Bureaucratic Coordination Research Articles

Network governance dynamics impact on intellectual property management: the case of a franchise system

Network governance has been mostly viewed by researchers as a static structure, whereas its dynamics remained relatively less understood. These study findings suggest that a purposeful combination of social and bureaucratic coordination mechanisms within network governance impact intellectual property creation and exploitation. Strategic objectives of a bank have been achieved throughout a network formation. Shifts from bureaucracy to socially driven governance had ambiguous impact on intellectual property management.

Essay on clan capitalism in Russia

This paper is a description of the socio-economic system which emerged in Russia as a result of the transformation to a capitalist economy. The main actors in this system are the so-called ‘clans’ including business people affiliated with state officials and sometimes with criminal groups. In the analysis of the context of the Russian transformation a detailed study deals with the internal structure of a clan, focusing on its five main constituents (leader or ‘chieftain’, ‘core’, skilled professionals, ordinary members, agents of influence). Within clan capitalism, mechanisms of clan coordination dominate, while market mechanism and bureaucratic coordination are relatively weaker. The main features of this system are a clan-state, providing the convertibility of resources that maintain favourable conditions for clan activities; post-Soviet monopolism that is basically of a non-market character; distortion of the aims of enterprise; institutionalisation of the shadow economy; and unprotected property rights. Now clan capitalism has turned to the stage of oligarch capitalism with Putin’s clan as the core of new Russian oligarchy.

Performance implications of organisational structure and knowledge sharing in multinational R&D networks

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are uniquely equipped to acquire knowledge from external sources because they can access pockets of innovation located throughout the world. MNEs can source knowledge externally through foreign direct investment in R&D, a strategy that has become prevalent during the past two decades. Unfortunately, little is known about the performance implications of external knowledge sourcing through R&D internationalisation, nor have researchers determined how organisational structure and intrafirm knowledge-sharing routines affect innovative performance in multinationals that set up R&D sites abroad. This study examines the effect of organisational structure and knowledge sharing on innovative performance in the overseas R&D units of North American, European and Japanese multinationals. An analysis of data from a survey of overseas R&D site directors in 17 countries suggests that innovative performance is enhanced by the lateral and hierarchical exchange of knowledge but suppressed by bureaucratic coordination and control mechanisms.

Reform, Reorganization, and the Renaissance of the Managerial Presidency: The Impact of 9/11 on the Executive Establishment

In the wake of 9/11, realigning the human and financial resources of the executive branch to fight the war on terrorism quickly became the defining mission of George W. Bush’s transformed presidency. This article assesses the ways in which 9/11 impacted on the executive branch of the U.S. government, using a framework of “punctuated equilibrium” to posit that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington added considerable force to trends already in motion. September 11 proved a catalyst for significant institutional changes, such as the enhanced role of the vice president in policy making and the reorganization of the federal government and intelligence apparatus. Organizational reforms, driven in a top‐down fashion by the White House, reflect President Bush’s confidence in the managerial presidency: the notion that preventing future terror threats is effectively a problem of executive control, bureaucratic coordination, and adequate funding.

Assumptions Commonly Underlying Government Quality Assessment Practices

Abstract The current interest in governmental assessment and accountability practices appears to result from: (1) an emerging view of higher education as an “industry” (2) concerns about efficient resource allocation; (3) a lack of trust and confidence between governmental and institutional officials; (4) a desire to reduce uncertainty in government/higher education relationships; (5) lack of confidence in institutional governance. Based on these concerns, governments increasingly are engaging in data‐based quality assessment processes. These processes appear to assume that: (1) faculty and administrators know how to improve quality but fail to do so; (2) government officials can assure the public interest in quality; (3) measures of quality can be identified and agreed upon; (4) improving quality requires strong bureaucratic coordination and control; (5) information systems can provide the evidence government officials need to address quality concerns. An examination of literature on organisation decisio...

Institutional reform and government coordination in Brazil’s social protection policy

This study, now being published posthumously, examines Brazil’s recent experience in formulating and implementing government social policies and assesses the prospects for establishing a “social authority” for centralizing and coordinating such policies. It describes the complex pattern of exclusion and vulnerability against which social reforms must be instituted in Brazil. It then goes on to review the social development strategy adopted as part of the Plano Real in 1994, which seeks to restructure the financing, outlays and benefits of the social protection system in order to increase its effectiveness, coverage and redistributive impact. Finally, it analyses the coordination of federal social policies, especially at the macropolitical and intergovernmental level, drawing special attention to the creation of sectoral chambers and policy integration mechanisms to replace former bureaucratic coordination structures.

Adjustment to Stagflation and Neoliberal Reforms in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States

This article explains why the stagflation and neoliberal reforms that reinforced party polarization in the United Kingdom and the United States instead led to party convergence in Japan. In Japan, industry-centered adjustment and bureaucratic coordination distributed the costs of policy changes across societal groups and facilitated party convergence, whereas the lack of such societal and state institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States led to policy changes with polarizing consequences. Focusing on industry-centered adjustment brings the unions back into Japanese politics and provides an alternative to the pluralism-neocorporatism dichotomy of organizing societal interests. Bureaucratic coordination not only includes the opposition in the framework but also provides a more nuanced view than is assumed in the debate over whether the ruling party of the bureaucracy dominates the Japanese state. When combined, these conceptualizations of market and state go a long way toward explaining the dynamics of party competition.

「五五年」政党制変容の政官関係

「五五年」政党制変容の政官関係

Five political and policy imperatives in green plan formation: The Canadian case

The 1990 Canadian Green Plan is useful as a case study in examining the five key political and policy imperatives essential in green plan formation, defined as systematic efforts by western governments to transform their environmental policy approaches from a remedial clean‐up approach after pollution has occurred to a preventive approach intended to support sustainable development. The five political and policy imperatives are prime ministerial leadership; sustained ministerial and bureaucratic coordination and leadership; strategic support by both environmental nongovernmental organisations (ENGOs) and business interests; a suitable conceptual framework for articulating and communicating the meaning of sustainable development in a world of mass‐media‐driven politics; and the right mix of policy instruments.

CORE EXECUTIVE STUDIES IN BRITAIN

Discussions of core executive operations in Britain have focused on a limited controversy about whether monocratic control is exercised by the premier or whether more collegial decision making persists in Cabinet. An extended typology of institutionalist views is examined, including the prime ministerial clique interpretation, models of ministerial government, segmented decision making, and bureaucratic coordination. This restricted debate reflects normative anxieties about Britain's unbalanced constitution, party‐structured legislature and an inadequate rational policy process inside the executive. New directions for core executive research are examined, including the analysis of decisional studies, more disaggregated and differentiated accounts of the core executive, coalition politics in the core executive, and the analysis of leadership influences.

The structure of West German university departments: Differences between the physical and the social sciences

Kuhn's concept of paradigm development and organizational contingency theories served as theoretical guidelines to examine the structures of 35 West German university departments. The results provide convincing evidence about different organizational structures used in scientific fields of varying technological development. Physical science departments are less differentiated with regard to different academic subspecialities than social science departments, and their role structure reflects their proximity to mechanized hardware technologies. In addition, variable maps, obtained through smallest space analysis, suggest that physical science departments apply coordination techniques more consistently than departments in less developed fields as differentiation increases. Bureaucratic coordination techniques, other than influences through external authorities, are not of great importance in academic departments. Organizational size, just like the level of paradigm development, has an impact on all aspects of structure investigated. The implications of these findings are discussed and elaborated.

Work and authority in Marcuse and Habermas

I have argued that Marcuse's notions of the merger of work and play and of the possibility of nondominating organizational rationality and authority fly in the face of the mainstream Weberian tradition which venerates the labor-leisure dualism and the bureaucratic coordination of labor. I have further argued that this Weberian current is reappropriated by Jurgen Habermas in his own recent work on the epistemological foundations of social science. The counterpoint between Marcuse and Habermas reveals a split within modern critical theory. This split could be characterized as the split between radicalism and incrementalism. Marcuse takes the more radical viewpoint, arguing that if work and leisure are dialectically merged and if that work is organized democratically through workers' control, then social labor will be experienced, in Marx's early sense, as creative praxis—a type of self-externalizing activity which is both productive and recreative. Habermas, in his reformulation of Weberian sociology, endorses an incrementalist position (contra Marcuse's radicalization and deepening of early Marx's theory of praxis) which rejects the possibility of transforming labor into praxis, arguing instead for greater communicative democracy as a way of redirecting (what Habermas contends is categorically immutable) social labor toward more constructive ends such as the economic levelling of the capitalist welfare state.