Institutional Reality Research Articles

O SISTEMA PRISIONAL NO BRASIL: UMA ANÁLISE DOS DESAFIOS E PERSPECTIVAS DE REFORMA

The Brazilian prison system is a complex and challenging issue that has raised heated debates over the years. With a growing prison population and precarious conditions in prisons, the reality of penitentiary institutions in the country presents a worrying picture. The purpose of prisons, which should be the rehabilitation of inmates, is often distorted by overcrowding, violence and lack of opportunities for social reintegration. In this context, this work aims to analyze the challenges faced by the Brazilian prison system and explore the reform perspectives that can be adopted to face such problems. It is crucial to understand the historical roots of this system, as well as the contemporary factors that have contributed to its current situation. Throughout this study, a comprehensive bibliographical review will be carried out, gathering data and analyzes from research, government reports and academic studies that focus on the subject. It is essential to emphasize that an effective reform of the prison system does not only imply improving the physical conditions of prisons, but also promoting actions that favor social reintegration and the reduction of criminal recidivism. In addition, civil society participation and dialogue between the various actors involved are crucial elements for building sustainable and humanized solutions.

The institutional intervention of disaster risk management as a territorial development strategy in the Chillanes canton

Canton Chillanes is a territory vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic risks. For this reason, institutional intervention is critical to meet the population's needs. However, the reality is different since the territory under study does not have the assistance of the local Risk Management Unit (UGR) despite its vulnerability. In this context, the study's objective is to know the institutional reality regarding the process under study and the population's perception of disaster risks. For this purpose, descriptive, documentary, and field research were conducted to determine a representative sample of the population under study and analyze information provided by those involved in Risk Management of the Decentralized Autonomous Government (GAD) of Chillanes. The results show that almost 100% of those surveyed indicate no adequate risk management and that at least 80% are unaware of the territory's vulnerability to adverse events. Despite this background, the municipal entity's RGU has not been strengthened, becoming one of the leading institutional weaknesses. Keywords: Hazards; institutional strengthening; risk management; governance; processes; risk reduction.

The institutional intervention of disaster risk management as a territorial development strategy in the Chillanes canton

Canton Chillanes is a territory vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic risks. For this reason, institutional intervention is critical to meet the population's needs. However, the reality is different since the territory under study does not have the assistance of the local Risk Management Unit (UGR) despite its vulnerabil-ity. In this context, the study's objective is to know the institutional reality regarding the process under study and the population's perception of disaster risks. For this purpose, descriptive, documentary, and field research were conducted to determine a representative sample of the population under study and ana-lyze information provided by those involved in Risk Management of the Decentralized Autonomous Gov-ernment (GAD) of Chillanes. The results show that almost 100% of those surveyed indicate no adequate risk management and that at least 80% are unaware of the territory's vulnerability to adverse events. De-spite this background, the municipal entity's RGU has not been strengthened, becoming one of the leading institutional weaknesses. Keywords: Hazards; institutional strengthening; risk management; governance; processes; risk reduction.

Pedagogical Outlook on How Disability and Inclusive Education are Perceived in Educational Rural Contexts

In the process of building educational communities that include students with disabilities, it is a challenge to understand how diverse these students are in terms of their specificities, interests, potentialities, and expectations, to ensure their comprehensive development. The purpose of this study is to analyze the underlying assumptions in discourses about disability and inclusive education in the classroom, based on how these are perceived by teachers and counselors in public education institutions in the Colombian departments of Córdoba and Atlántico. The study is grounded on a qualitative, hermeneutic analysis, conducted in 10 focus groups, which took place virtually through the Zoom platform because of the global crisis generated by the pandemic. The data gathered were examined using the tools provided by Textual Discourse Analysis, focusing on giving visibility to the instructors’ voices and positions. The most relevant results related to the perceptions of disability were as follows: (1) For instructors, disability is associated with a lack, with incompleteness, or with an impairment. (2) For guidance teachers, disability is related to potentiality. Regarding inclusive education, both school counselors and teachers agree on (3) broadening the view towards a comprehensive and integrative approach to pedagogical work with students. (4) training in a pedagogical practice that contributes to different conditions of disability. One of the main conclusions is that the conceptions of disability and inclusive education are barriers present in the reality of rural educational institutions, therefore, they must be transformed systematically and gradually into affirmative actions from the reflexivity on practice.

The Rise of Public–Private Religious Partnerships: Arguing Church Autonomy in the Era of Public Funding of Religion

Abstract Religion and government, following the influence of Locke and Madison are often considered two different institutions. As such, they function under different sets of rules. We argue that the ‘two institutions’ image and institutional reality are increasingly untenable. Rather, religion and government are intertwined in many democratic countries, including, growingly, in the US, that it would be more accurate to speak of the new norm of governmental–religious hybridity. Advances in data collected regarding religion–state relations, and the accumulation of court decisions in the US bring to the fore a new norm of religious–governmental hybridity. Such hybrid institutions are typically functionally religious associations; however, their funding is sourced in the government to create ‘public private religious partnerships’. If such a re-classification is justified, then norms of public law should apply to such religious associations. This bears substantial implications vis-a-vis central concepts used in political and legal circles regarding religious freedom; furthermore, this reclassification also bears upon an ongoing intellectual debate between scholars such as Chiara Cordelli—advocating democratization of religion, and Michael W. McConnell who advocated an opposing view: a strong version of church autonomy. So, this reclassification bears important implications for both scholarly debates and political issues.

Andrei Marmor, Foundations of Institutional Reality

Andrei Marmor, Foundations of Institutional Reality

Science in the Trading Zone: Interdisciplinarity and the ‘Environment’

AbstractInterdisciplinarity continues to be a focus and method for complex social and environmental challenges. This paper explores how the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) which was founded through the idea of scientific interdisciplinarity operated in practice to create new knowledge about a new object of concern, the ‘environment’. Using the ‘trading zone’ concept, the social and epistemic processes behind making scientific interdisciplinarity a material and institutional reality are uncovered, and to what extent interdisciplinary knowledge was actually produced. This paper concludes that interdisciplinary processes can be effective in dealing with complex challenges but often rely on the institutional and social dynamics of the researchers involved. Historicising interdisciplinarity in knowledge‐making settings can go some way in supporting new interdisciplinary endeavours associated with environmental and climate research.

Down (my) Memory Lane: Has Economic Analysis Impacted CAP Reforms?

SummaryThis article elaborates the role of economic analysis in influencing the reform path of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) between 1992 and 2022 on the basis of publicly available information from a personal career experience in the European Commission. Analyses about the trade distorting impact of the pre‐1992 CAP were dominant in influencing the internal Commission debate before the Uruguay Agreement on Agriculture, and were mostly external from academia and international organisations. Developments leading to the Fischler reform in 2003 led to the broadening of analytical scope to cover the impact of food safety issues on market developments, non‐tariff barriers to trade, or alternative scenarios about an enlarged EU based on the increasing use of internal and external models. Evaluations and Impact Assessments played a major role in assessing options for CAP reforms after 2007, with the increasing role of NGOs and think tanks gradually shifting the analytical and policy focus in identifying CAP weaknesses in its environmental delivery. The new institutional reality of co‐decision complicated the link between analysis and policy decision making. However, though economic analysis is clearly not sufficient, it is still necessary and essential to jointly address the twin challenges of food security and climate change.

Foundations of Institutional Reality

Foundations of Institutional Reality

Truth that Matters

Truth that Matters

A Moral Bind? — Autonomous Weapons, Moral Responsibility, and Institutional Reality

In “Accepting Moral Responsibility for the Actions of Autonomous Weapons Systems—a Moral Gambit” (2022), Mariarosaria Taddeo and Alexander Blanchard answer one of the most vexing issues in current ethics of technology: how to close the so-called “responsibility gap”? Their solution is to require that autonomous weapons systems (AWSs) may only be used if there is some human being who accepts the ex ante responsibility for those actions of the AWS that could not have been predicted or intended (in such cases, the human being takes what the authors call the “moral gambit”). The authors then propose several institutional safeguards to implement in order to ensure that the moral gambit is taken in a fair and just way. This paper explores this suggestion in the context of the institutional settings within which AWSs are most likely to be deployed. It raises some concerns as to the feasibility of Taddeo and Blanchard’s proposal, in light of the recent empirical work on the incentive structures likely to exist within militaries. It then presents a potential problem that may arise in case the accountability mechanisms are successfully implemented.

KURUMSAL ETNOGRAFYA: TEMEL YÖNLERİ VE TEORİK TEMELLER

This paper demonstrates how institutional ethnography provides a way forward for social scientists to explore how social organization of work shape people’s daily lives and transform their experiences into institutional knowledge. Institutional ethnography is a qualitative method of inquiry taking individual’s experience and standpoint as a starting point and try to explore the textually mediated forms of coordination and control in institutional settings. According to this theory, institutional texts are tools that transform subjects' experiences into knowledge necessary for institutional functioning. Institutional ethnography claims that the transformation of knowledge leads the a bifurcation between the reality of the owner of the actual experience and the institutional reality. As a result, the individual whose experience is processed and transformed for the needs priorities of the system is alienated from his/her own experience and becomes disadvantaged against the institutional system. Within this regard, institutional ethnography has a critical and activist perspective with its search for power relations and social inequalities within institutional organizations. In this paper, the theoretical and philosophical foundations of institutional ethnography, and its main concepts and principles as a research methodology are revealed by the systematic review of the relevant literature. In addition, the differences and common aspects of institutional ethnography from other sociological theories such as the feminist standpoint approach, Marxist theory, ethnomethodology and phenomenology have been tried to be revealed.

Alice in Wonderland: experimental jurisprudence on the internal point of view

ABSTRACT Humans have this extraordinary cognitive ability: They imagine inexistent objects, they treat them as if they were real, and by doing so they make them real. They thus give rise to a shared institutional reality that enables them to cooperate in ways that would be impossible otherwise. In this paper, we would like to revisit the account that HLA Hart gives of the practice of collective acceptance that makes a legal system possible. We try to provide an explanation of what Hart calls the ‘internal point of view’, on the basis of experiments on institutional concepts, drawing on the paradigm known as ‘embodied cognition’. Experts and non-experts in law rated the role of several cognitive dimensions for a list of words referring to two kinds of abstract concepts (institutional and theoretical/scientific) and two kinds of concrete ones (food and artifact). Institutional concepts were distinguished into pure-institutional (e.g., ‘contract’, ‘state’, ‘property’) and meta-institutional (e.g., ‘norm’, ‘duty’, ‘justice’). The results provide an empirical account of how our way of thinking about institutions changes as we acquire expertise in the legal field, thus shading light on the cognitive underpinnings of the ‘internal point of view’.

Mandatory non-financial disclosure: is everybody on the same page about business model reporting?

ABSTRACT Recent regulatory initiatives, such as the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive and the UK Companies Act, require companies to mobilise the business model concept as a framework to disclose non-financial information in the annual report. These regulatory initiatives are based on a reflexive legal approach that avoids specifying what should be disclosed or articulating minimum disclosure requirements. In this context, this study investigates whether and to what extent preparers and users of non-financial information have a shared understanding of the business model concept and its role in reporting. An exploratory survey was conducted involving 35 users and 13 preparers, followed by 13 in-depth interviews, with both stages of research conducted from Searle's perspective of institutional reality. The findings present a somewhat divergent picture, indicating a lack of widespread consensus around a specific definition of a business model, its constitutive elements, and its reporting function. Thus, we conclude that the business model remains a concept under social construction in this domain and highlights areas of intervention. This study contributes to the existing literature by discussing how the absence of a common definition might hinder the otherwise positive effects of business model disclosure regulation from enhancing corporate transparency. Archival studies on business model reporting generally show low levels of disclosure, indicating poor informativeness. Our evidence adds to the accounting literature by considering the role of a shared view of the business model among market participants as a determinant of business model reporting quality and informativeness.

‘Treading the no woman’s land’: the gender-STEM dynamics in higher education in premier institutions of India

ABSTRACT The gender dimension of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) has intrigued social scientists for a long time. Although in India, women’s entry to STEM higher education has been improving over the last few decades, the reality of premier institutions remains broadly unaltered. The current qualitative research was an attempt: (a) to explore the career-selection-related decision-making, (b) to detect whether gendered processes are evident in STEM research laboratories, and (c) to explore the psychological effects of gendered processes among female doctoral/postdoctoral researchers. This qualitative study relied on in-depth interviews with twenty female STEM academics pursuing doctoral or postdoctoral research in ten premier Indian institutions. A hybrid of theoretical and inductive thematic analysis has been used to analyse the qualitative data. The results revealed that the combination of individual (interest and self-efficacy) and contextual factors (parental support and role models) had impacted the researchers’ decision to select and pursue higher studies in STEM. Furthermore, the current research shows that higher studies in STEM are characterised by the four defining features of gendering, i.e., gendered division of labour, gendered symbols, gendered identity, and gendered interactions (Acker, 1990). Gendering in STEM has led to self-doubt and diminished sense of belonging among the researchers.

The Historical Semantics of the Contemporary Classical Education Movement

As contemporary classical education continues maturing as a pedagogical tradition, an institutional reality, and an academic tradition, the need has grown to clarify the nature of the project and to understand how it relates to the past. The classical education movement, which seeks to encourage human flourishing by studying and imitating the past, uses an unstable terminology to describe itself. Some speak of a “Renaissance,” others work toward what they call a “Renewal,” and still others conceive of the project in terms of a “Recovery.” In using these terms, contemporary educators and writers, knowingly or not, reenact historiographical debates about the nature of Western culture and embrace differing opinions about the meaning of the term “classical” and consequently, about what period or periods of the past are worthy of imitation. This article seeks to clarify the history of these terms, delineate how the process of cultural emulation works, and encourage classical educators to come to a deeper appreciation of the past as they chart a course for the future of their disciplines.

Miss Implementation of Philanthropic Institutions by Reviewing The Prophet's Hadith

This study is crucial to see the reality of some philanthropic institutions that use religion to carry out their activities. There is many cases misused public funds, how the Prophet carried out philanthropic activities is important to review. This study uses a qualitative method, namely qualitative research using text as study material. The data source for this study is primary data from philanthropic institutions and hadith which discuss philanthropy and secondary the statements from scholars and experts on philanthropic activities. The data collection method was carried out by gathering information about philanthropic institutions in Indonesia and hadiths that relate to philanthropy. Data processing was carried out by elaborating with a multidisciplinary approach through linguistic, psychological, hadith science, and Syariah approaches. The findings of this study indicate that the collection and management of funds, philanthropic activities today are different from philanthropic activities during the Prophet’s times and companions. Philanthropy is an activity that has a parallel goal with Islamic law. Then needs to be emphasized that many philanthropic institutions actively collect donations from society must have a legal basis and be supervised by a competent supervisory agency.

Opaque windows in puppet studies: A response to Lillard (2022), Rakoczy (2022), Wellman & Yu (2022), and Yu & Wellman (2022)

In our article (Packer & Moreno-Dulcey, 2022) we pointed out that the use of puppets in Theory of Mind tasks (1) requires young children to pretend, which (2) introduces a confound, and also (3) reflects a failure to distinguish scientific and folk psychology. In their comments Lillard (2022) and Wellman and Yu (2022; Yu & Wellman, 2022) claim that use of puppets requires not pretense but an understanding that they ‘stand-in’ for people, without explaining how this differs from pretense, or how it avoids a confound. Rakoczy (2022) in contrast agrees with us that pretense is required but argues that it uses the same “code” and “concepts” as “the real world.” We recall his earlier appreciation that institutional reality has the logical form of pretense. We suggest that ‘mind’ is a culturally and historically bound institutional fact, and point out that a typical ToM task involves multiple levels of pretense, games, and institutional reality.

Internationalization and Higher Education

Introduction: In times of global intensification of the internationalization in higher education and its importance for educational institutions worldwide, this research addresses this complex theme, exposed to multiple interpretations and perceptions, through an investigation carried out over the convergences and divergences on students’ perceptions on the reality of Brazilian higher education institutions. Methodology: The research was conducted in four large Brazilian higher education institutions (HEIs) and its domestic and international undergraduate students. This analysis was carried out through the understanding and perception of the local students and international students. The analysis was executed using exploratory, descriptive, analytic, interpretive, and qualitative research. The strategy used for data consolidation and presentation was a comparative study between these two groups. Results: The findings were that there is a strong link between internationalization and globalization, as well as mobility, the presence of a foreign language in the activities of IES and partnerships. Although it is maturing, the multiple interpretations for the internationalization of higher education persists. There is an identification of a different perspectives on themes and realities in relation to Brazil and the United States. Foreign students give more importance on Brazil after living in the country. Conclusion: The research showed that Brazilians have the perception that Brazil is behind the global context in higher education, while for North Americans, Brazil is aligned, the most positive perception of North Americans stands out. There is no consensus on the common "end" for university internationalization. The research also demonstrated a perception of a glamourization regarding internationalization of HEIs.

“Brexit Means Brexit!”: Investigating the Production of Social Phenomena in Political Discourses

The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit, is arguably the most important political, social, and economic phenomenon in British post‐WWII history. This paper analyses parliamentary debates from December 2018 concerning the European Withdrawal Act, focusing on the epistemic modality of Member of Parliaments' (MP) statements, to investigate the ontology of Brexit. Epistemic modality refers to linguistic devices that allow modification with regards to confidence, truthfulness, and probability, and enables investigation of MPs' commitments. Commitments are a part of their status function declaration, which create institutional reality. Analysis of such commitments permits inference about the institutional reality of Brexit. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/90RRWApg0rQ.