Cross-national Issues Research Articles

Beyond the Crisis: Re-energizing Southeast Asian Studies

This article examines the main drivers of the fiscal crisis in Asian/Southeast Asian Studies and considers ways of overcoming or at least ameliorating it. In the Australian context, several leading scholars in Asian Studies have called for various new forms of strategic state financial support to help keep the field alive, including incentives and structural support for Asian languages at both school and university levels and priority in publicly-funded research grant schemes. However, re-energizing Asian Studies in fiscal terms will undoubtedly require efforts to make the field more appealing to prospective students because of the prevalence of higher education funding models in which money follows student enrollments. This will particularly be the case with Southeast Asian Studies, given the weakness of enrollments in this sub-field. In this respect, there may be some value in seeking to create new education pathways in Asian Studies that focus on cross-national issues and problems within the region as an alternative to the traditional country-focused area studies approach

Demystifying the Hermit Kingdom: the constitution and public administration in North Korea

BackgroundSituations of extreme information deficit regarding administrative behavior are rare, but such conditions persist for the most enigmatic and troubling nations, such as North Korea. How might the behavior of public administrators be explained when systematic observation of individual administrators or institutions’ parties is not feasible?AimFinding a way to estimate administrative behavior based upon the information available is an important task in understanding the complexities of closed states’ behavior in the international arena.MethodWe use constitutional analysis to explain public administration in North Korea, arguing that this is the best available method to explain administrative norms and behavior in this and other closed nations.ResultsWe find that while administrative theorists predict that administrative norms can be predicted using constitutional analysis, administrative behavior in closed nations cannot be efficiently predicted using only a reconstructed set of norms as we do not have evidence to confirm that the suppositions of normative theorists hold in these conditions.ConclusionsWhile we can better understand the values of administrators in North Korea through constitutional analysis, without harder evidence we can only speculate on the true values of administrators in North Korea. Points for practitioners Administrators working on cross-national issues with closed states like North Korea should familiarize themselves with the values of the states’ constitution, as this may be a stable source of preliminary norms for predicting administrators’ behavior.

Institutional Theory as a Framework for Analyzing Conflicts on Global Projects

Global construction projects that involve collaboration between participants from multiple countries often result in unique challenges, and costs due to cross-national interactions. Case studies performed to investigate the cross-national interactions and tensions present on global projects suggest that institutional differences—differences in workplace norms, legal regulations, and cultural values— contribute to these costs. We demonstrate how institutional theory—a branch of organizational theory—can comprehensively describe the cross-national challenges on global projects. We show how this theory can help practitioners to more accurately classify the cross-national issues they encounter, determine the causes behind the conflicts, and judge the relative ease with which each type of conflict can be resolved. However, there are gaps in the extant application of institutional theory that prevent us from predicting institutional conflicts on global projects and devising solution strategies. These gaps are identified and a research trajectory to understand them is proposed. This paper is aimed at starting a much-needed dialogue on the mitigation of cross-national issues on global projects, and not as a demonstration of methods to eliminate all cross-national conflicts.

Current approaches to national health research systems analysis: a brief overview of the WHO health research system analysis initiative

This article introduces the WHO health research system analysis (HRSA) initiative as an input to the World Health Report 2004 on health research, "Knowledge for Better Health". Section 2 presents the HRSA conceptual framework for operational description and analysis of national health research from a system rather than sector perspective. Section 3 summarizes research projects addressing contemporary cross-national issues, aiming to: provide answers to key questions, further explore contested areas within systems, and improve decision-making on research investment options. Section 4 summarizes the comprehensive country studies on research systems. Section 5 outlines a pilot study on methods for 18 comprehensive country studies, including Brazil, Chile, and Costa Rica. Section 6 concludes that the pilot study and eventual main phase to describe and analyze national health research systems will demonstrate WHO's commitment to strengthening capacity in partnership with countries.