Institutional Roots Research Articles

Poverty of Democracy: The Institutional Roots of Political Participation in Mexico. By Claudio A. Holzner. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. xvii, 304. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables.

Poverty of Democracy: The Institutional Roots of Political Participation in Mexico. By Claudio A. Holzner. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. xvii, 304. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables.

The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico. By Matthew R. Cleary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 272p. $28.00. - Poverty of Democracy: The Institutional Roots of Political Participation in Mexico. By Claudio A. Holzner. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 304p. $26.95.

The Sources of Democratic Responsiveness in Mexico. By Matthew R. Cleary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 272p. $28.00. - Poverty of Democracy: The Institutional Roots of Political Participation in Mexico. By Claudio A. Holzner. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 304p. $26.95.

The Institutional Roots of Anti-Corruption Policies: Comparing the Three Baltic States

The idea to establish Independent Anti-Corruption Agencies (IACAs) first appeared on the international agenda in the late 1990s, and has since become a powerful subject for discourse. Responses to this idea have varied among the Baltic states. We ask why and compare the development of Baltic strategies and institutions. Our discussion focuses on how national political systems, perceptions of and discourse surrounding corruption, and external pressures on domestic structures have influenced the initial institutional choice. The resulting policies look very much alike, despite their differing points of departure.

The institutional roots of post-war European economic underperformance: a regional approach

This article investigates which institutions and policies were related to the increase in European unemployment since 1970 and the productivity stagnation since the mid 1990s. By using data for 88 regions in nine European countries, national policies and institutions are analysed in a fixed-effects panel-data model to detect their relative importance after controlling for unobservable regional factors. The main finding is that institutions only started to matter after the oil crisis. The strongest institutional effects on employment came from the net reservation wages and employment protection laws. The institutional effects on productivity were mainly channelled through the employment productivity trade-off. By restricting the supply of labour, these effects were positive on productivity in the short run. However, the article shows that the long-run effects were negative and that there may be institutional roots to the European productivity slow-down in the 1990s.

The œdipus complex, crystallizer of the debate between psychoanalysis and anthropology

The way that anthropologists understand the Oedipus complex, in particular, is a good example of how they understand psychoanalysis in general. Indeed, it has crystallized a set of reactions marked by ignorance, misunderstanding, distortion and screening out and at the same time has provoked suspicion among anthropologists as to psychoanalysis, according to the preconceptions of the various schools of thought and authors implied, and this from the very first contacts up to nowadays. In what way did the psychoanalysts contribute to this and what representation did they, in turn, elaborate of anthropology?The purpose of this paper is to expose the epistemological and historical conditions of the emergence of this debate, and then to develop it by following chronology up to the 1950s and 1960s, while differentiating three major cultural areas, Great Britain, the USA and France, in order to get a clearer picture. From that point on, we will try to diversify our inquiry and to formulate some interpretative hypotheses. In particular, we think that a traumatic event may have inaugurated and organized the history of the relationship between the two disciplines, producing a situation of acculturation with multiple impacts, if we identify them with two cultures coming into contact: what is at stake here is Totem and Taboo in which Freud carries through the first major psychoanalytical approach of the interpretation of ethnographic facts, that leads him to transplant the universality of the Oedipus complex to the very root of the first social institutions and to pinpoint the presence of unconscious processes in their genesis.

Lost in transition: youth, work, and instability in postindustrial Japan

1. The lost generation 2. The historical roots of Japanese school-work institutions 3. The importance of ba, the erosion of ba 4. Unraveling school-employer relationships 5. Networks of advantage and disadvantage for new graduates 6. Narratives of the new mobility 7. The future of the lost generation.

Rooted in Mission: Family and Consumer Sciences in Catholic Universities

The purpose of this paper is to establish the unity between the missions of the Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) discipline and Catholic higher education by demonstrating relationships among (a) Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and the role of the service principle to FCS; (b) Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT) and the centrality of intellect to FCS; and (c) the institutional charism and the shared calling of FCS professionals, exemplified by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, sponsors of Fontbonne University. Key philosophical and foundational FCS papers along with documents pertaining to the principles of CST, CIT, and the charisms of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul, and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet were examined and shared meanings were identified; institutional mission statements from respective sponsored institutions were likewise compared. The review process permitted a very pointed comparison between the disciplinary and institutional missions, substantiating the congruity between the two. The parity between professional and Catholic institutional missions outlined in this paper suggests that the longevity of FCS programs could be fostered by taking root in Catholic institutions.

Revitalizing the institutional roots of Anglo-American corporate governance

Over the past three decades, the topic of corporate governance has become an increasingly high-profile aspect of social-scientific scholarship, in both the Anglo-Saxon world and continental Europe. To a significant extent, however, the conceptual boundaries of the corporate governance debate have been set narrowly in accordance with the logic and language of the dominant ‘agency’ paradigm of governance. According to agency theory, the central problem of corporate governance is the question of how to minimize the (harmful) consequences of the separation of ownership and control within public companies first identified by Berle and Means (1932), by reference to competitive market pressures coupled with market-based incentive and disciplinary mechanisms. In this article, we present an alternative interpretation of the corporate governance problem premised on the logic and language of institution rather than the market, which we argue is both more empirically relevant and conceptually defensible than the dominant agency paradigm. To this end, we rely on some fundamental and longstanding doctrines of Anglo-American corporate law in conjunction with recent developments in the economic theory of the firm. According to the proposed ‘institutional’ model of corporate governance, the central governance problem is that of how to exploit, rather than minimize, the (beneficial) consequences of the separation of ownership and control, so as to engender the development of a more sustainable system of governance than that emanating from the free interplay of (stock) market forces. After setting out the key conceptual underpinnings of our revived institutional model, we analyse how worker involvement in corporate decision-making might be advanced as a way of instrumentalizing this framework within firm-level governance practices.

Possession Versus Property in a Tree Plantation Socioenvironmental Conflict in Southern Cameroon

Industrial tree plantations are worldwide at the origin of a growing number of conflicts between local populations and commercial planters. This case study involves the resistance of local Bulu communities against a large-scale rubber tree plantation in Southern Cameroon. The aim is to understand the institutional roots of the conflict. The methods used are historical analysis and anthropological fieldwork. The Bulu logic of possession and use-value corresponds to a multifunctional forest management based on lineage institutions, individual productive investments, ecological cycles, and a broad metaphysical dimension. The economic logic based on Western-type property titles—enabling bank credit that generates specific pressures—gave birth to the industrial monoculture model. Commercial tree plantations are seen as the highest stage of the transformation of forest ecosystems in order to match the requirements of the financial economy in terms of repayment of interest and loans.

National Model of Technological Catching Up and Innovation: Comparing Patents of Taiwan and South Korea

This paper discusses different patterns of innovation and their institutional roots in Taiwan and South Korea. By using USPTO patent data as indicators of innovation, this paper finds that while individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) still account for a significant proportion of the patents in Taiwan, the large conglomerates are the major contributors of patents in South Korea. Moreover, although electronics is the sector that has gained most of the patents in both countries, Taiwan's patents are more dispersed while those of its South Korean counterparts are more concentrated. These differences come mainly from the institutional roots in their economic catching-up era.

Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences

The Muslims of South Asia made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than the region’s Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were relatively less likely to use large-scale and long-living economic organizations, and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this paper also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families; they were also ill-suited to profit-seeking business. Whereas Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint family enterprises, Muslims tended to use ephemeral Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.

Varieties of cooperation: the domestic institutional roots of global governance

AbstractThis article develops a domestic institutional explanation for the growing institutional diversity in global economic governance. Transgovernmental networks linking domestic regulatory agencies have emerged in a number of areas alongside more conventional cooperation based on international organisations and regimes. At the same time, the number and scope of private self-regulatory schemes at the international level has markedly increased. While rich literatures have developed around each of these three governance cluster, less attention has been paid to the critical questions why, where, and when we are most likely to see one type of governance as opposed to another. The article argues that broad observable patterns of global governance result from specific configurations of domestic institutional variables in leading markets against the backdrop of the dynamics of market globalisation. Empirical evidence from case studies of global governance in the fields of securities, Internet domain names, intellectual property, and hedge funds broadly support the argument.

France's ‘Grenelle de l'environnement’: openings and closures in ecological democracy

Since 2007 France has been systematically renovating government policy under the banner of sustainable development. This process, called the Grenelle de l'environnement, extends the official role given to environmental associations in certain of the State's advisory bodies. The institutional roots of the Grenelle are located in various precedents for consultative environmental practice in French administration. The role of Nicolas Hulot's 2006 ecological pact in making democratised environmental policy a higher presidential priority is then reviewed. At a procedural level, the Grenelle is shown to take France's meso-corporatist practices in the direction of deliberative democracy. Its newly adopted Energy-Climate tax shows how environmental groups can use discursive power to shape environmental legislation.

Cyprus: Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflict and International Politics

This article provides an essential background to the domestic setting of the conflict in Cyprus and some of its international repercussions. In doing so, emphasis is placed on the geographical, historical, social, cultural, institutional, and political roots of the conflict. The presentation and analysis of these aspects aims at examining the relationship between political division along ethnic lines and the generation and internationalization of the conflict. It places some emphasis on the factors that contributed to the maintenance and reinforcement of ethnic cleavages in a bicommunal society and the failure of the political system to counteract divisive forces.

Military Transformation Past and Present: Historic Lessons for the 21st Century (review)

Reviewed by: Military Transformation Past and Present: Historic Lessons for the 21st Century Harold R. Winton Military Transformation Past and Present: Historic Lessons for the 21st Century. By Mark D. Mandeles. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007. ISBN 978-0-275-99190-6. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xi, 157. $64.95. This is a book with a great deal of promise that, except for one interesting and perhaps even important insight, fails to deliver. The promise stems from the author’s obvious familiarity with issues of national defense formed during his close association with the iconic guru of Pentagon strategic vision, Andrew Marshall, and from the overall design of the work, which sets out to apply insights from history to the vexing problem of merging evolving technologies with diffuse contemporary defense requirements. The falling short comes from a laser-like focus on organizational behavior theory as the dominant and virtually sole explanatory arbiter of success and failure and a consequent neglect of the rich literature of the histories of technology and military innovation. Mandeles is intimately familiar with the field of defense studies. He has written two previous works in the area, co-authored two others, and heads up a defense studies corporation that examines a broad array of security issues for both private industry and the government. The work begins with a conceptual chapter developing the central argument that “the real key to unlocking the process of innovation is [End Page 1385] attention to the multiple sets of relationships among individuals, organizations, and multiorganizational systems” (p. 2). The next four chapters provide historical and contemporary evidence to test this argument. The examples include the U.S. Army in the post-Civil War era, a comparative analysis of the U.S Navy and U.S. Army air arms between World War I and World War II, another comparative analysis of American and British Marine doctrine in the inter-war era, and the U.S. Navy’s development of an integrated air-defense system from 1990–2005. Not surprisingly, each analysis confirms the argument. The post-Civil War Army lacked the organizational structures to induce the kind of self-correction the author postulates as being necessary for reform; the inter-war Navy had them, while the Army Air Corps did not; the U.S Marines had them, but the British Marines did not; and the U.S Navy at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries seems to have had them. Thus, what Mandeles calls “multiorganizational analysis” (p. 85) emerges as the dominant factor in explaining the success or failure of military innovation. In one respect, Mandeles has a useful point. His description of the interactions among the Navy’s General Board, the fleet, the Naval War College, and the Bureau of Aeronautics from 1919–1939 adds an interesting, and arguably important, dimension to Stephen Peter Rosen’s emphases on the personality of William A. Moffett and the promotion pathway he designed for naval aviators as explanations for naval aviation’s taking fairly firm institutional root in the years leading up to World War II. But the tight focus on a single variable produces numerous interpretive problems. It is simply ahistorical to apply a mid-late twentieth-century standard of organizational development to the nineteenth-century U.S. Army. There is also abundant evidence (even in Mandeles’s presentation) that the key distinctions between the naval and army aviators were cultural rather than organizational. The same can be said for the American and British Marines. Finally, while the strong emphasis on the correction of error is noteworthy, there is no glimmering of one of the fundamental truths of military innovation: such correction must always compete with the concomitant requirement for good order and discipline. Thus, while some who follow the fads of transformation may find the work enticing, those educated broadly in the field of military reform will probably find it disappointing. Harold R. Winton Montgomery, Alabama Copyright © 2009 The Society for Military History

The institutional roots of Great Britain's 'big problem of small change'

Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde (2002) argue that it took government authorities centuries to solve the ‘big problem of small change’ because those authorities were constrained, first by the lack of a sound theory of small change, and then by the lack of adequate technology for implementing the theory. British experience suggests, however, that institutions also played a crucial part. In particular, the monopolistic nature of Great Britain's official coinage arrangements undermined incentives for establishing a sound system of small change even after theoretical and technological constraints were no longer present. The institutional perspective offered here helps to explain a number of historical facts that are otherwise puzzling, including the fact that a relatively successful private-sector small-change system anticipated Great Britain's official solution to the small-change problem by two decades.

Curiosity in the Austrian Enlightenment

Catholic culture is popularly supposed not to be conducive to curiosity. Yet the Austrian Enlightenment, which reached its peak in the 1780s but had intellectual and institutional roots earlier in the eighteenth century, encouraged curiosity — sometimes unofficial — in many areas. The three here examined are: the study of the Bible and Church history; natural science; and ethnography, or the description of foreign peoples, a genre which developed from travel literature and became fully established at the end of the century.

Bilaterale Wanderungsverträge und die Entwicklung eines internationalen Arbeitsmarktes in Europa 1919-1974

Bilateral agreements characterized the international migration of labour within Western Europe in the 20th century. They regulated the temporary recruitment of mostly unqualified workers, their transfer and conditions of employment as well as the terms of their stay and secured a demand-tailored supply of foreign labour for the receiving countries. This essay discusses the institutional roots of bilateral labour agreements and their propagation, which resulted in an international labour market of multiply linked partners. Special analytical attention is given to the effect of competition for work or workers in the emerging multipolar system on the terms set out in individual treaties.

Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality (review)

Reviewed by: Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality Mark Edberg Merrill Singer , Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality. Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2008. 293 pp. Given the repeated metaphor of "drug wars" in the national narrative, it would seem an obvious objective to delineate who, or what, in these "wars" is the "enemy." If it is drugs, per se, then, as Richard le Grande aptly notes, drugs are a pervasive 24-hour phenomenon in US society, where a Manichean public discourse lurches back and forth between drugs as evil and drugs as angel (2006a, 2006b)—depending upon which drugs one is talking about, and at which point in history. Unfortunately, the "good guy/bad guy" discourse surrounding drugs obscures the complex social impact of drugs of all kinds in the US as well as globally, and the disparate impact of drugs on those who are poor and without resources. Merrill Singer, in Drugging the Poor, approaches this issue from a long-standing commitment to the perspective of critical medical anthropology (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2003, Singer and Baer 1995). In brief, critical medical anthropology (CMA) reframes health issues as embedded in the broader [End Page 337] context of inequitable socioeconomic, class, ethnic, and gender relationships that create vulnerabilities. Singer, for example, has linked HIV/AIDS to a litany of other health problems (tuberculosis, infant mortality, hypertension, diabetes, cirrhosis, and substance abuse) that are disproportionately found in poor urban populations, and together calls the aggregate situation a syndemic—that is, several epidemics that exist together because conditions promote their co-existence (Singer and Clair 2003, Singer 1994). These conditions include poor housing, lack of economic opportunity, racism, violence (at many levels), lack of access to resources, and, generally, to the tools of power. Continued exposure to such conditions creates a multifaceted vulnerability, in which drug abuse plays a significant role because of its simultaneous qualities of delusion and destruction. As Singer poignantly writes, drug use among the poor is "the medicine that relieves but does not heal; the remedy that takes far more than it yields; the lie that embodies all the lies between rich and poor" (214). Singer deserves enormous credit for his tireless and significant efforts to bring the CMA perspective to the broader public health community through his applied research and intervention work, through a prolific output of publications (particularly focusing on the intersections of drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, and violence, as well as critical theory), and through his longstanding public engagement within anthropology and applied anthropology. His work has been highly influential, including, if I may say, to this author. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, he is the originator of the term syndemic (described earlier)—an important construct that has begun to take root in key public health institutions including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). With that background in mind, Drugging the Poor is Singer's third volume in a series of books on drug use and abuse, and is perhaps the broadest of the three in its focus on the social impact of drug capitalism writ large. The book begins with a broad commentary on the nature of globalism and contemporary capitalist enterprise, calling social injustice neither a product of indifference among those who benefit or moral failure among its victims, but "an arrangement that materially benefits some while harshly punishing others" (17). During this discussion a key purpose of the book is stated: "The role of drugs in maintaining inequality is not often addressed in public discussion of social disparities. Doing so is a primary purpose of this book" (ibid). How does Drugging the Poor carry out that purpose? First, the introductory chapter situates both legal and illegal drug industries as functional equivalents within a global capitalist framework. This is followed by a series of [End Page 338] chapters taking the reader through an extensive exegesis of both the legal and illegal drug industries, describing their operative dynamics as well as their optics, or (situated) point of view. In each of these chapters, covering the specific legal/illegal drugs—from tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals to marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and ecstasy—Singer...

Understanding Latin American political economy: varieties of capitalism or fiscal sociology?

Ben Schneider and David Soskice trace the origins and reproduction of Latin America's ‘hierarchical’ market economies to the perverse synergy of: 1) free-market economic reforms that systematically atomize (or demobilize) low-income constituencies; 2) majoritarian presidential elections that no less systematically ensure middle-class support for an upper-class agenda marked by labour market dualism, educational elitism, corporate conglomeration, and associational underdevelopment; and 3) proportionally-elected legislatures that are particularly susceptible to corporate influence. I worry that in their haste to incorporate Latin America into the varieties of capitalism framework, however, Schneider and Soskice: 1) overlook the Iberian roots of the region's principal economic institutions; 2) confuse symptoms like ignorance, informality, and corporate conglomeration with causes like inequality and fiscal underdevelopment; and 3) ignore not only the possibility but the likelihood of left-wing mobilization in the wake of democratization and international integration. And I therefore conclude with an alternative account that addresses not only the historical roots but the contemporary contradictions of the region's admittedly benighted political economies.