Complex Institutional Settings Research Articles

Heat as emergency, heat as chronic stress: policy and institutional responses to vulnerability to extreme heat

ABSTRACTIncreasingly commonplace in cities, extreme heat events introduce multi-stress vulnerability, affecting people’s health and well-being, financial situation, mobility, social relations, and access to basic services. Planning to reduce heat vulnerability has become part of government business and to some extent community-level responses, cutting across a number of sectors including public health, emergency management, social services, critical infrastructure, and housing. This planning is often framed around heat as an emergency, focusing on preventing loss of life and severe health impacts, yet a vulnerability perspective also draws attention to the chronic and persistent impacts of heat. Our research, based on interviews and desktop research in Melbourne, Australia, found tensions between addressing heat as an emergency and heat as a source of chronic stress, with emergency responses taking precedence over responses addressing the chronic dimensions of heat. Each approach results in different but nonetheless related programmatic priorities for reducing vulnerability. In complex institutional settings, improving relations between policy and programme managers, non-government organisations, and vulnerable people themselves would enable the multiple stresses associated with extreme heat to be more effectively addressed. Policy and institutional responses that better appreciate the interconnections between the emergency and chronic aspects of heat would likely reduce vulnerability and contribute to more just approaches to urban sustainability.

Digitally-enabled service transformation in the public sector: The lure of institutional pressure and strategic response towards change

Digitally-Enabled Service Transformation (DEST) projects in public sector institutions are viewed as a choice of strategic response towards changes in policy. Such transformation can destruct institutional stability and legitimacy and result in failure if the complex institutional setting of the public sector is not comprehended in the change-institutionalisation effort. Through a multiple case enquiry, this study examines how institutional pressures contribute towards the emergence of DEST in public agencies and how newly introduced transformation is implemented and diffused within the institutional setting. The findings highlight that as a form of technology driven change, DEST is characterised and shaped dominantly by continuous interplay with institutional elements and the impact of these interactions define the institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation of DEST. Ability to recognise such stages and provide the required support will determine a public institution's ability to effectively manage DEST and attain its strategic goals.

EO-Performance relationships in Reverse Internationalization by Chinese Global Startup OEMs: Social Networks and Strategic Flexibility.

Due to the context-sensitive nature of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), it is imperative to in-depth explore the EO-performance mechanism in China at its critical, specific stage of economic reform. Under the context of “reverse internationalization” by Chinese global startup original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), this paper aims to manifest the unique links and complicated interrelationships between the individual EO dimensions and firm performance. Using structural equation modeling, we found that during reverse internationalization, proactiveness is positively related to performance; risk taking is not statistically associated with performance; innovativeness is negatively related to performance. The proactiveness-performance relationship is mediated by Strategic flexibility and moderated by social networking relationships. The dynamic and complex institutional setting, coupled with the issues of overcapacity and rising labor cost in China may explain why our distinctive results occur. This research advances the understanding of how contingent factors (social network relationships and strategic flexibility) facilitate entrepreneurial firms to break down institutional barriers and reap the most from EO. It brings new insights into how Chinese global startup OEMs draw on EO to undertake reverse internationalization, responding the calls for unraveling the heterogeneous characteristics of EO sub-dimensions and for more contextually-embedded treatment of EO-performance associations.

Dealing with institutional complexity

This paper reports an empirical study of the video game development industry in Sweden. It provides a detailed account on how video game developers legitimize their engagement in video game development in a context of high institutional complexity. The justification theory is utilized as a framework to analyze how actors enact different orders or worth to legitimize their actions to others as well as to themselves. The enrolment of such sometimes contradictory value orders highlights the narrative skills needed to make sense of and explain behaviors and actions within such complex institutional setting. The paper contributes to the institutional theory by bridging it with the French pragmatist sociology through an in-depth study on the micro-level, analyzing how individuals actively deal with institutional complexity in practice.

The Construction of Human Rights Space in a Globalised World: A Case of the Right to Food and Agricultural Modernisation in Papua

In the age of globalisation, human rights are gaining importance, but its realisation is done in different ways and in complex institutional settings. Nowadays promoting and invoking human rights are not only the interests of the state as the duty bearers, civil society organisations, or the right holders. Rather, in transition and developing economies, the realisation of rights also depends on, for example, how access to natural resources and distribution of wealth are governed by public and private actors. Studies on the subject in connection with globalisation demonstrate situations where liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation have weakened human rights protection, primarily social, economic, and cultural rights that hinge on the principle of progressive realisation of state obligations. Assessments as to how the coexistence of private governance, customary and state legal systems mutually shape human rights practices are however scantily found. In this regard, the paper aims to discuss human rights as a political space of a struggle between the state, private interests and organised social movements.

Measuring Social Capital: Accounting for Nested Data and Subnetworks Within Schools

Social capital is a central concept in social science research, and it is measured in diverse ways. Few measurement approaches take the network structure of complex institutional settings into account. In this study, using data from a large-scale school-based randomized field trial, we develop several factor analytic models to test the validity and reliability of a new survey battery capturing multiple dimensions of social capital in such settings. We demonstrate that it is important to account for institutional and network structure in social capital measures, and we show how social capital can be operationalized as the shared variance between different relational characteristics in complex settings with multiple subnetworks.

Growing a student organic garden within the context of university sustainability initiatives

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of a student organic garden at a large public university, as an example of student initiatives that promote both university sustainability and student-focused sustainability education on campus.Design/methodology/approach– The authors conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis to document the evolution of the university’s Local Organic Gardening Initiative of Carbondale (LOGIC), which is the student-initiated and -operated organic garden at Southern Illinois University.Findings– The student organic garden evolved in three stages, each of which had specific goals and accomplishments. Stage I (establishment): students in Geography courses took action to get the garden established; key components included funds from a sustainability scholarship and student-initiated camps Green Fund, dedicated undergraduate students, negotiating campus bureaucracy and motivating broad support. Stage II (evolution): a high tunnel was added to the original raised beds garden, a graduate assistant position was filled to manage the garden, additional funds were secured, a permaculture demonstration site was added, the volunteer base was established and LOGIC began being included in campus and community events. Stage III (future) challenges include: consistent leadership, long-term funding, guarantee of land availability, student graduation/turnover and increasing student involvement.Originality/value– This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on the evolution of student-led sustainability efforts which require progressive, inclusive action from multiple stakeholders across campus and in the community. Several replicable practices include student leadership in sustainability initiatives, actions for promoting local food in the university structure and methods of negotiating complex institutional settings.

International Organisations and the Politics of Migration

The last two decades have seen major shifts in the way international organisations (IOs) address migration. While state sovereignty remains central in the politics of migration, IOs are increasingly developing their visions regarding how the cross-border movements of people should be governed (or ‘managed’) and, in some cases, they have become important actors in the design and implementation of migration policy. Research on the role and functions of IOs remains scarce, however, and there are major uncertainties, concerning not only their actual influence, but also the political context in which they operate and the outcome of their initiatives. According to their advocates, the involvement of IOs would enable greater international cooperation, which would lead to policies that pay greater attention to human rights and development imperatives. Yet, at times, interventions by IOs seem to reinforce existing imbalances, as these organisations primarily tend to align themselves with the interests and agenda of developed receiving states. In addition, the work of IOs is embedded in a complex institutional setting, characterised by sometimes-problematic institutional relations between them, as well as between IOs and other international cooperation mechanisms.

Social Capital and Institutional Trust: Evidence from Bolivia's Popular Participation Decentralisation Reforms

This article uses Bolivia's emblematic process of decentralisation (Popular Participation) to explore the elusive relationship between interpersonal and institutional trust, as central components of social capital. The evidence corroborates the notion that basic social interaction and more complex institutional settings are strongly co-related, such as the trust that individuals place in their governments and institutions. The data also shows that social capital has a direct effect on civic activism and political behaviour at the individual level. The notion of social capital is present throughout the analysis as this type of capital allows observing and measuring changes in social structures that affect more complex institutional arrangements.

Inhabiting Institutions: Critical Realist Refinements to Understanding Institutional Complexity and Change

This paper builds on recent contributions to understanding conditions of institutional complexity by developing a theoretical framework to elaborate the interdependencies between actions, contexts and institutional logics. Our aim is to refine existing explanations of how actors inhabit complex institutional settings. Drawing on a critical realist ontology, we treat agency and structure as analytically distinct phenomena to advance our understanding of conditioned action. This is subject to relational analysis in order to explain the structural conditioning that shapes particular socio-historical contexts, the potential ‘action options’ contained within these contexts and the processes through which actors draw upon these. This reading of institutional reproduction and transformation allows us to reassess the ‘paradox of embedded agency’ by advancing understanding of the historically grounded and multilevel nature of structures and agency in institutional processes. Our approach offers conceptual refinements, a new sensitizing framework and methodological insights to guide studies of the ways actors inhabit complex institutional settings.

The European Commission and bureaucratic autonomy: Europe's custodians

This book examines the struggle of the European Union bureaucracy to maintain its autonomy in an increasingly complex institutional setting and adverse political environment. Using an original survey of nearly two hundred top European Commission officials, it shows that the Commission is a coherent organization that shares a common culture of supranationalism. The European Union's multicephalous structure of political authority limits the capacity of European politicians to curb the autonomy of the Commission but tends to undermine the legitimacy of the organization, which finds itself under persistent political attacks. These attacks inadvertently help the organization bolster its defenses against the external threats and trigger internal legitimation processes that reinforce the devotion of its employees to its institutional mission. The rich survey data show how Commission bureaucrats establish themselves as the 'custodians of Europe'. The book helps disentangle the complexity of the Commission and makes a contribution to the study of international bureaucracies, a topic that has received little attention.

The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities

Throughout the world, measuring “learning outcomes” is viewed by many stakeholders as a relatively new method to judge the “value added” of colleges and universities. The potential to accurately measure learning gains is also a diagnostic tool for institutional self-improvement. This essay discussed the marketisation of learning outcomes tests, and the relative merits of student experience surveys in gauging learning outcomes by analyzing results from the University of California’s Undergraduate Experience Survey (Student Experience in the Research University Survey: SERU-S). The SERU-S includes responses by seniors who entered as freshmen on six educational outcomes self-reports: analytical and critical thinking skills, writing skills, reading and comprehension skills, oral presentation skills, quantitative skills, and skills in a particular field of study. Although self-reported gains are sometimes regarded as having dubious validity compared to so-called “direct measures” of student learning, the analysis of this study reveals the SERU survey design has many advantages, especially in large, complex institutional settings. Without excluding other forms of gauging learning outcomes, we conclude that, designed properly, student surveys offer a valuable and more nuanced alternative in understanding and identifying learning outcomes in the broad tapestry of higher education institutions. We discuss the politics of the learning outcomes race, the validity of standardized tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), and what we can learn from student surveys like SERU-S. We also suggest there is a tension between what meets the accountability desires of governments and the needs of individual universities focused on self-improvement.

Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services for sustained on-farm utilization of plant and animal genetic resources

This paper discusses the potential application of Payment for Ecosystem Services-like schemes to tackle market failures associated with the public good characteristics of agrobiodiversity conservation services. So called payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS) would increase the private benefits from utilizing local plant and animal genetic resources on-farm through voluntary reward mechanisms, so as to sustain their on-farm conservation. Theoretical and applied insights about PACS are discussed and attention drawn to some of the challenges to be overcome in implementing PACS. In particular, these relate to the identification of potential buyers, the complex institutional setting in which PACS might operate and the articulation of a meaningful conservation goal based on a safe minimum standard approach. The latter is urgently needed, so as to ensure that additional agrobiodiversity services are generated. Relative to a fixed pricing approach, PACS schemes that seek to overcome information asymmetries through the use of conservation auctions may be associated with significant efficiency gains. However, potential trade-offs between ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social equity considerations need to be carefully evaluated.

Taking enforcement on its own terms: EPA's heavy-duty diesel engine litigation

The authors of Regulation by Litigation characterize the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s enforcement action against diesel engine manufacturers as an effort to achieve by litigation what the Agency was unable to achieve by regulation: immediate reductions in emissions of nitrogen oxides. By substituting litigation for rulemaking, the authors of the book argue, the Agency avoided political and judicial accountability and put itself on a suboptimal policy track. This comment argues that the diesel engine litigation may be better understood as what it purported to be, an enforcement action, not rulemaking in disguise. The authors' characterization of the litigation is questionable on at least two grounds. First, it fails to fully appreciate the distinct functions of enforcement and policymaking in a regulatory setting. The goal of enforcement is not primarily to make policy, but to enforce it – to punish violators, deter future violations, and mitigate harms caused by violations. That goal supplies the proper measure of the litigation's success. Second, in applying public choice analysis to create a story of agency circumvention of appropriate rulemaking procedures, the authors' account misses key features of how agency enforcement decisions are made – and were made in this litigation. This latter shortcoming raises broader questions about the difficulties of applying public choice analysis in complex institutional settings.

Dynamic Legal Pluralism in Indonesia: Contested Legal Orders in Contemporary Aceh

This paper examines the contest between the clams to jurisdiction of shari’a courts and other tribunals in the framework of dynamic legal pluralism in Aceh, Indonesia. During Aceh’s sultanates, Islamic law and adat co-existed and at times were hardly distinguished. The Dutch colonial presence contributed to sharper demarcations between shari’a and adat, the Dutch policies tending to support adat institutions and adat leaders. In post-independence Indonesia the colonial legacy of legal pluralism continued with some modifications. While adat legal institutions (peradilan desa) were largely eliminated in the 1950s for the sake of Indonesian unity and judicial integrity, adat norms were retained and continued to be applied by the state civil courts (pengadilan negeri). Some particular areas of Islamic law were applied by an Indonesian system of state religious courts (pengadilan agama), and Indonesia developed a complex system of legal pluralism that allowed a variety of legal sub-systems to be operative in the realm of a single sovereign state power.Partly in response to the frustration of Islamic interests, a rebellion arose in the 1950s aimed at Acehnese independence from Indonesia. In response, on the ground of ‘unity and the unitary nation’, the New Order regime (1968–1998) sought to reinforce legal centralism by issuing laws which effectively abolished the special status of Islamic religious courts in the province. Thereafter, in the post-New Order era the willingness of the central government to allow more legal pluralism in Aceh appeared to be an initial step towards the political peace process. The central government believed that greater local authority over religion, customs and education would overcome the problems resulting from violent conflict. Indonesian legal policy has dramatically shifted to include the principle of ‘legal distinction’, according to which particular groups of citizens have certain specific laws applicable exclusively to them. The tsunami that caused severe damage in December 2004 created a surge of momentum for the further implementation of the shari’a, including the actual authority of the shari’a court. It resulted in higher case-loads for courts, including the shari’a court, and it is possible that the international relief effort brought in international actors who have been influential in deepening the existing configuration of legal pluralism in Aceh.All of these processes have involved contestation between the different laws and courts, played out in complex institutional settings. To explore these a detailed study is made of the written laws and the actual practice, and case-studies are examined. The course of dynamic legal pluralism has not yet ended, and in practice the different legal orders in Aceh continue their contests.

Investigating the Effects of the EU Mandatory Adoption of IFRS on Accounting Quality: Evidence from Italy

The European Community Regulation No. 1606/2002 required all EU listed companies to prepare their consolidated financial statements in accordance with IFRS as from 1 January 2005. This paper studies the impact of the IFRS mandatory adoption in a typical code-law European country such as Italy. It aims to investigate how and whether the accounting information quality changes following IFRS implementation. The focus is on value relevance which is considered as one of the basic attributes of accounting quality. An empirical analysis is performed on a sample of 960 firm-year observations concerning Italian listed companies observed from 2002 to 2007. Results confirm the expected overall increase in the value relevance under IFRS. The research also documents changes in Italy’s country-specific factors in the period surrounding IFRS adoption that may contribute to an improvement in accounting quality. Such a concern is consistent with previous literature supporting the idea that accounting quality does not depend only on thehigh quality of accounting standards, but it is also a function of the country’s complex institutional setting.

Public understanding of science and technology embedded in complex institutional settings

We use a constructivist analysis to describe how citizens learn and integrate highly technical scientific information about a new technology (bioremediation) within the context of a risk-based relationship with a federal agency in their own backyards. We engaged members of the general public in a workshop process where they produced a consensus report that describes how bioremediation works, characterizes the scientific issues not yet addressed, and sets the problem within the context of institutional arrangements for the production of knowledge. On the basis of their social roles in their communities, they applied new knowledge to their own experiences and worked at ways to translate their understanding of the technology into information that could be used in their multiple roles as learners in the workshop, as well as citizens and family members outside the workshop.

Editorial

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. ‘Induction’ is defined here as the first three years of work in teacher education (see Harrison and McKeon, in this issue, and Murray and Male 2005, for further discussion of the concept of induction for teacher educators). 2. Van Velzen et al. (in preparation van Velzen, C., van der Klink, M., Swennen, A. and Yaffe, E. (in preparation). The induction of teacher educators; the needs of beginning teacher educators [Google Scholar]) report on a comparative study, conducted collaboratively by nine RDC members, in which semi‐structured interviews with new teacher educators were used to explore the induction experiences of a small sample of new teacher educators in five European countries and the USA. As Harrison and Mc Keon (in this issue) note, the findings of the Van Velzen et al. study show fascinating and ‘diverse patterns and forms of participation in teacher education, as well as complex institutional settings’. Harrison and McKeon also note that, despite this diversity, the study also indicates ‘some commonalities in induction experiences’, which require further investigation. 3. Yaffe (2007 Yaffe, E. 2007. “Reflections on the special issue.”. Email communication to members of RDC 18. September 2007 [Google Scholar]) gives an overview of the rationales which have contributed to the RDC's development of the special issue. This document also provides a powerful account of the author's personal and professional development at a time when she led an action research project in Israel with a group of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) (see also Harrison and Yaffe, forthcoming 2008 Harrison, J. K. and Yaffe, E. 2008. “Helping beginning teacher educators to understand and engage in reflective practice.”. In Becoming a Teacher Educator, Edited by: Swennen, A and van der Klink, M. Dordrecht: Springer. Forthcoming [Google Scholar]). Yaffe (2003 Yaffe E. 2003. The reflective beginner: Promoting professional development of newly qualified teachers. EdD Thesis, University of Bath. Can be accessed at http://www.bath.ac.uk/∼edsajw/yaffe.shtml (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/yaffe.shtml) [Google Scholar], 2007 Yaffe, E. 2007. “Reflections on the special issue.”. Email communication to members of RDC 18. September 2007 [Google Scholar]) argues that self‐study has permitted an articulation of her professional learning which has been rooted in and articulated through her professional activities as a teacher educator.

Formative acts: American politics in the making

Political actors are a diverse lot, animated and engaged by the prospect of change. Operating inside and outside the government, they are out to instigate change or inhibit it, to promote or deflect it, to channel or absorb it. Their interactions keep the American polity in a perpetual state of development, rendering it always to some degree unsettled. In the past, the study of American political development has treated political institutions and ideas as disembodied subjects. In Formative Acts, leading scholars in the field seek to refocus the debate on the political agency of people, analyzing various modes of action and various sites of interaction with an eye to their transformative potential.Seventeen essays illuminate critical junctures in American political development--from the social movements for women's suffrage, civil rights, and workers' rights, to Reconstruction, to the regulation of prescription drugs--as vantage points from which to examine how change is enacted. Contributors question not simply how political actors behave but also how and to what extent their actions change the American polity itself.At the same time, the transformative act is presented as larger than any one actor or group of actors; often the act of transformation involves many actors and a panoply of motives. Three concepts claim center stage: political entrepreneurship--especially as it directs attention to ambiguity and malleability in the rules of action found in any complex institutional setting; political leadership--specifically the conundrum of democratic leadership; and political agency--particularly the strongly voluntaristic construction of that concept found within American political culture. The authors focus on each of these categories to link the study of political action more effectively to our understanding of the formation and reformation of American government and politics.

Participatory research on the effectiveness of drainage in the Red River Delta, Vietnam

The irrigation and drainage systems in the Red River Delta in Vietnam were designed and constructed in the 1950s and 60s. These systems are well established and provide water to virtually all of the irrigable land in the Delta. The land is cropped intensively: on average just over two crops a year. The irrigation and drainage systems are complex: dual purpose channels and pumping stations are used. In the 1990s, the systems were rehabilitated and upgraded. A review showed that irrigation projects performed reasonably well, but the two core drainage projects performed less than anticipated. In the Red River Delta, with its low elevations, drainage rather than irrigation is often the limiting factor affecting agricultural production. To investigate these constraints in more detail, a participatory research study on the effectiveness of drainage was conducted in two drainage areas in the Red River Delta. The study started with a participatory pre-investigation to identify and quantify the constraints in the functioning of the drainage systems. Next, the drainage system was modelled and computer simulations were used to develop conceptual designs to improve the functioning of the systems. Finally, recommendations to improve the institutional capacity of the drainage system management were formulated, again in close cooperation with the stakeholders. These recommendations cover a whole range of technical issues: small-scale improvements in the farmers’ fields, modifications in the main and secondary drainage systems, including the control structures, up to recommendations to increase the efficiency of the pumping stations. Next to these technical innovations, recommendations to reform the complex institutional setting have been formulated.