Changing Role Of Institutions Research Articles

Governing the transition to low-carbon futures: A critical survey of energy scenarios for 2050

There is a growing scientific consensus that limiting the increase in global average temperature to around 2 °C above pre-industrial levels is necessary to avoid unacceptable impact on the climate system. This requires that the developed countries’ emissions are radically reduced during the next 40 years. Energy scenario studies provide insights on the societal transitions that might be implied by such low-carbon futures, and in this paper we discuss how a greater attention to different governance and institutional issues can complement future scenario exercises. The analysis is based on a critical review of 20 quantitative and qualitative scenario studies, all of relevance for meeting long-term climate policy objectives. The paper: (a) analyzes some key differences in energy technology mixes and primary energy use patterns across these studies; (b) briefly explores the extent and the nature of the societal challenges and policy responses implied; and (c) discusses a number of important implications for the design and scope of future scenario studies. Our review shows that in previous scenario studies the main attention is typically paid to analyzing the impact of well-defined and uniform policy instruments, while fewer studies factor in the role of institutional change in achieving different energy futures. We therefore point towards a number of strategies of integrating issues of transition governance into future scenario analyses, and argue for a closer synthesis of qualitative and quantitative scenario building.

Online higher education commodity

This article analyzes the current trend towards online education. It examines some of the reasons for the trend and the ramifications it may have on students, faculty and institutions of higher learning. The success and profitability of online programs and institutions such as the University of Phoenix has helped to make the move towards online education more appealing to other institutions, as well as, helped to change how online education is viewed by the public. Reasons such as cost, accessibility and flexibility are often presented as motivations for why many students and institutions use online learning. However, the reasons behind the movement towards more online learning may be more motivated by capitalistic ideals associated with an ever increasingly knowledge-based economy than that of providing quality and more accessible education. The movement towards more online learning coupled with the increased corporatization of higher education may be helping to contribute to the commodification of knowledge and the changing role of institutions and education itself. Thus potentially leading to a state in which education is further transformed into a commodity, students becoming more like consumers, faculty into entrepreneurs, and institutions of higher learning into storefronts for knowledge.

Tate Modern: Pushing the limits of regeneration

► Questions the conventional limits to regeneration. ► Identifies the manifest tensions between the instrumentalisation of museums and galleries, and the potential to undermine their core purpose. ► Argues that evaluation cannot be reduced to uni-dimensional bottom line in a multi-causal environment. Both, the role of institutional changes changing the conditions of museum priorities and processes; and redefining who their audience(s) might be; and, how different representational or curatorial practices can, likewise, re-configure who and what, as well as where the audience is. ► Provides an example of the Tate Modern Turbine Hall that challenges the passive notion of audience that regeneration, and social inclusion, implies. ► Illustrates the benefits of attempting to ‘think together’ two quite different literatures on audience and representation: of normative regeneration and museology and shows how the literature on museology and its concepts of audience offer some pointers toward a reformed vision of what and who is being regenerated. This paper questions the conventional limits of regeneration and highlights the limited range of approaches, especially in relation to cultural institutions and their multiplicity of audiences, and the fact that different policies evoke, or construct, various ‘publics’, ‘visitors’ and ‘audiences’. The question of who gains and looses is given an extra twist when the object or instrument of regeneration is a cultural institution: a gallery or museum. To this end we identify the manifest tensions between the instrumentalisation of museums and galleries, and the potential to undermine their core purpose. We draw upon a second literature of museology to provide contrasting notions of audience and inclusion since such analyses sensitize the debate regarding audience and regeneration and will illustrate these issues by reference to Tate Modern in London.

Manufacturing productivity in China and India: The role of institutional changes

In this paper we undertake a comparative study of productivity in the manufacturing sector for China and India using data from survey of manufacturing industries for the two countries. We find that productivity of manufacturing industries in China relative to that in India improved substantially over the 1998–2003 period. Specifically, the average total factor productivity (TFP) growth for the manufacturing sector over this period was about 11% higher in China than in India. We document two substantial changes in government policies in China that were not witnessed in India. First, the late 1990s saw an enormous wave of ownership restructuring due to the formal endorsement of private property rights by the Chinese central government. Second, in 1997 a large scale labour retrenchment program was launched to address the long standing problem of labour redundancy in the public sector. Using data from the Chinese survey of manufacturing industries, we quantify the impact of these large scale institutional changes on TFP of Chinese manufacturing industries. We find that these policy changes can explain about 30% of the growth in TFP of manufacturing industries. Hence we conclude that these institutional changes in China can account for a significant part of the gains in productivity of manufacturing industries in China relative to that in India over the 1998–2003 period.

Reforming China's Stock Market: Institutional Change Chinese Style

In this article we examine the dual-track pricing system in China's stock market since its inauguration, a legacy of its economic transition and a major source of institutional predation in the market. We then examine the share structure reform initiated in 2005 that sought to eliminate the distortion this predation had elicited. We interpret the reform push as a process of institutional change and focus on the drivers and theoretical explanations of such changes in China's stock market. We thus advance a model for understanding institutional change, Chinese style. We argue that, initially, the institutional arrangement was constructed by the dynamics of transition – the juxtaposition of the Leninist state and the emerging stock market. This provided huge incentives for state corruption in the emerging market. As the market transition proceeded, the societal and political costs of corruption and market distortion also grew, which produced a crisis that eventually attracted the attention of powerful leaders of the party state. We argue from this case that the broader political context in which specific examples of institutional change occur needs to be examined. Specifically, we argue that powerful agents who are external to given institutional environments can play an important role in institutional change, thus highlighting the political dynamics of an authoritarian state amid systemic transition and global integration.

The relative and incremental information content of earnings vs cash recovery rates

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the relative and incremental information content of a cash recovery‐based measure of performance, the estimated internal rate of return, vs an earnings‐based measure of performance, return on assets, in explaining firms' economic performance.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses the cash recovery rate that is based on continuous time analysis and U‐shaped cash flows to derive the estimated internal rate of return and compare it to return on assets. A cross‐sectional sample was used over a short interval (year 1993 and year 2005) and a time‐series sample (1993‐2005) to empirically examine the relative and incremental information content of the competing measures. Tobin's q and stock returns are used as performance benchmarks.FindingsThe results of the empirical tests indicate that the estimated internal rate of return provides better relative and incremental information content over earnings‐based measures of performance. Specifically, the empirical evidence shows that the estimated internal rate of return is consistently positively related to Tobin's q and stock returns over all measurement intervals.Research limitations/implicationsThese results imply that earnings‐based performance measures are less value relevant compared to cash recovery‐based measures. There are some limitations that may apply to this study. First, the systematic measurement error in estimating the cash recovery rate may not be independent of the measurement error in the estimated internal rate of return. Second, the performance benchmarks used in the study are not free from problems. Particularly, the return on assets is influenced by firms' rate of growth and the Tobin's q is not a perfect measure of business performance. Therefore, one avenue of future research is to assess the usefulness of financial accounting data for analysts forecast. Moreover, future research may also examine the role of institutional changes in financial reporting and its effect on the quality of earnings and economic performance.Originality/valueThis paper presents extended research on cash recovery‐based vs earnings‐based metrics as proxies for economic return using improved research designs, larger samples and new sensitivity analyses.

A Theory of Institutional Change: Illustrated by Dutch City-Provinces and Dutch Land Policy

Since the early 1990s, planning theory has focused on the issue of institutional change. Not only does institutional change have clear bearings on processes of spatial planning, it is also, increasingly, seen as an object of planning. A core concept in the literature is the juxtaposition of ‘institutional design’ and ‘institutional evolution’. Yet, in understanding processes and the role of institutional change, this dichotomy does not appear to be very helpful. We therefore propose a more encompassing perspective that includes both ‘design’ and ‘evolution’ dimensions, invoking various components from theories of policy change, inspired by the work of Kingdon. We try to unravel, in particular, why, under seemingly comparable conditions, some cases show substantive institutional transformations while others do not. We briefly discuss two cases from the Netherlands to illustrate this point, namely the thwarted process of establishing city regions within the scalar fabric of territorial governance, and some instrumental changes in land policy.

Politics and Society in Latin America at the Start of the New Millennium

This article discusses the existing relationships between politics and society at the start of the twenty-first century in Latin America, a region that is characterized by its heterogeneity, and that is addressed as a homogenous whole. Politics are treated as an extension of democracy, the changing role of institutions, the weakness of political capital, difficulties of representation, and the new regionalist integrationism. When engaging in social analysis, this work addresses divisions among social classes, large and growing inequality, poverty, lack of security, and multiculturalism.

Transition and institutional change

The changing roles of institutions in the transition of Central and Eastern Europe to a market economy have been much neglected. The unforeseen character of both the sudden collapse of communist one-party rule, of the planned economic systems and the subsequent fast disillusionment of the population was closely related to the nature, interests and resilience of institutions. The changing features of institutions influenced the mentality of those representing them; their growing consciousness strengthened the institutional changes. The slowness and inadequacy of structural changes and efficiency improvement are in great part due to the resistance of institutions which is a consequence of the relatively smooth and peaceful character of the social transformation.

The Marriage of Finance and Order: Changes in the Mexican Political Elite

Recent literature on Latin American political economy appears to echo work of the 1960s and 1970s emphasising technical expertise in government. Sikkink and Geddes, for example, suggest that the role of technical experts and professionalisation of the bureaucracy explain Brazil's relative economic successes in the 1960s.1Conaghan, Malloy and Abugattas focus on the role of technocrats in economic policy—making in the Central Andes.2Following seminal work by Camp and Smith, Hernández Rodríguez presents the latest data on the role of technocrats in the Mexican political elite.3To a large extent, this recent literature on technocrats in Latin America fails to address one of the main issues debated in the earlier literature: the political consequences of increasingly technocratic government. A second problem with recent work is that, when it does address causal issues, it tends to follow the functionalist logic of earlier literature. Using data on Mexican political elites, this article develops a new typology which carefully differentiates the new technobureaucratic elite from other elite groups. The aim is to shed new light on the debate over the implications of increasing technocratisation. Secondly, this study of the rise of a new elite emphasises the role of institutional changes within the government bureaucracy in addition to the state's functional response to changes in its politico—economic environment. This article begins with a brief discussion of earlier general — and Mexico—specific — literature on technocrats.Some analysts of technocracy in the 1960s and 1970s saw technocrats as apolitical specialists whose growing role in society heralded ‘an end to ideology’ and increased efficiency in government.4

Institutional Changes and Development of the Fishing Industry in a Japanese Island Community

The main focus of this study is placed on an analytical assessment of technological and institutional changes centering around the development of local fishing industry in the 1960's at Katsumoto-ura community, Iki Island, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. The technological change involved wide acceptance of innovative elements which have direct bearing upor modernization of fishing technique for local fishermer and fishing operations of the community as a whole. The impact of technological change has ultimate affected the marine ecology of this island. The institutional change, on the other hand, is concerned with development of a local fishing cooperative and its wider socio-economic implications, which resulted in an expansion of multi-functional activities affecting not only the technological sphere but other facets of local fishing industry as well. Contrary to much cited and readily observable technological change, which often leads to a notion of monistic technological determinism, this study is oriented to reveal changing roles of institutions, rather than changing technology, as a prime force behind modernization of local commercia fishing and as a more effective means of adaptive strategy than the latter. As findings from this study indicate, socio-economic consequences of modernization, besides playing a key role in reshaping the local fishing operations and the economy, have led to greater involvement of the local population in all spheres of socio-economic affairs. Effective readjustment to local social conditions and the fishing industry was accomplished by the cooperative. By imposing institutional changes on the local scene, the fishing cooperative has adjusted to changing economic conditions with less difficulty than individua kin groups, even though the basic fishing operatior clings to the traditional mode of the household unit.