Showing papers on "Embeddedness published in 1994"

Globalization, institutions, and regional development in Europe

Abstract: Preface and Introduction Living in the Global The Local Embeddedness of Transnational Corporations Global Agro-Food Complexes and the Refashioning of Rural Europe The Uneven Landscapes of Innovation Poles: Local Embeddedness and Global Networks Growth Regions Under Duress: Renewal Strategies in Baden Wurttemberg and Emilia-Romagna Flexible Districts, Flexible Regions? The Institutional and Cultural Limits to Districts in an Era of Technological Paradigm Shifts Regulating Labour: The Social Regulation and Reproduciton of Local Labour Markets The Disembedded Regional Economy: The Transformation of East German Industrial Complexes into Western Enclaves Institutional Change, Cultural Transformation, and Economic Regeneration: Myths and Realities from Europe's Old Industrial Areas Local and Regional Broadcasting in the New Media Order Global-Local Social Conflicts: Examples from Southern Europe Holding Down the Global

Games Real Actors Could Play: Positive and Negative Coordination in Embedded Negotiations

Abstract: There is more coordination in the modern world than is plausibly explained by the classical mechanisms of community, market, hierarchy and their commonly discussed variants. This paper explores mod...

Behind the market stage where real societies exist ‐ part I: The role of public and private order institutions

Abstract: This two‐part article is an attempt to clarify the social conditions upon which the viability and efficiency of the market system rest. It strives to show that the ‘embeddedness’ thesis, that is, an explanation based upon the existence of long‐run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors, cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies. As explained in Part I, there are difficulties of both theoretical and empirical/historical kinds and these explain why the ‘market order’ needs to be sustained by private and public order institutions. In Part II, the role of generalised morality in backing or supplementing such institutions is discussed in the light of game theory, and particular emphasis is put on the ability of moral norms to sustain honest behaviour by generating the right kind of preferences and establishing trust. The vexed problem of the dynamics of norm emergence and erosion is then addressed with a view to showing ...

Behind the market stage where real societies exist ‐ part II: The role of moral norms

Abstract: This two‐part article is an attempt to clarify the social conditions upon which the viability and efficiency of the market system rest. It strives to show that the ‘embeddedness’ thesis, that is, an explanation based upon the existence of long‐run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors, cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies. As explained in Part I, there are difficulties of both theoretical and empirical/historical kinds and these explain why the ‘market order’ needs to be sustained by private and public order institutions. In Part 11, the role of generalised morality in backing or supplementing such institutions is discussed in the light of game theory, and particular emphasis is put on the ability of moral norms to sustain honest behaviour by generating the right kind of preferences and establishing trust. The vexed problem of the dynamics of norm emergence and erosion is then addressed with a view to showing ...

Captured by the Discourse? Issues and concerns in researching ‘parental choice‘

Abstract: In this paper we look at the relationship between political, cultural and economic change, the ‘position’ of parental choice in the various policy texts (in particular, it's centrality to The Parent's Charter) and what we have termed the context of practice (Bowe et al., 1992). In particular, we raise some issues and concerns that arise from research to date, in terms of their methodologies, their analysis and their representations of choice. It is the failure, in all these respects, to consider the complexity and inter‐relatedness of choice‐making and political and economic change that gives rise to our concerns. We tentatively suggest a heuristic device, the metaphor of landscapes of choice, that we think might help us to explore the relationships between the various policy contexts, whilst recognising the embeddedness of the research process in precisely these contexts.

Chinese People's Congresses and Legislative Embeddedness Understanding Early Organizational Development

Abstract: Evidence from medieval Europe and modern China suggests that cooperation with strong executives plays a larger role in early legislative development than is generally acknowledged: that under conditions of absolutism (or near-absolutism), acceptance and exploitation of subordination may be a means to organizational development. In this article, the author relies primarily on interview data and Chinese field research to show that early legislative development can occur without significantly increasing conflict with established authorities and without winning autonomy. The author further argues that legislative embeddedness, as measured by clarified and expanded jurisdiction and increased capacity, is a product less of conflict than of executive support and attention, and that support and attention in the early stages of organizational development can be understood in terms of a legislature's presence, its reliability and usefulness, and the political standing of its leaders. The article's conclusion offers...

Multinational enterprises, political economy and institutional theory: domestic embeddedness in the context of internationalization

Abstract: There is rising interest in placing the study of the multinational enterprise (MNE) at the core of political economy scholarship. This article attempts to locate the MNE in its outer institutional environments. MNEs are embedded in networks of relations with a number of important external actors, not only governments. These networks manifest marked differences between nations and regions, with differential implications for production and managerial arrangements within the firm, public policy choices and the constellation of MNE‐government relationships. In the distribution of wealth and power, MNEs are situated at the interface of domestic structures in national and regional political economies, and the process of internationalization within global political economic structures. A research agenda for the 1990s should, therefore, incorporate a political economy of the MNE in structures of global competition and cooperation that have institutional underpinnings. This study seeks to address elements...

Economic Internationalization: The New Migration in Japan and the United States

Abstract: The general proposition argued in this article is that international migrations are embedded in larger social, economic, and political processes. Although individuals experience migration as the outcome of their personal decisions, the option to migrate is itself socially produced. Because immigration flows tend to share many characteristics, this embeddedness is easily lost in immigration analysis or made so general as to lose explanatory power. An example is the notion that poverty as such is a migration push factor; yet many countries with great poverty lack a significant emigration history. It takes a number of other conditions to activate poverty into a push factor. This article explores whether the concrete processes though which economic internationalization binds major immigration-receiving countries to their emigration-sending countries are one form of this embeddedness. Elsewhere I have developed such an analysis for the case of the U.S. (Sassen, 1988) and in more theoretical terms (1993). New illegal immigration into Japan raises questions concerning the impact of the internationalization of the Japanese economy on the formation of this flow. Japan has never had immigration, although it has a history, even if at times brief, of forced labor recruitment, colonization, and emigration. It lacks a belief in the positive contributions of immigration. The concept immigration did not exist in its law on the entry and exit of aliens. Yet, since the mid-1980s there has been an increasing illegal immigration from Bangladesh, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and, most recently, Malaysia and Iran. Japan is now a major foreign aid donor, investor, and exporter of a wide range of consumer goods in the countries whence originate most of its new immigrants, except Iran. This may have created objective and subjective bridges between these countries and Japan, thus contributing to a reduction in the sociological distance by familiarizing people with Japan. The U.S. has played a similar role in the regions and countries where most of its immigrants originate. The first section of this article addresses the impact of economic internationalization on the formation of new immigration flows into the U.S. during the last 25 years. The second section examines both the magnitude and forms of Japan's recent economic presence in the South and Southeast Asia. The third and fourth sections briefly review questions of policy in the U.S. and Japan during the last few years. The policy issue is now of great concern in Japan. Following an intense two-year debate, a new law was passed and became effective in June 1990, but it proved inadequate and is already under review. This is reminiscent of events in the U.S,: no sooner had the long-debated 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act been passed than it came under attack and in 1990 a new Immigrant Act was signed. The fifth section conveys evidence of illegal immigration to Japan. The sixth section discusses conditions in receiving countries that make possible the adaptation of immigrants with a view to understanding how illegal immigrants in Japan could become part of the Japanese economy, involving Japanese employers who are deeply steeped in an anti-immigration culture. Economic Internationalization and Immigration Migrations do not just happen; they are produced. Moreover, migrations do not involve just any possible combination of countries; they are patterned. Furthermore, immigrant employment is patterned as well; immigrants rarely have the same occupational and industrial distribution as citizens in receiving countries. Finally, while it may seem that migrations are ever present, distinct phases and patterns are clearly discernible during the last two centuries. Mass migrations during the 1800s made an integral contribution to the formation of a trans-Atlantic economic system. Before this period, labor movements across the Atlantic had been largely forced (notably slavery) and mostly from colonized African and Asian territories. …

`These emotions of the body': Intercorporeal narrative in To the Lighthouse

Abstract: Kristeva, Julia. "Women's Time." Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology. Hannerl O. Keohane et al., eds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Langan, Thomas. Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason. New Haven: Yale UP, 1966. Meisel, Perry. The Myth of the Modern. New Haven, Yale UP, 1987. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonse Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. -----. "The Child's Relation with Others." The Primacy of Perception. James Edie, ed. Evanston, Northwestern UP, 1964. As Lily Briscoe gazes at the drawing-room steps in the third section of To the Lighthouse, she thinks they look "extraordinarily empty." She asks, "How could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there?" (265). We more clearly understand Lily's questions when we recall that "that emptiness" is the space once filled by a mother's body, by Mrs. Ramsay. This once female-occupied space may well be understood as the "absent center" that feminist deconstructive critics locate at the core of language. For Mrs. Ramsay's marriage is a relationship in which "he could say things; she never could," and in this sense Mrs. Ramsay represents an absent or unspeaking presence in the text. Moreover, for Lily, Mrs. Ramsay's absence constitutes the problem at the center of her attempts to express, to paint. Woolf herein anticipates both the general deconstructive skepticism about language as a vehicle of "reality" and the more specific feminist arguments for such skepticism -- that a silencing objectification of women rather than a scientific objectivity about "reality" generates the terms of language. But Woolf's project also moves us beyond these critical insights. I will argue that, beneath her explorations of both of these layers of philosophical doubt, Woolf reveals that the "emotions of the body" which Lily feels in response to that "emptiness there" are precisely the means whereby the text can turn inside out the unnamed, body-transcending core of traditional Western philosophy and narrative. While Woolf's characters vacillate between vertigo and exhilaration as they stand on the edge of "that emptiness there," Woolf's narrator moves into and within that emptiness, both discovering already within it a phenomenological fullness and further filling it herself. Specifically, in To the Lighthouse the narrator stations herself within the objects which situate the mother's and the other characters' presence in the world; she can therein reincarnate and even extend the mother's phenomenality insofar as it is carried silently within those objects; but in doing so she not only breaks the mother's silence, evincing the "emotions of the body," but also revises the patriarchal coding of bodily emotions, in which the traditional mother is complicit. By extending the mother's embeddedness in things, in other words, the narrator transgresses the patriarchal and traditional motherly frame for that embeddedness and creates a site of uncoded embodiment. More broadly, by literalizing and spatializing "that emptiness there," by casting it as a dimension of physical and emotional existence rather than as an ineluctable metaphysical condition, Woolf corporealizes the spaces rendered empty by patriarchal culture and thought. She constitutes narrative not according to what Edward Said once characterized as its "celibate enterprise" of forming "individuals" who mark their own "beginnings," but as an entrance into what Helene Cixous calls the "in-between" of self and self created by the physical world (254). Woolf attends, as her narrator says, to "all sorts of waifs and strays of things. . . . A washer-woman with her basket; a rock; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers" to get at what Lily Briscoe calls "the common feeling that held the whole" (286). But neither Woolf's nor Lily's "common feeling" is a naive humanist "fantasy of totality" of the kind that Julia Kristeva warns feminists against (49). …

Women and the environment

Abstract: The topic “women and the environment” encompasses far more than the transactions of a particular user group with the physical world of homes, neighborhoods, communities, and regions. It also addresses fundamental questions about the nature of our society, the nature of our environments, the nature of our professions, and the way we study, educate, do research, design, and plan. The present chapter first describes the general history of research, design, and policy with respect to women and the physical environment. We then discuss how the topic may be profitably addressed in terms of several themes: (1) the contextual nature of women’s lives, their embeddedness in a variety of social and cultural relationships, and the interpenetration of women’s activities with many physical settings; (2) the varied and changing nature of the traditional public/private distinction for women, and historical traditions and restrictions deriving from this distinction; (3) needs and exemplars of social change in respect to women’s environments, with emphasis on sociophysical units of change (e. g., homes, neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, etc.), the domains of needed environmental change (e. g., household activities, services, work, etc.), and the process of change (e. g., social action, policy and politics, and women’s participation in environmental decision-making processes).

The Institutional Embeddedness of International Business Strategy: Implications for U.S. Firms

Abstract: U.S. managers and business academics alike have been slow to recognize some of the fundamental differences between domestic and international industrial competition. This article examines one particularly salient difference, the role of national institutional systems in shaping economic action across national markets. The article initially reviews four relevant bodies of literature on competitive strategy and international competition and finds that, despite progress in this direction, none of them adequately account for the institutional embeddedness of corporate strategy. The nature of national institutional systems and their impact on international business strategies are then theoretically described. Finally, some fundamental strategic implications of the institutional embeddedness approach are explored for U.S. firms.

Towards a Personal Knowledge of Economic History: Reflections on Our Intellectual Heritage from the Polanyi Brothers

Abstract: I Introduction DURING THE 1950S AND 1960S the "new" economic history emerged to dominate historical scholarship in the United States. According to Douglass C. North, this new economic history consists of the use of quantitative analysis to test and to verify hypotheses concerning economic growth and economic welfare. The hypotheses are always drawn from economic theory; the verification always involves the use of statistical tests (North, 1966, 1-14). While the testing and verification of hypotheses may be useful in specific research situations, it is our opinion that this usefulness is extremely limited and that, therefore, the statistical testing of theoretical hypotheses lacks general applicability in historical scholarship. The "old" economic history seeks to achieve a broader purpose: to compile a broadly humanistic and insightfully interpretative record of past human experience in order to increase our understanding of the present and to secure greater control over the future course of human development for the purpose of enhancing human welfare. In short, the old economic history uses the past in the present for the purposes of the future, in order that humankind can achieve a better quality of life in the future than that which existed in the past. These more general, and therefore more important purposes, can be achieved only through the application of the old economic history to the course of human experience. Karl Polanyi, the older of the brilliantly insightful Polanyi brothers, has written one of the best of the old economic histories. In his classic book, The Great Transformation (1944), he traces the rise and fall of the politicoeconomic system which was based on the dogmatic belief in the infallibility of the self-regulating market. He elucidated the dangerously urgent problems which grew out of this system, and he explained how the efforts to solve these problems ultimately undermined the absolute acceptance of the self-regulating market. Michael Polanyi, the younger brother, was a distinguished scientist who became an even more distinguished philosopher. He formulated his broadly phenomenological and intensely anti-rationalistic post-critical philosophy of personal knowledge, which he offered as an alternative to secular rationalism, logical positivism, cultural relativism, and philosophical nihilism. Then, Michael Polanyi extended his system of thought to include a post-critical philosophy of history and historiography. His purpose in doing so was to justify and to authenticate the historical scholarship of his older brother, Karl Polanyi. Although The Great Transformation (1944) was published more than a decade before Michael Polanyi's major philosophical works, this chronology will be reversed in order to facilitate an easy and clear exposition of this subject matter. First, Michael Polanyi's post-critical philosophy will be offered as a model historiography for the writing of economic history; then, Karl Polanyi's masterpiece will be proposed as an excellent example of an economic history which conforms to this model. II The Post-Critical Philosophy and Historiography of Michael Polanyi MICHAEL POLANYI, the younger of the two brothers, was first a physician and a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, then a distinguished physical chemist of international repute, and finally an even more distinguished philosopher who may be remembered as the greatest epistemologist of the twentieth century (M. Polanyi, 1966b, 91). His obsessive concern for freedom of thought led him to develop his post-critical philosophy of personal knowledge (M. Polanyi, 1946, 7-19). This philosophy was broadly phenomenological in the sense that he believed that no person could acquire a real knowledge of acquaintance of anything without experiencing that thing in a uniquely personal manner (M. Polanyi, 1966a; Farber, 1966, 11). Polanyi was intensely antirationalistic because he believed that secular rationalism had undermined the moral values, which are fundamental to Western Civilization (M. …

The embeddedness of service “products” in value systems

Abstract: The definition and measurement of productivity is a controversial issue in many service activities. In this article, it is argued that the core of the difficulty lies in the embeddedness of the “product”—considered as as social construction—in different value systems. The case of insurance is specifically treated. Moreover, the greater-than-average uncertainty encountered in service provision and the frequent irreversibility of the transaction help to explain the fuzziness of the product concept.

Why dissatisfied members stay and satisfied members leave: options available and embeddedness mitigating the performance commitment relationship in strategic alliances.

Abstract: Study investigated and found support for the joint influence of strategic alliance performance and dimensions of the context, dependence and embeddedness, on member commitment. Results also indicat...

The nature and transformation of communal socialism: a case study of Kibbutz industry

Abstract: The thesis analyses the specificity of kibbutz work organisation. Although also engaging secondary data, utilising a qualitative methodology, empirical data is drawn from a case study kibbutz and its industrial plant. By reference to labour process and neo-institutionalist analyses, this data suggests that the organisation and development of kibbutz industry as a deliberate social construct cannot be adequately understood from the embeddedness of that industry within the kibbutz process, the (pm-) national polity of Israel and the market economy. Further, that embeddedness creates tensions within the management process of kibbutz industry, involving the inability of managers to formally organise and control the labour process, whilst yet expected to make that labour process commensurate with market exigencies. Moreover, the logic of accumulation exerts a transformatory dynamic upon that labour process. Representing the main economic activity of the kibbutz, the industrial labour process is the most immediate and important point of articulation between kibbutz and market economy, such that those delegated the management of kibbutz industrial enterprise on behalf of the kibbutz community must manage those tensions and thereby negotiate the relationship between kibbutz and market economy. The thesis demonstrates that these managers, attempting to negotiate the tensions arising from that embeddedness and articulation initiate transformatory processes within the network of social relations and economic culture of the kibbutz as it shapes the industrial labour process in order to affect market commensurability.

The treatment of family issues in united states history textbooks: General thoughts and a review of several examples

Abstract: Beginning to formulate questions for this review, I found my identification quickly shifting to the other side of the transaction, imagining myself a textbook author (which I am not). Is the challenge implicit in this review a fair one? How can we fairly demand that yet another issue, another theme, another aspect of history be "covered"? After several decades of teaching, I think of coverage as a goal often in tension with that of drawing students into what makes history engaging. Moreover, in teaching family history to undergraduates, I often find it difficult to get students to think about families in a contextualized, grounded manner if they do not know any "standard" history. Lacking that grounding, they tend to conceive of families as floating, disconnected institutions and behaviors. These doubts show the need for caution and self-consciousness about what we ask of survey textbooks. If we ask them to cover more, we may lose depth and readability. Still, there are losses in offering students no sense of the historical embeddedness of family life. Some of what we want from introductory history courses is the education of citizens. This purpose argues strongly for inclusion of material about the family because so many contemporary public controversies concern familythose about abortion, gay rights, single motherhood, and the "underclass," for example. The public discourse about these issues could be much enlightened, the whole level of the debate raised, if there were more historical knowledge and fewer assumptions about a golden age in which families were homogeneous and harmonious. We also want introductory courses to invite college students to become majors in history, to show them what is attractive about the study of history. The attractions surely include the considerable widening of the subject matter of history that has taken place in the last decades, to include the "personal," the demographic, the cultural. Family issues provide excellent stories for introducing students to a variety of historical approaches and fields.