abstract:
Contemporary world politics is a matter of wealth and poverty, life and death. The members of this Association have chosen to study it because it is so important to lives and those of other people — not because it is either aesthetically attractive or amenable to successful theory-formulation and testing. Indeed, we would be foolish if we studied world politics in search of beauty or lasting truth. Beauty is absent because much that we observe is horrible, and many of the issues that we study involve dilemmas whose contemplation no sane person would find pleasing. Deterministic laws elude us, since we are studying the purposive behavior of relatively small numbers of actors engaged in strategic bargaining. In situations involving strategic bargaining, even formal theories, with highly restrictive assumptions, fail to specify which of many possible equilibrium outcomes will emerge (Kreps 1984:16). This suggests that no general theory of international politics may be feasible. It makes sense to seek to develop cumulative verifiable knowledge, but we must understand that we can aspire only to formulate conditional, context-specific generalizations rather than to discover universal laws, and that our understanding of world poltitics will always be incomplete.read more
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Posted Content
The global health system: Institutions in a time of transition.
William C. Clark,Nicole A. Szlezák,Suerie Moon,Barry R. Bloom,Gerald T. Keusch,Catherine M. Michaud,Dean T. Jamison,Julio Frenk,Wen L. Kilama +8 more
TL;DR: A series of four papers on one dimension of the global health transition: its changing institutional arrangements, which defines institutional arrangements broadly to include both the actors that exert influence in global health and the norms and expectations that govern the relationships among them.
Journal ArticleDOI
Intermestic Approach: A Methodological Alternative in Studying Policy Change
TL;DR: The intermestic approach is useful to analyse the policy change in the globalization era that occurs as if the world is “borderless" and the role of states becomes ambiguous because the globalization process has redefined the sovereignty rights and political power of the nation state.
Dissertation
The Water War Debate: Swimming Upstream or Downstream in the Okavango and the Nile?
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparative analysis of the works of Turton and Swatuk/Vale, as applied to the case study of the Okavango River basin and a tentative assessment of the Nile River basin is presented.
Journal ArticleDOI
Translating Europe's security culture
André Barrinha,Marco Rosa +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the so-called ideational construction of a multi-level European security apparatus, in which both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) play significant roles as the two main security organizations in Europe.
The institutionalization of benchmarking in the Danish construction industry
Abstract: ...................................................................................................................................................... 3 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATIONS FOR THE THESIS ................................................................................................... 6 1.2 OBJECTIVES .................................................................................................................................................... 10 1.3 EXCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................................................... 11 1.4 UNFOLDING OF THE TITLE AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................................................. 11 2 THEORY ................................................................................................................................................ 14 2.1 INSTITUTIONAL THEORY .................................................................................................................................... 15 2.2 INSTITUTIONALIZATION ..................................................................................................................................... 16 2.3 INSTITUTIONALISM – RATIONALISM, ISOMORPHISM, AND ROLE OF ACTORS.................................................................. 17 2.4 ORGANIZATIONAL FIELDS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE ........................................................................................... 21 2.5 INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS – COPING WITH INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE ............................................................................... 23 2.6 ACTORS BECOMING SUBJECTS IN INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE ........................................................................................ 27 2.6.1 The social construction of actors and institutional entrepreneurship ............................................... 28 2.6.2 The paradox of embedded agency .................................................................................................... 29 2.6.3 Institutional contradictions as impetus that drives, enables, and constrains institutional change .. 30 2.6.4 Institutional entrepreneurship .......................................................................................................... 32 2.6.5 Practice, mutual negotiation, and power ......................................................................................... 33 3 METHODOLOGY .................................................................................................................................... 35 3.1 RESEARCH STRATEGY FOR STUDYING INSTITUTIONALIZATION .................................................................................... 36 3.1.1 The three pillars of institutions – a model for understanding the prerequisites for institutions ....... 39 3.1.2 Institutional contradictions as an analytical approach to understanding political struggles ........... 41 3.1.3 Framings – actors’ social construction of new structures ................................................................. 42 3.1.4 Methodological considerations ......................................................................................................... 44 3.2 DATA COLLECTION METHODS ............................................................................................................................. 45 3.2.1 Case Studies ...................................................................................................................................... 46 3.2.2 Texts .................................................................................................................................................. 48 3.2.3 Interviews .......................................................................................................................................... 50 3.3 ANALYTICAL STRUCTURE ................................................................................................................................... 53 4 ANALYSIS .............................................................................................................................................. 55
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness
TL;DR: In this article, the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society, is examined, and it is argued that reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the "oversocialized" way criticized by Dennis Wrong.
Book
The Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: In this paper, a model based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game was developed for cooperation in organisms, and the results of a computer tournament showed how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
TL;DR: The Economic Institutions of Capitalism as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the field of economic institutions of capitalism. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 528-530.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Evolution of Cooperation
R. B. Greene,Robert Axelrod +1 more
TL;DR: A model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game to show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.