Complex Institutional Environment Research Articles

The ethics of trust in world politics

This article argues that actors in contemporary world politics display a propensity to comply' with international norms, regimes and regulations, and that this propensity is rooted, in part, in a presumption of trust'. However, this presumption is unstable in the contemporary context and increasingly so owing to the growing discrepancy between the legal and institutionalforms of world politics and many of its most important processes, especially the complexity and types of agents. This is compounded by difficulties in the conceptualization of trust. The article concludes by outlining ways of evolving practices in world politics that might rectify this situation,focusing especially on 'shaming '-a practice that can generate trust, and hence support, and enhance the propensity to comply' with an ever-widening agenda of issues in an increasingly complex institutional environment.

Local policy networks in France and Britain: Policy co‐ordination in fragmented political Sub‐Systems

This article applies the concept of local policy networks to understand the emergence of local governance in France and Britain. Although the concept of policy networks needs to be used with caution, it is a useful way of mapping out the complex interdependencies of local decision makers in both states. Traditional approaches to central‐local politics in Britain and France emphasised the contrasts between the two countries, and while these continue, Cole and John argue that recent institutional and policy changes suggest a convergence to a more complex institutional environment and more decision making based on networks between organisations.

Institutional and Organizational Dynamics in Community-Based Drug Abuse Treatment

Organizations located in complex institutional environments must deal with conflicting demands from their constituencies. One organizational response, a variant of the symbolic adaptation originally described by Meyer and Rowan, is a chameleon strategy. Presentations of services are varied from situation to situation to meet the demands of different audiences, while primary work activity remains constant. With the decoupling of presentations from technical activity, ideology is used to establish and maintain institutional sponsorship, leaving consumer-oriented services unconstrained. Community drug abuse treatment agencies use the chameleon strategy to achieve isomorphism in conflicting environments. Clients must be attracted, and many want something other than drug treatment; yet institutional sponsors want drug treatment to be provided. Though appearing to specialize in drug abuse services, agencies are actually generalists, offering a wide range of high demand services to the general public.

Canonicity and Black American Literature: A Feminist View

How does a literary critic talk about canon formation if she sees the literary canon not as cast in stone or proclaimed ex cathedra, but as a variable product of certain people over a specific period of time, people who are temporarily vested with the power to decide what is important to read and teach to students, based on their own priorities, needs and values? How can she discuss canonicity if the concept of permanence and sacredness usually associated with it keeps repelling her because she endorses Terry Eagleton's notion that the list of literary works is always in flux: 'Value' is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes (11)? Such a critic must talk about a canon in relativist, non-exclusive, and, perhaps most important, political terms and focus on a canon's continuous expansion to reflect contingencies of the historical, economic, and social moment. Our shifting tastes, needs, and loci of power in academe also politically influence the shaping of a canon and prevent us from seeing it as a petrified, sanctified structure. John Clifford has indicated the instability of the literary canon by describing academicians as politically motivated architects of canons: Instead of priests protecting a sacred trust, we can more modestly see ourselves situated in a complex institutional environment with varied and hardly disinterested values (49). No longer priests, we no longer need be dogmatic about what must be included in or excluded from an ironclad canon. And in a recent panel on the Black American Literature Canon, Claudia C. Tate has agreed, describing canon formation as one of ongoing revisionism and reconstruction because major social changes continuously influence the inscribing criteria for admission into a canon. Moreover, these relativist, non-exclusive and political terms to conceptualize canonicity become even more obligatory when the critic using them is a non-priestess female academician, a feminist attempting to canonize. The term itself troubles feminists for whom its bestowal of favor smacks of patriarchal power. A feminist critic and teacher meditat-