Period Of Institutional Change Research Articles

Environmental and Economic Trends in the Baikal Region and the Far East During a Period of Institutional Changes

ABSTRACT This article studies the dynamics of environmental and economic development in the constituent entities of the Far East and Baikal region during the formation of new institutions in the country’s East. Economic development and environmental pressure per capita in 2009–2012 and 2012–2016 were calculated for each region and the Russian Federation. In addition, a decoupling index was calculated to detect the discrepancy between the economic growth rate and rate of environmental pollution in the regions under analysis. This study uncovered disparities in the environmental and economic development of the regions of the Russian Federation’s East. In 2016, there was an almost fivefold difference between the maximum and minimum values of the territories’ GRP [gross regional product] per capita. A marked gap in negative environmental impact is also noted. It is established that in most eastern regions, a decoupling effect is evident in the discharge of polluted wastewater and emissions of air pollutants from stationary sources. Finally, it is concluded that the institutional decisions made in accordance with the Far East’s new model of development have not yet had a noticeable positive effect on the environmental and economic indicators of the designated territories.

Sel'skaya molodezh' pervoj treti XX v. i ee vliyanie na socium v ocenkah sovremennyh issledovatelej

The article studies historiography of the rural youth phenomenon during the war, reforms and revolution. The author tries to highlight the most important conclusions of modern Russian and Belarus historians discussing the fundamental changes in the behavioral model of the rural society development, including demographic one, as a response to the existing challenges of the modernization era and the period of institutional changes. Innovative assessment of the impact of the transformation period of youth associations on the peasant generation, the role of youth in the evolution of the moral state of society is revealed.

Religiosity and economic attitudes in post-communist Central Europe: Some additional evidence

Religion and religiosity are rarely the main focus of economic research; although, some studies have already shown the importance of religion for economic development. Previous research has also provided some evidence that religiosity matters in the process of formation of economic attitudes. Economic attitudes and culture in general affect social institutions and economic development, especially in the periods of institutional change. This article provides some additional evidence that religiosity has had an impact on economic attitudes in post-communist countries. Thus, religion shall be taken seriously as an explanatory variable when it comes to evaluation of transition process and its outcomes.

A methodology to design a performance management system in preventive care

BackgroundPreventive care has gained increasing attention in health reforms around the world due to its ability to reduce the burden of disease and to save health costs. Nevertheless, there is a gap in terms of the development of reliable systems to measure and evaluate performance of preventive care in order to support decision-making and increase service outcomes. The aim of this study is to define a methodology for designing a performance management system (PMS) in order to effectively support the planning, control and evaluation of preventive care and to identify the factors that influence such a process.MethodsThe methodology is based on the participatory action research approach, which implies collaboration between researchers and practitioners. The study was articulated in four phases and carried out in an Italian regional healthcare system that was undergoing a major reorganization process.ResultsThe findings provide insights into the peculiarities that affect preventive care and highlight two categories of critical factors: general issues regarding the process and specific issues regarding preventive care. The first category includes the importance of interactions between academics, physicians and policy-makers, the impact of workloads and red tape on employee involvement and the increased conservation mechanisms during periods of institutional change. The second category concerns the strong heterogeneity of preventive activities within health organizations, the huge amount of regulations and the incompleteness of information systems.ConclusionThe development of a PMS for preventive care can best be served by collaborative methods that involve academics, professionals and policy-makers, whose roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined, and by an improvement in transparency and communication within organizations in order to enhance the involvement of different professionals at appropriate times and in appropriate ways. Key recommendations that may improve the maintenance and use of information systems are proposed to policy-makers.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

In the Shadow of Litigation: Arbitration and Medical Malpractice Reform

Abstract Alongside the dramatic growth in the use of mandatory, binding arbitration in the United States, proposals to use arbitration in lieu of medical malpractice litigation have proliferated as a mechanism for providing a more efficient and less costly way to resolve disputes. However, these proposals have largely been divorced from an understanding of the history, politics, and law of arbitration, which comes with a significant cost. Although liberals developed arbitration with the goal of ensuring access to justice for those who struggled to find it in traditional courts, conservatives (both in Congress and in the private sector) began to promote it in the latter part of the 20th century as a way to keep what they considered “lesser” cases out of court and to better protect corporate and other powerful institutional defendants from litigation. This article examines this transition toward the use of private, mandatory, and binding arbitration through three periods of institutional change: partisan conversion, judicialization, and privatization. It argues that it is essential to situate malpractice reform proposals in the history, politics, and law of arbitration in practice, where partisan efforts have privatized arbitration with significant effects for equality under the law.

Organizational Structure, Policy Learning, and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Chinese Commune

Using original county-level panel data on Chinese communes over two decades, 1958 to 1979, this article builds upon existing theories about the influence of organizational size and structure on institutional performance. We found a consistent and robust interaction effect among the size of the commune (i.e., the coordination level) and its subunits, the brigade (i.e., the supervisory level) and production teams (i.e., the working level), on agricultural productivity. Future work on the relationship between organizational performance and size would likely benefit from including such interaction variables. We also provide evidence that to create a more productive institution, county-level officials learned from their most productive neighbors and adjusted the size of their communes accordingly. This work explains the role of organizational structure as a driver of economic performance and how policy diffusion occurred during China’s Maoist era—a period generally treated as a monolith rather than a period of institutional change.

When does it make sense to focus business portfolios? A study of business group responses to institutional change in India

PurposeThis paper aims to report the findings from a longitudinal study of Indian business groups responding to the pro-market reforms that the government had initiated. It explores their diversification choices at the group level and the group performance consequences of these choices during a period of institutional changes (1990-2008).Design/methodology/approachOrdinary least squares regressions were used to analyze data spanning the 1988-2008 study period for 98 Indian business groups.FindingsResults show that business groups that focused their portfolios in the early stages of institutional reforms tended to perform worse than their counterparts that did not do so. However, as market reforms became more established, business groups that made the transition from an unfocused to a more focused portfolio experienced superior performance consequences.Originality/valueThe findings underscore the temporal dimension of focusing and suggest that both changing strategy by refocusing business portfolio too early or waiting too long to refocus can hurt performance outcomes.

How do institutional transitions impact the efficacy of related and unrelated diversification strategies used by business groups?

Drawing from institutional theory and organizational theory, this paper reports findings from a longitudinal study of Indian business groups as they were responding to pro-market institutional reforms. It explores their diversification choices at the group level, and the group performance consequences of these choices during a period of institutional change (1988–2012). Results show that although overall group diversification had a positive impact on performance, as institutions developed and market reforms took root, unrelated diversification resulted in poorer performance. However, related diversification strategies resulted in positive group performance outcomes after pro-market reforms had taken root. This suggests that the performance consequences of alternative diversification strategies adopted by business groups change as institutional development occurs, an important facet of business group evolution that has received limited attention in the extant literature.

The redevelopment of peri-urban villages in the context of path-dependent land institution change and its impact on Chinese inclusive urbanization: The case of Nanhai, China

Following nearly three decades of urban sprawl, China's urbanization has entered a new era of land redevelopment that encompasses built-up land in villages in a manner that is unprecedented. Village redevelopment involves both dramatic institutional change and governance restructuring. The extant literature on this redevelopment focuses primarily on top-down initiatives launched by urban governments, paying little attention to villages' responses as actual landholders. Through a case study of village redevelopment in Nanhai, this paper examines villages' behaviour during periods of institutional change and their interactions with urban governments to shape final outcomes. Institutional uncertainty emerges during path-dependent institutional change, as revealed through the absence of effectively executed planning control and unclearly defined profit sharing. As a result, villages and urban governments sign incomplete contracts for entire redevelopment plans. Such agreements result in disordered competition for land rents that take the form of villages ‘holding up’ the government that has previously made a commitment to the village pursuant to the contracts. Villages maximize their profits and attenuate the government's role in ensuring public revenue, whereas government compromises related to development control challenge the capacity of limited public governance. The government's concessions related to profit distribution result in increased inequality between more prosperous villages and other groups, such as migrant populations and remote rural villages. Research findings contribute to a comprehensive understanding of newly created governance in redevelopment and call for a critical evaluation of existing urban renewal policies to ensure that urbanization is an inclusive process.

The Effect of Institutional Evolution on Indian Firms' Internationalization: Disentangling Inward- and Outward-Oriented Effects

We draw upon the institutional theoretical perspective to study Indian firms' internationalization during periods of institutional change. We focus on firms establishing a subsidiary abroad. We delve into the nature of institutional change and propose two categories of institutional change that have impacts of different magnitudes on international investments. We also investigate the case of firms affiliated with domestic business groups. We develop four hypotheses and test them using data on Indian firms. Our findings provide interesting insights into different institutional factors that promote firms' internationalization in a context characterized by dynamic change. The results of our study have significant theoretical and managerial implications.

The Recruitment Paradox: Network Recruitment, Structural Position, and East German Market Transition

Economic institutions structure links between labor-market informality and social stratification. The present study explores how periods of institutional change and post-socialist market transition alter network-based job finding, in particular informal recruitment. We highlight how market transitions affect both the prevalence and distribution of network-based recruitment channels: open-market environments reduce informal recruitment’s prevalence but increase its association with high wages. We test these propositions using the case of the former East Germany’s market transition and a comparison with West Germany’s more stable institutional environment. Following transition, workers in lower tiers increasingly turned toward formal intermediaries, active employee search, and socially “disembedded” matches. Meanwhile, employers actively recruited workers into higher-wage positions. Implications for market transition theory and post-socialist stratification are discussed.

Public Information Arrival and Investor Reaction During a Period of Institutional Change: An Episode of Early Years of a Newly Independent Central Bank

Employing unique data derived directly from Reuters electronic brokerage platform for currency trading, this paper investigates the reaction of investors to central bank announcements on foreign exchange market in Poland in years 1999-2003. Our sample period is interesting as it captures a time during which the National Bank of Poland (NBP) gained independence and it was transforming institutionally and switching to a new monetary policy regime, namely inflation targeting. Evidence indicates that central bank communication helped reduce foreign exchange market uncertainty, measured here by the conditional variance of foreign exchange returns, and increased trading volume. The findings suggest that in newly emerging economies with major institutional changes investors may react significantly to central bank communication and central banks can hence play an important role in market development during an institutional change. Our results also have broader implications for the applicability of micro-structure models in newly emerging economies.

Public information arrival and investor reaction during a period of institutional change: An episode of early years of a newly independent central bank

Employing unique data derived directly from the Reuters electronic brokerage platform for currency trading, this paper investigates the reaction of investors to central bank announcements on the foreign exchange market in Poland in the years 2000–2003. Our sample period captures a time during which the National Bank of Poland (NBP) gained independence and it was transforming institutionally and switching to a new monetary policy regime; namely inflation targeting. Evidence indicates that central bank communication helped reduce foreign exchange market uncertainty, measured by the conditional variance of foreign exchange returns, and increased trading volume. The findings suggest that in newly emerging economies with major institutional changes, investors may react significantly to central bank communication, and central banks can hence play an important role in market development during an institutional change. Our results also have broader implications for the applicability of micro-structure models in newly emerging economies.

Status, Peer Influence, and Racio-ethnic Diversity in Times of Institutional Change: An Examination from European Labour Law

This paper employs institutional theory as a theoretical lens and examines the role of status and peer influence on diversity following a change in European labour law in 1995. This change in European labour law, well-known as the Bosman ruling, significantly increased labour mobility in European soccer. The ruling lifted restrictions on the number of foreign players that soccer teams could recruit and eliminated compulsory transfer fees for players whose contracts had ended. We demonstrate that the Bosman ruling, while increasing the number of foreign players on a team, did not uniformly affect all teams. Our investigation indicates that the increase in racio-ethnic diversity in teams depended on the status of teams and on peer influence (the behaviour of similar teams). This setting, though specific to European labour law in the context of soccer, allows an examination of the complex interplay between racio-ethnic diversity, status, and peer influence in a period of institutional change.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

This case explores the complexity and dilemmas that faculty and academic administrators at Southwestern University (SU) encountered as they engaged in the development and establishment of a partnership with the local city’s school districts. The partnership—carried at SU’s College of Science but funded and based through a university-based agency—aimed to prepare math and science educators to better respond to the increasing pressure of improving student achievement in those subject areas. The complications and dilemmas that the math and science partnership encountered are traced and made visible as its establishment coincides with a period of institutional changes at SU. The changes involve the university’s redefinition of its mission and goals including an institutional shift from a focus on teaching to one on research. The shift brought into stark relief a long-standing tension between two cherished but unequally valued academic practices: disciplinary (or basic) scholarship versus transdisciplinary (educational or applied) scholarship. Thus, set against the backdrop of institutional change and the resulting unstable institutional environment, the College of Science faculty who were part of the math and science partnership were confronted with an irreducible task: to work to reconcile the traditions and expectations of their department’s disciplinary orientations that privileged disciplined based scholarship with the institutional commitment acquired through the partnership expecting a more transdisciplinary, applied educational scholarship. What follows describes how faculty and academic administrators navigated through this complex institutional tension and context, the dilemmas they confronted, and some of the outcomes that resulted.

The Supreme Court of Canada and Strategic Decision Making: Examining Justices’ Voting Patterns during Periods of Institutional Change

This article examines the voting behavior of justices of the Supreme Court of Canada during two important periods of institutional change: the end of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I argue that these changes affected the justices' voting patterns in systematic ways. My assertion is that the end of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council removes a constraint on Supreme Court decision-making, which had led to strategic voting by the justices in the period during which the JCPC could examine and reverse the Supreme Court's decisions. For the Charter of Rights, I assert that its existence as a legal document served as a constraint for conservative justices on the Court in the period immediately following its passage. Drawing on the universe of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1945 to 2005 in criminal, tax, and tort cases, I use Baum's (1988, 1989) method of examining policy change on the Supreme Court over time. I examine judicial votes before and after the Supreme Court becomes a court of last resort in 1949, and before and after passage of the Charter of Rights in 1982. Then, I employ a logistic regression model in the Charter of Rights period and a comparison of Supreme Court of Canada and JCPC voting in the 1949 period. I find support for the assertion that justices will vote strategically when faced with threat of reversal. The Charter of Rights also appears to have a constraining effect. Its mandate as a progressive document appears to have a constraining effect on conservative justices' voting patterns, at least in the short-term following its passage.

Masculinity and social class, tradition and change: the production of ‘young Christian gentlemen’ at an elite Australian boys’ school

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the kinds of values they work to instil in their students and the kinds of men they aim to produce. This article looks closely at one such school in order to gain an understanding of how it sought to shape a particularly classed, leadership-oriented masculinity, during a period of institutional change. The historical context for the study is the final decade of the twentieth century, a period that saw the approximate beginning of a ‘boys’ crisis’ in Australian education, which for schools like the one in this study meant a degree of reconceptualisation of practices and ideologies of masculinity. The article draws on a set of oral history interviews with former students and executive staff of the school.

Institutional change in natural resource management in New South Wales, Australia: Sustaining capacity and justice

Periods of institutional change are crucial to developing a capacity for just and participatory natural resource management. Whilst the need for such change is often widely recognised, shifting to a new regime is typically uncertain, tentative and uneven. Transitions between regimes are crucial periods when institutional foundations for justice or injustice can be laid for decades. Transitions need to address both formal institutional structures and the informal values, networks and resources that underpin these structures. New South Wales, Australia, has recently undergone a period of major reform in natural resource management, involving substantial institutional and legislative changes. This period of reform illustrates transitional issues of rescaling and changes to decision-making structures. Increased attention to these issues during institutional reform and to the process of transition itself is essential to developing sustainable forms of environmental governance.