Journal ArticleDOI
Norms, culture, and world politics: insights from sociology's institutionalism
TLDR
In the field of international law, history, anthropology, and sociology, the role of norms of behavior, intersubjective understandings, culture, identity, and other social features of political life has been explored as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
International relations scholars have become increasingly interested in norms of behavior, intersubjective understandings, culture, identity, and other social features of political life. However, our investigations largely have been carried out in disciplinary isolation. We tend to treat our arguments that these things "matter" as discoveries and research into social phenomena as forays into uncharted territory. However, scholars within the fields of international law, history, anthropology, and sociology have always known that social realities influence behavior, and each field has incorporated these social constructions in different ways into research programs. Sociologists working in organization theory have developed a particularly powerful set of arguments about the roles of norms and culture in international life that pose direct challenges to realist and liberal theories in political science. Their arguments locate causal force in an expanding and deepening Western world culture that emphasizes Weberian rationality as the means to bothread more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
World society and the nation-state
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the nation-state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation-states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional
Journal ArticleDOI
The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders
James G. March,Johan P. Olsen +1 more
TL;DR: The authors argue that the tendency of students of international political order to emphasize efficient histories and consequential bases for action leads them to underestimate the significance of rule-and identity-based action and inefficient histories.
Journal ArticleDOI
“Let's Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics
TL;DR: The authors argue that actors have a third mode of social action at their disposal: arguing and deliberating about the validity claims inherent in any communicative statement about identities, interests, and the state of the world.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations
Michael Barnett,Martha Finnemore +1 more
TL;DR: The authors argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI
How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism
TL;DR: In this paper, a dynamic explanation of norm diffusion in world politics is proposed, which describes how local agents reconstruct foreign norms to ensure the norms fit with the agents' cognitive priors and identities.
References
More filters
Book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
TL;DR: For instance, in the case of an individual in the presence of others, it can be seen as a form of involuntary expressive behavior as discussed by the authors, where the individual will have to act so that he intentionally or unintentionally expresses himself, and the others will in turn have to be impressed in some way by him.
Journal ArticleDOI
Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
John W. Meyer,Brian Rowan +1 more
TL;DR: Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules as discussed by the authors, and the elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and i...
Posted Content
The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
Walter W. Powell,Paul DiMaggio +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory.
Book
The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
Walter W. Powell,Paul DiMaggio +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory.
Related Papers (5)
Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony
John W. Meyer,Brian Rowan +1 more
The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields
Paul DiMaggio,Walter W. Powell +1 more