Showing papers on "Agency (sociology) published in 2005"

Corporate Governance, Economic Entrenchment, and Growth

Abstract: Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding, and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countries, a few such families end up controlling considerable proportions of their countries’ economies. Three points emerge. First, at the firm level, these ownership structures, because they vest dominant control rights with families who often have little real capital invested, permit a range of agency problems and hence resource misallocation. If a few families control large swaths of an economy, such corporate governance problems can attain macroeconomic importance—affecting rates of innovation, economywide resource allocation, and economic growth. If political influence depends on what one controls, rather than what one owns, the controlling owners of pyramids have greatly amplified political influence relative to their actual wealth. This influence can distort public policy regarding property rights protection, capital markets, and other institutions. We denote this phenomenon economic entrenchment, and posit a relationship between the distribution of corporate control and institutional development that generates and preserves economic entrenchment as one possible equilibrium. The literature suggests key determinants of economic entrenchment, but has many gaps where further work exploring the political economy importance of the distribution of corporate control is needed.

The Limits of Financial Globalization

Abstract: Despite the dramatic reduction in explicit barriers to international investment activity over the last 60 years, the impact of financial globalization has been surprisingly limited. I argue that country attributes are still critical to financial decision-making because of “twin agency problems” that arise because rulers of sovereign states and corporate insiders pursue their own interests at the expense of outside investors. When these twin agency problems are significant, diffuse ownership is inefficient and corporate insiders must co-invest with other investors, retaining substantial equity. The resulting ownership concentration limits economic growth, financial development, and the ability of a country to take advantage of financial globalization.

Do External Auditors Perform a Corporate Governance Role in Emerging Markets? Evidence from East Asia

Abstract: In emerging markets, the concentration of corporate ownership has created agency conflicts between controlling owners and minority shareholders. Conventional corporate control mechanisms such as boards of directors and takeovers are typically weak in containing the agency problem. This study examines whether external independent auditors could be employed as monitors and as bonding mechanisms to alleviate the agency conflict. Using a broad sample of firms from eight East Asian economies, we document that firms are more likely to employ Big Five auditors when they are more subject to the agency problem imbedded in their ultimate ownership structure. One possible reason that this documented relation between auditor choice and the agency problem is more evident than the inconsistent results using U.S. and U.K. data is that alternative governance mechanisms are limited in East Asia. In addition, among East Asian auditees subject to the agency problem, Big Five auditors charge a higher fee and set a lower audit modification threshold while non-Big Five auditors do not. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Big Five auditors in emerging markets do have a corporate governance role.

Identity and Agency in Emerging Adulthood: Two Developmental Routes in the Individualization Process.

Abstract: The study of emerging adulthood—the prolonged transition to adulthood extending into the 20s—is a rapidly growing area of research. Although identity issues are prominent during this period, the role of personal agency and individualization in the identity formation process during these years is not well understood. This study examines three psychological aspects of identity formation (style, status, and process) in relation to personal agency associated with the individualization process. Structural equation modeling analyses suggest that higher levels of agency are positively related to exploration and flexible commitment, unrelated to conformity, and negatively related to avoidance. Cluster analysis was used to examine and support a theorized polarity between developmental and default forms of individualization. Replicated across three U.S. ethnic groups, the results suggest that emerging adults utilize agentic capacities to varying degrees, and that the degree of agency utilized is directly related to...

Institutional Entrepreneurship, Partaking, and Convening

Abstract: This paper proposes that processes of institutional change vary depending on the form taken by the three factors that define them: agency, resource mobilization, and opportunity. The paper builds on a conceptualization of agency that considers that change may result from diverse forms of agency (i.e. strategic, routine, and sense-making). It develops the concept of resource mobilization, focusing on the process as opposed to the skills required for mobilization. It then suggests that the mobilization of resources, support and acceptance, accompanying the diffusion and legitimation of institutional changes may follow leverage, partaking, or convening processes. Finally, the paper defines institutional opportunity as an objective condition of organizational fields, suggesting that fields may be opportunity opaque, transparent, or hazy. Opportunities, of course, only become real when perceived by actors. Building on current sociological work, the paper suggests that actors’ perception of the opportunity tran...

Beyond agency conceptions of the work of the non-executive director: creating accountability in the boardroom

Abstract: This paper examines board effectiveness through an examination of the work and relationships of non-executive directors. It is based on 40 in-depth interviews with company directors, commissioned for the Higgs Review. The paper observes that research on corporate governance lacks understanding of the behavioural processes and effects of boards of directors. Whilst board structure, composition and independence condition board effectiveness it is the actual conduct of the non-executive vis-a` -vis the executive that determines board effectiveness. Data about behaviour and relationships on boards suggest that traditional theoretical divisions between agency and stewardship theory, and control versus collaboration models of the board do not adequately reflect the lived experience of non-executive directors and other directors on the board. Developing accountability as a central concept in the explanation of how boards operate effectively enables the paper to both challenge the dominant grip of agency theory on governance research and support the search for theoretical pluralism and greater understanding of board processes and dynamics. Practically, the work suggests that corporate governance reform will be undermined by prescription that supports distant perceptions of board effectiveness but not the actual effectiveness of boards.

The Samaritan's Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid

Abstract: INTRODUCTION 1. What's wrong with development aid? THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS 2. Laying the theoretical foundations for the study of development aid 3. Better development through better policy? Development aid's challenges at the collective-choice level 4. Sorting out the tangle: Incentives across action situations 5. A formal analysis of incentives in strategic interactions involving an international development cooperation agency 6. All aid is not the same: The incentives of different types of aid CASE STUDIES 7. Applying the IAD framework: The incentives inside a development agency 8. Incentives for contractors in aid-supported activities 9. Sida aid in electricity and natural resource projects in India 10. Sida aid in electricity and natural resource projects in Zambia CONCLUSION 11. What have we learned about aid?

The Persistence of Flexible Organizational Routines: The Role of Agency and Organizational Context

Abstract: Once regarded as stable and inflexible, organizational routines are increasingly seen as capable of being adapted to the situation at hand and a potentially important source of endogenous change in organizations. This paper considers why routines that are performed flexibly may nonetheless persist over time. Drawing on data from participant observation of a high-tech manufacturing company, I identify factors that contribute to both the flexibility and persistence of a routine. First, individuals and groups approach routines with different intentions and orientations, suggesting that agency shapes particular routine performances. Second, routine performances are embedded in an organizational context that, while it may not restrict the flexible use of a routine, may constrain its ongoing adaptation. Finally, accounting for the relative power of individuals sheds light on the interaction between agency and context in routine performance and explains why the actions of some individuals, but not others, can change routines. This paper draws on recent work that conceptualizes routines as ongoing accomplishments, and it extends it by identifying how actors and contexts shape both individual performances of routines and contribute to their persistence or change over time.

Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life

Abstract: Conceptualizing User Agency Technology in Everyday Life Researching the Internet at Home Becoming a Domestic Internet User Situating the Virtual Little Behaviour Genres of the Internet Making Room for the Internet Virtual Togetherness Conclusion

Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering : Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone

Abstract: Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering : Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone

The Impact of Microfinance on Decision‐Making Agency: Evidence from South India

Abstract: Evaluations of the effects of microfinance programmes on women's empowerment generate mixed results. While some are supportive of microfinance's ability to induce a process of economic, social and political empowerment, others are more sceptical and even point to a deterioration of women's overall well-being. Against this background, development scholars and practitioners have sought to distil some of the ingredients that might increase the likelihood of empowerment or at least reduce adverse effects. This article formally tests the impact of some of the suggested changes in programme features on one particular dimension of empowerment: decision-making agency. Using household survey data from South India, the author explores the importance of the borrower's gender and the lending technology for intra-household decision-making processes. It is shown that direct bank–borrower credit delivery does not challenge the existing decision-making patterns, regardless of whether men or women receive the credit. These findings change when credit is combined with financial and social group intermediation. Women's group membership seriously shifts overall decision-making patterns from norm-guided behaviour and male decision-making to more joint and female decision-making. Longer-term group membership and more intensive training and group meetings strengthen these patterns.

The Public Governance of Collaborative Spaces: Discourse, Design and Democracy

Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between democratic practices and the design of institutions operating in collaborative spaces, those policy and spatial domains where multiple public, private and non-profit actors join together to shape, make and implement public policy. Partnerships are organizational manifestations of institutional design for collaboration. They offer flexibility and stakeholder engagement, but are loosely coupled to representative democratic systems. A multi-method research strategy examines the impact of discourses of managerialism, consociationalism and participation on the design of partnerships in two UK localities. Analysing objective measures of democratic performance in partnerships and interpreting the discursive transition from earlier practices in representative democratic institutions we find that institutional designs for collaboration reflect different settlements between discourses, captured in the distinction between club, agency and polity-forming partnership types. The results show how the governance of collaborative spaces is mediated through a dominant set of discursively defined institutional practices.

The Paternalism of Partnership: A Postcolonial Reading of Identity in Development Aid

Abstract: The development industry has been criticised recently from very diverse quarters. This book is a nuanced and original investigation of Northern donor agency personnel as they deliver aid in Tanzania. The author explores in particular how donor identities are manifested in the practices of development aid, and how calls for equal partnership between North and South are often very different in practice. She demonstrates the conflicts and tensions in the development aid process. These reflect both the longstanding critique of the eurocentric nature of development, and discourse that still assumes images of the superior, initiating, efficient ‘donor‘ as opposed to the inadequate, passive, unreliable ‘partner‘ or recipient. This book will be useful to students seeking an introduction to postcolonial studies and the ways in which it can throw light on contemporary social realities, and to scholars interested in the ethnographic realities of aid delivery.

Stress, Social Support, and Workers' Intentions to Leave Their Jobs in Public Child Welfare

Abstract: The present study examined the relationships among stress, social support, and intention to leave in 418 public child welfare workers. Workers with higher levels of stress were more likely to think about leaving, while those receiving greater social support were less likely. Social support did not buffer the effects of organizational stress, but had some effect in buffering the effects of work-family conflict. Implications for agency administration and future research are discussed.

Interorganizational Coordination in Dynamic Context: Networks in Emergency Response Management 1

Abstract: for this study. Further, I thank public managers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, theU.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Health and Human Services, and managers of the nonprofitorganizations in New York City who gave their time and thoughtful observations to this research. CONNECTIONS 26(2): 9-10 http://www.insna.org/C onnections-Web/Volume26-2/2.Kapucu.pdf© 2005 INSNA

Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations

Abstract: Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil–Military Relations. By Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. 400p. 19.95 paper.Most scholars work within established paradigms. Few have the temerity to challenge them—and fewer still succeed in causing fundamental reconsideration. Peter Feaver has accomplished the latter task. He has taken on the dominant long-standing theoretical framework for American civil–military relations and, in the process, provided a more accurate view of them in the early twenty-first century.

Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice

Abstract: Jason Corburn’s Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice is an important addition to the literature on the science and politics of environmental health decision making. In clear prose, Corburn provides a “descriptive, analytic, and prescriptive understanding of local environmental-health knowledge” through what he calls “street science” (p. 217). Street science is a framework that joins local insights with professional scientific techniques, with concurrent goals: to improve scientific inquiry and environmental health policy and decision making. At the heart of Street Science are four case studies from Greenpoint/ Williamsburg, in New York City, where diverse racial and ethnic, low-income populations practice what Corburn calls “science on the streets of Brooklyn.” These studies were centered on complex environmental health issues: subsistence fishing risks, asthma, childhood lead poisoning, and small sources of air pollution. Some of the larger issues addressed through these particular studies include the limits of traditional risk assessment and the politics of mapping health and environment risk. Through these studies, Corburn provides a theoretical model for understanding key characteristics of what he calls “local knowledge,” its paradoxes, and contributions to environmental health policy. Street science, at its best, identifies hazards and highlights research questions that professionals may ignore, provides hard-to-gather exposure data, involves difficult-to-reach populations, and expands possibilities for interventions, resulting in “improved science and democracy.” One of the strengths of this book is that it succeeds where most studies of local knowledge fail, “scaling up” and providing generalizations about the nature of local knowledge, how it is acquired, the typical problems that occur when local and scientific knowledge conflict and why. Drawing from social science, particularly science and technology studies, Corburn explicitly calls for environmental and public health researchers, policy makers, and urban planners to become “reflective practitioners.” At the same time, he is careful to reject the idea that street science is a panacea. It does not devalue, but rather revalues science. He is not calling for a populism where the “community” replaces “experts,” but for a better understanding of how knowledge “co-produced” among local and professional constituencies can lead to better health, science, and politics. The greatest strength of the book is in the details about the particular interventions that street science made in these four examples. One of the stronger cases was in the story about subsistence fishing. Local residents added to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Toxics Modeling and Cumulative Exposure project by contributing local knowledge to the dietary exposure assessment. The U.S. EPA had no idea that local residents consumed contaminated fish from the East River, but as a result of community challenges to the U.S. EPA’s risk assessment models, the agency was able to conduct angler surveys and to more accurately represent the real-life exposures that local residents faced. Local knowledge was culturally sensitive, linked with the environmental justice movement, successfully used intermediaries, and was low-cost enough to be incorporated successfully into the U.S. EPA’s practices. Corburn does not claim that each example of street science is successful or equivalent with one another. But even these failures and limits are instructive. For policy makers and health researchers who face hostile communities, his accounts of conflictive public meetings in Greenpoint/ Williamsburg offer a good guide to “what goes wrong and why.” Agencies such as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences are increasingly recognizing community-based research and environmental justice concerns [exemplified, for example, by “Advancing Environmental Justice through Community-Based Participatory Research,” Environ Health Perspect 110(suppl 2)]. At the same time, more focus and funding is being channeled into investigating and eliminating health disparities. Corburn’s Street Science is an essential and critical investigation into the science and politics of local knowledge and environmental health justice at this crucial juncture.

The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness

Abstract: The New Masters of Capital: American Bond Rating Agencies and the Politics of Creditworthiness. By Timothy J. Sinclair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 208p. $29.95. In his book, Timothy J. Sinclair makes a strong theoretical and empirical contribution to the growing political economy literature on the increasing influence of nonstate actors. More specifically, he draws upon a cogent interweaving of rationalist and constructivist approaches to reveal the various forms of power exercised by American bond raters, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's. Moreover, by means of detailed case studies on the rating of corporations, municipalities, and national governments, he demonstrates the broad political implications of rating agency power in terms of both geopolitical and distributive questions. In both cases, Sinclair's central argument is that “rating agencies help to construct the context in which corporations, municipalities, and governments make decisions. Rating agencies are not, as often supposed, ‘neutral’ institutions. Their impact on policy is political first, in terms of the processes involved, and second, in terms of the consequences of competing social interests” (p. 149).

Cultural Diversity and Trust in IT Adoption: A Comparison of Potential e-Voters in the USA and South Africa

Abstract: To trust means to have expectations about others’ (the trustees’) socially acceptable behavior. One of the central effects of this trust in the context of IT adoption is to increase the perceived usefulness (PU) of Information Technology (IT) associated with the trustee’s agency. One way of increasing this trust is through greater sociocultural similarity. Taking previous research into the realm of electronic voting, this chapter posits that because trust is culture-dependent, it should decrease considerably as cultural diversity and differentiation increases. To investigate the role of trust in IT adoption in different cultures where dissimilar concepts of socially acceptable behavior exist, this study compares trust-related perceptions of an emerging IT (i.e., electronic voting) between the United States of America (USA) and the Republic of South Africa (RSA). More specifically, the question was addressed by comparing the unique circumstances of the cultural changes in the RSA with the more socially integrated mainstream USA culture. In both cultures, a perceived sociocultural similarity between the individual and the agency in charge of the electronic voting IT contributed to both the establishment of trust and to an increase in the perceived usefulness of the IT, supporting and extending the extrapolations of past propositions to this new realm. However, only in the USA did trust contribute to the PU of the IT. The results suggest that when cultural diversity is large, trust becomes of lesser importance, perhaps because it can no longer reduce social uncertainty. Implications for researchers and governmental voting agencies are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.

Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government

Abstract: This is a hopeful account of the potential for organizational change and improvement within government. Despite the mantra that "people resist change," it is possible to effect meaningful reform in a large bureaucracy. In Unleashing Change , public management expert Steven Kelman presents a blueprint for accomplishing such improvements, based on his experience orchestrating procurement reform in the 1990s. Kelman's focuses on making change happen on the front lines, not just getting it announced by senior policymakers. He argues that frequently there will be a constituency for change within government organizations. The role for leaders is not to force change on the unwilling but to unleash the willing, and to persist long enough for the change to become institutionalized. Drawing on the author's own personal experience and extensive research among frontline civil servants, as well as literature in organization theory and psychology, Unleashing Change presents an approach for improving agency performance from soup to nuts --mixing theory with practice. Its analysis is innovative and empirically rich. Kelman's conclusions challenge conventional notions about achieving reform in large organizations and mark a major advance in theories of organizational change. His lessons will be of interest not only to scholars interested in improving the performance of the public sector, but for anyone struggling to manage a large organization. "Steve Kelman's creative research, augmented by his own considerable experience as a reform-minded federal official, gives this book unusual depth and authenticity." --Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, author of Con fidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End

Agency: Promiscuous and Protean

Abstract: In this essay, I propose that agency (1) is communal and participatory, hence, both constituted and constrained by externals that are material and symbolic; (2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently protean, ambiguous, open to reversal. Those claims are illustrated and confounded through an analysis of the text, created by a white woman twelve years after the event, of the speech allegedly delivered by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 woman's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.