Institutional Status Quo Research Articles

Reputation-concerned policy makers and institutional status quo bias

We study the policy choice of an office-holding politician who is concerned with the public's perception of his capabilities. The politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform. The reform's success depends critically on the politician's capabilities, which are privately known to the politician. The public observes both his policy choice and the outcome of the reform, and assesses his competence. We show that the politician may engage in socially detrimental reform in order to be perceived as more capable. We investigate the institutional remedy that balances the gains and costs when the policy maker is subject to reputation concerns. Conservative institutions that thwart beneficial reform may potentially improve social welfare.

Making Change

This paper identifies and describes two new norm-based strategies for institutional change to address intractable social problems. In both strategies, advocates “foreground” and criticize norms supporting the institutional status quo before either promoting an alternative existing norm via normative reframing of the issue, or creating and promoting an entirely new norm via normative innovation to build support for new institutional arrangements. Drawing on examples of institutional change addressing the problems of climate change and violence against women, the analysis illustrates how these strategies are especially effective in the face of opposition from vested interests or problematic existing norms.

The politics of rights-based approaches in conservation

Scholars and advocates increasingly favor rights-based approaches over traditional exclusionary policies in conservation. Yet, national and international conservation policies and programs have often led to the exclusion of forest-dependent peoples. This article proposes and tests the hypothesis that the failures of rights-based approaches in conservation can be attributed in significant measure to the political economic interest of the state in the tropics. To this end, the article presents findings from the empirical analysis of the Forest Rights Act of 2006 in India. Two key recommendations emerge from this analysis. One, the proposals for operationalizing rights-based approaches will likely be far more effective if they protect the inalienability of a minimal set of rights critical to the subsistence and well-being of forest people, as opposed to promising the protection of an expansive set of rights subject to the instrumentality of conservation. Two, the proponents of rights-based approaches in conservation need to guard against their actions reinforcing the institutional status quo of the state control of forests. This, in turn, requires international conservation groups to join hands with national forest rights movements.

Negotiating Justice for the World: The Role of Power and Inequality in the Drafting of the ICC Statute

This article discusses the structure of the Rome conference convened to finalize a statute for an international criminal court. Contrary to conventional wisdom that presents the conference as a site of argumentation and persuasion this article argues that inequality and power pervaded the negotiations. It shows how the presentation of openness, rational discourse and transparency obfuscates the tension between the highly structured and indeed rational exchange of some countries in negotiation forums and the unequal access and negotiation power of other countries that simply lacked resources to successfully participate and make their position heard. This unequal participation is reflected in the Rome Statute, in which positions advocated by developing countries gave way to compromise solutions that disproportionately affect the standing of less developed states vis‐a‐vis the international court. That power matters in international negotiations is not surprising. However, in the case of the ICC it is not only the conception of material power so central to IR theory. Rather the negotiations were dominated by the representational power of the institutional status quo and in the very project of cosmopolitan legal justice itself. By attempting to show how power can be tamed and reduced in international negotiations scholars reproduce the structures they seek to overcome.

The New Politics of Social Work Practice: Understanding Context to Promote Change

During the past several decades, social work practice in the USA and the industrialised world has become increasingly politicised—a consequence of political-economic, ideological, demographic and cultural changes. This new political environment is reflected in all aspects of social work practice, including its underlying assumptions, theoretical bases, research methods and educational foundation. It influences how all participants in the service process define needs, implement alternative strategies of helping and evaluate their effectiveness. Persistent misunderstandings about the meaning of politics and its relationship to professional practice, however, present major obstacles to the development of effective responses to this dramatic transformation. At the organisational and societal levels, these misunderstandings discourage challenges to the institutional status quo. At the micro level, they rationalise existing hierarchies between social service agencies and service users, and between workers and clients. To counteract these tendencies, this article conceives of politics as those relationships and activities that reflect power and value differences and which influence critical decisions about the distribution of resources, rights, access, opportunities and status. It examines the forces altering the politics of practice, in both the USA and other industrialised nations, and suggests ways social workers can create effective responses in the areas of education, practice theory and research.

Machiavellian Democracy in the Good Society

Machiavellian Democracy in the Good Society

The Enabling Role of Social Position in Diverging from the Institutional Status Quo: Evidence from the UK National Health Service

This study examines the relationship between social position, both within the field and within the organization, and the likelihood of individual actors initiating organizational changes that diverge from the institutional status quo. I explore this relationship using data from 93 change projects conducted by clinical managers at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. The results show social position, both within the field and within the organization, influences actors' likelihood to initiate two types of organizational change that diverge from the institutional status quo, namely, (1) changes that diverge from the institutionalized template of role division among organizations and (2) changes that diverge from the institutionalized template of role division among professional groups in a field. The findings indicate that these two types of divergent organizational change are likely to be undertaken by individual actors with different profiles in terms of social position within the field and the organization.

Bleaching a dialectal voice in political discourse

In 1973, former President of Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba delivered nine speeches in which he recounted episodes of the national movement. Even though delivered in an official setting and to a highly educated audience, the semi-planned speeches were delivered in the dialectal variety of Arabic, i.e. Tunisian Arabic. The speeches were brought together in a book form titled ḥayātī, ’ārā’ī, jihadi (My Life, My Opinions, My Jihād). Their publication in a book form meant that the original performed texts were modified from a spoken mode to a written mode and ‘translated’ from Tunisian Arabic, a dialectal form of Arabic, to fuṣḥā, the High variety of Arabic (Ferguson 1959). The rewriting of the speeches led to strategic sociolinguistic choices. In the translation process, the linguistic product was regulated by a web of competing institutions of power, sites of linguistic ideologies, and linguistic practices; each of which represents an institution of power whose interests shift strategically between moments of ideological convergence and/or divergence, if not rivalry and connivance, among and between them. The present essay is an attempt to explore those sociolinguistic choices translated into erasures, shifts, modifications, and polishing of the original text. The carefully orchestrated changes in the original text, I believe, aim at re-establishing the authoritative presidential voice, restoring the institutional linguistic status quo, and rendering Bourguiba’s personal ‘ḥkāyāt’, stories, to ‘tārīkh aš-šaʿb t-tūnsi’, ‘the history of the Tunisian people’.

Belgium: Towards the Breakdown of a Nation-State in the Heart of Europe?

Due to reversal of the center-periphery cleavage between Flemish and Francophones by the 1960s, the Belgian unitary state was transformed gradually into a fully fledged federal state. In spite of this empowerment of the regions and communities, the aftermath of the June 2007 general elections showed that Belgium was moving into a crucial, and maybe final, phase of its community conflict. Conflicts over socioeconomic autonomy have replaced the original language issues, essentially opposing on the one hand the Francophones in Wallonia and Brussels unanimously defending the institutional status quo of the current federal state, and on the other hand most Flemish political elites calling for radical autonomy, and some even for independence. In the near future, undoubtedly more policy competences will be devolved, but this “lighter but fitter Belgium” outcome may not satisfy Flemish elites.

The Choice of International Institutions: Cooperation, Alternatives and Strategies

We develop a framework that explains the choice of institutions to address international cooperation problems. We begin with boundedly rational actors who make institutional choices based on the properties of the cooperation problem they face and the menu of international institutions available to them. If the institutional status quo offers an appropriate venue for the prevailing cooperation problem, then actors will either use a focal institution or select a readily available alternative; if no suitable venue is available in the institutional status quo then costlier and riskier strategies of institutional change and creation will be pursued. The framework further allows us to incorporate the impact of international organizations and governance arrangements on the menu for institutional choice, to combine elements of rationalist and constructivist institutional accounts, and to address distributional and power considerations inherent to the choice of international institutions. The paper contains many empirical illustrations and is followed by a companion paper that applies the framework to the ongoing development of international institutions for financial reporting.

Surveillance and Social Movements: Lenses on the Repression-Mobilization Nexus

Police monitoring of law-abiding activists at protest events. A CIA-sponsored program dedicated to investigating financial transac tions. An NSA initiative to collect data from massive numbers of domestic phone calls. The Pentagon's aborted Terrorism Informa tion and Prevention System, TIPS, and Total Information Awareness programs. The USA Patriot Act. Over the last half-decade, Ameri can citizens have been bombarded with a dizzying array of issues and controversies re lated to state surveillance initiatives. While the potential impact of surveillance activities is widespread-some claim, for instance, that the recent NSA program sought to obtain da ta from every call placed in the U.S.-its ef fects are most squarely centered on settings that pose a challenge to the institutional po litical status quo. It is clear that such efforts have enormous potential effects on the shape of political contention, and that these effects emerge in multifaceted ways. Rich historical accounts offer a window into these complexities. Take Jeremy Varon's Bringing the War Home, a compelling and nuanced chronicle of New Leftist militancy in the U.S. and Germany dur ing the 1960s and 1970s. Varon focuses on two organizations in particular: the Weather Underground (WU) in America and the West German Red Army Faction (RAF). While not a comparative study per se, he uses these two juxtaposed cases to develop a layered analysis of how activists in both countries came to embrace violent revolutionary ac tion, and how varied interactions with the state and civil society shaped their distinct trajectories. Policing agencies in both nations em ployed a variety of means to actively monitor and disrupt the WU and RAF. Surveillance through wiretaps, agent observation of pub lic events, illegal break-ins, and infiltration by informants and provocateurs-constituted the meat of the state's repressive efforts, at least in the U.S. Varon notes that, even be fore the Weatherman organization went un The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch US American Social Movements, by Jules Boykoff. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 288 pp. $80.00 cloth. ISBN: 0415978106.

Divide et impera: Financial supervision unification and central bank fragmentation effect

This paper analyses how the role of the central bank can influence the unification of the overall financial supervision architecture. We claim that the policymaker's choices can be viewed as a sequential process in which the institutional status quo matters. The degree of unification in supervision is decided based on the position of the central bank. If the central bank involvement in supervision and its reputation are high, the unification level is likely to be low, and vice versa. The central bank fragmentation effect can be explained through the three possible channels of moral hazard, bureaucracy, and reputation endowment effects. The empirical analysis–performed with ordered logit and probit functions on a dataset of 89 countries–confirms the robustness of the central bank fragmentation effect.

Antitrust Enforcement in the Medical Services Industry: What Does It All Mean?

Before 1975, federal antitrust authorities neglected the health care sector, thereby allowing the entrenchment of many anticompetitive practices and institutions that seemed not only "natural," but also beneficial to the quality and professionalism of doctor-patient relations. While antitrust enforcement shares the usual physician preference for free enterprise, prosecutorial discretion is often feared as eroding professional discretion and even well-intentioned reform. However, strengthened competition in the health services industry offers a way to bring some stability to health policy, and to resolve some of the conflicts between advocates of institutional status quo and enthusiasts for increased government regulatory power.

Financial Supervision Unification and Central Bank Fragmentation Effect

This paper analyses how the central bank role can influence the unification process of the overall financial supervision architecture. We claim that the policymaker's choices can be viewed as a sequential process in which the institutional status quo matters. The degree of unification in supervision is decided based on the position of the central bank. If the central bank involvement in supervision and its reputation are high, the unification level is likely to be low, and vice versa. The central bank fragmentation effect can be explained through three possible channels: the moral hazard effect, the bureaucracy effect, the reputation endowment effect. The empirical analysis - performed with ordered logit and probit functions with a dataset of 89 countries - confirmed the robustness of the central bank fragmentation effect.

Defending the Institutional Status Quo: Communist Leadership of the Second Russian State Duma, 1996–99

The 1995 Russian parliamentary elections returned a State Duma dominated by an alliance of the Communist Party (CPRF) and the Agrarian (APG) and Popular Power (PP) groupings, whose combined number fell just four votes short of an overall majority. Such a powerful voting bloc might have been expected to undo the power‐sharing principles on which the First Duma (1994–95) operated. Rather than challenge the status quo, however, the CPRF defended it on several occasions. In this paper, I argue that existing arrangements held benefits for the CPRF and its leftist allies. In the absence of a stable, disciplined majority, the Duma's rules gave leftist deputies the incentives and flexibility to organize collectively.

Neutral, Colluding or Subversive?

The restructuring of the British public sector since 1979 has brought marketization to the public services, including higher education. With this comes the concomitant managerial function of marketing. Academics and othersperhaps have a tendency to shrug such activity off as ‘administration’. However, it can be argued that the marketing discourse itself contains a number of subdiscourses. One belongs to the marketing practitioner,who may regard the practice as politically neutral or ‘common-sensical’.Others, from a different political position may see marketing as acontrolling device to support the market system, and with it an acceptance of a societal and institutional status quo. However, it is also possible tosee marketing as a subversive means to overturn tradition and promote new values, perspectives and different types of higher education institutions.

All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary Blues of Jayne Cortez

Although Jayne Cortez is one of the most popular poets in the United States, few critics have examined her work in detail. Eugene B. Redmond devotes some attention to her poetry in Drumvoices (1976); Barbara Christian has published review essay (1985); Aldon Nielsen discusses Cortez's work in his seminal study Black Chant: The Languages of African American Postmodernism (1997); and Kimberly N. Brown has recently published a chapter on her in Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color (1998). The neglect of Cortez's poetry reflects an indifference toward poetry generally and, more specifically, the Black Arts Movement which shaped her approach to writing. Despite the recent attention devoted to Sterling Brown, the vast majority of critics continues to focus upon various prose forms. And while this attention has contributed a reassessment of the importance of African American literature, many black poets--Henry Dumas, for instance--have been all but forgotten. The critical indifference toward the Black Arts Movement stems from bitter disagreements over the definition of literature between conventional critics, on the one hand, and Black Aesthetic proponents, on the other. Black Arts poets contended that they had become the new avant-garde in American literature, but critics like Henry Louis Gates countered that Black Aesthetic theorists were essentialist and chauvinist, and dismissed the poetry of the period as mere rhetoric. The adherence to cultural nationalism inhibited a truly revolutionary poetics because fostered a manichean world view wherein poets often conceptualized representation as reactions to the colonizer. As Patrick Taylor argues m his Fanonian study of African Caribbean literature and culture, the inability of the colonized to act on her/his own terms reflects a world view shaped by slave ethics (55). The widespread rejection of the blues as submissive music reflected a sense of confusion not unlike the false consciousness to which the poets we re opposed, and their conceptualization of representation as a dialogue with the master undercut one of the primary objectives of the movement--to speak directly to the colonized. Nonetheless, Black Arts writers were correct when they called attention to the potentiality of a sound-based poetics. As David Lionel Smith says, Though Gates often assaults Black Aesthetic critics for having an ideological agenda, the real struggle is between an ideology that rejects the institutional status quo and another that embraces it (106). While the academy has traditionally privileged metaphor as a universal sine qua non of the poetic, is also important to consider the political implications of this viewpoint. Barbara Harlow has pointed out that indictments against much of Third World poetry as rhetorical are based upon attempts to create a universal idea--that genuine poetry is based upon metaphor--out of a locally based notion that follows Aristotle's ideas in The Poetics (50). Who knows what a poem ought to sound like, Charles Olson writes, until it's thar? (79). My contention is that Black Aesthetic poetic theories are best exemplified in the poetry of Jayne Cortez, whose work demonstrates the full potentiality of what I call a blues poetics; that is, the most profound manifestation of the tradition of African American Resistance poetry. Earlier poets like Sterling Brown and the Langston Hughes of the 1920s had resisted misrepresentation by transcribing vernacular forms onto the page. Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, and the Hughes of Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) fused their fascination with vernacular forms with a concern for modem literary conventions. However, Black Arts poets, who were attuned to the impact of Malcolm X and James Brown on black audiences, realized that the sermon and song/shout could be utilized to create a popular people's poetry (Neal, Shine 20-21). In other words, rather than envisioning their work primarily as reading material, poets attempted to incarnate--that is, become--the black performer and thereby blur the distinction between poetry and song by using the voice as an instrument. …

Does disability affect self-esteem and learning? A school based study of adolescents

The relationships between the natural environment and poverty have been a central theme in the sustainability and development literatures. However, they have been less influential in mainstream international development and conservation policies, which often neglect or fail to adequately address these relationships. This paper examines how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may influence the framing of environment–poverty relationships. We argue that the SDGs’ comprehensive nature could provide an opportunity for better environment–poverty integration. To realise this potential, SDG-related activities will need to challenge the institutional status quo; transform how we measure, understand and implement development; design interventions that reflect local visions of development; make trade-offs between SDGs explicit; and address ultimate drivers of environmental degradation and poverty.

Law, Deconstruction, and the Resistance to Theory

ideal. And this in turn gives rise to the history of variant legal creeds and philosophies, the debate between conservatives, liberals, and radicals all of whom adopt some particular view of how the balance can best be struck. What de Man suggests is that the rhetoric of law more specifically, the tensions that develop in its language between constative and performative modes may be at the root of these differences and affect them in ways not fully understood by exponents of this or that principled viewpoint. Now there might, on the face of it, seem little to choose between de Man's deconstructionist reading of the Social Contract and the arguments put forward by members of the critical legal studies movement. They also make practice of exposing contradictions and antinomies, pointing to areas where law is indeterminate, and claiming that judgments are arrived at not on the basis of impartial reasoning, or in pursuit of justice and truth, but always under pressure of competing political interests. Furthermore, they would appear to follow his example by treating legal discourse in rhetorical terms, as language that works to persuade, win over, or (most often) simply to coerce subjects into accepting the current institutional status quo. Any attempt to derive code of practice from first principles, rules, or natural justice is regarded by these delegitimising critics as ruse in the service of authority and power. Their main target is the doctrine of legal formalism, classically defined (in the words of Roberto Unger) as in the availability of deductive or quasi-deductive method capable of giving determinate solutions to particular problems of legal choice.39 This belief found its most articulate expression in the work of Hans Kelsen, the neo-Kantian theorist who sought to ground jurisprudence in self-sufficient system of priori concepts, ground rules, and regulative terms, and hence to save it from the looming threat of cultural and ethical relativism.40 This strong version of the formalist case has since been subjected to widespread criticism and nowadays has few adherents. But the doctrine survives, according to Unger, in current attempts to distinguish between questions that belong strictly within the province of legal debate, and issues that open into wider contexts of socio-political argument. Formalism in this sense can be defined more generally as a commitment to, and belief in the possibility of, method of legal justification that contrasts with open-ended disputes about the basic terms of social life, disputes that people call ideological, philosophical, or visionary.41 It is the aim of the critical legal studies movement to demolish the grounds of any such distinction, to show that legal reasoning is always bound up with particular interests, values, priorities, or visions of the social good. And this can best be

CURRENT TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY IN WEST GERMANY

For many observers the Federal Republic of Germany has up to now been the most conservative country in Europe with respect to telecommunications policy. On 16 September 1987, however, the Regi erungskommissionFernmeldewesen (also named Commission', after its chairman Eberhard Witte) submitted a report containing liberalisation proposals for German telecommunications. This report has become the basis of draft legislation which has been prepared by the Ministry of Post and Telecommuni cations to be submitted to the federal cabinet after consultation with the other ministries involved in telecommunications policy. The present paper deals largely with the recommendations of the Witte Com mission against an analytical background of the current regulatory problems which are common to all countries and against the background of the institutional status quo in Germany.