Specific Institutional Arrangements Research Articles

Power advantage: antecedents and consequences in supplier–retailer relationships

PurposeThe research indicates that relatively powerful firms exploit their advantages to damage their weaker partners. However, how power can be abused by advantaged firms remains unclear. This study aims to examine the relationship between power advantage and abuse of power and whether the power advantage mediates the relationship between dependence and personal interests and between trust and company performance.Design/methodology/approachA total of 130 retailers in Taiwan were investigated. Partial least squares regression was performed to test the proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe results of this study show that power-advantaged firms are more likely to abuse their power; however, the purposes are more for their company performance than for personal interests. Power advantage has different mediating effects on the dependence–personal interests and trust–company performance relationships.Research limitations/implicationsConsidering both time and cost limitations, this study investigated one aspect of the retailer–supplier dyad in northern Taiwan. The samples collected may be influenced by the nature of the industry and sampling method, possibly limiting the generalizability of the research results.Practical implicationsThis study can help channel managers with a power advantage to have an improved understanding of their salespersons’ behavioral patterns, particularly gaining personal interests from customers.Originality/valueThis study expands the understanding of the antecedents and consequences of power advantages in supplier–retailer relationships. It also highlights in specific institutional arrangements, the weaker parties’ efforts to endure their counterparts’ use of their power advantage to serve their personal interests. Future research may analyze abuse of power by expanding research to other industries and different cultural contexts.

THE ROLE OF VILLAGE-OWNED ENTERPRISES (BUMDes) TO RURAL DEVELOPMENT: A COMPARATIVE INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Government intervention for village development is carried out with various policies. The establishment of BUMDes is one of the government's efforts to accelerate rural development, advance the local economy, and develop the village partnerships and/or third party’s partnerships. This study exploits comparative institutional analysis framework to examine further how institutional aspects can affect the application of BUMDes in the rural development. The institutional aspects of BUMDes utilization for rural development is worth emphasizing since it will be employed as a foundation between the actors in a specific social area (structure) in its various forms such as rules, norms, or a certain routine, and the institution as a form of authority for the social behavior of the village organization. Furthermore, the successful implementation of BUMDes in the rural development is also affected by how stakeholder system can manage the institutional aspects. The result of this study, from the standpoint of comparative institutional analysis, underlines: (1) the limited authority of the Ministry of Villages, Underdeveloped Regions and Transmigration for rural development suggests that this Ministry must establish a specific institutional arrangement with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises as well as banking institutions; (2) The village government has not fully taken advantage of the flexibility of its institutional arrangement to use BUMDes as a source of rural development; and (3) there is considerable scope to increase the role of BUMDes. This paper will propose some practical advices while considering the existing institutional arrangement.

Human Insecurity in South Asia: Challenging Market Injustice

The article addresses the issue of social injustice by stressing on the need for social action through state initiatives for uplifting the underprivileged segments of society. 1 It is argued that while human insecurity impacts all classes of people, it is asymmetrically distributed across South Asian societies where the resource-deprived remain more vulnerable than the more privileged members of the society. Evidences show that market forces remain one of the most important drivers of insecurity. While the ruling elite has attempted to address problems of human insecurity through various welfare palliatives ranging from feeding the vulnerable to providing shelter and subsistence income support, it is the modern welfare state that remains capable of undertaking the most institutionalised public policies to address the more fundamental sources of human insecurity. The author argues that challenging human insecurity remains a more relevant response to the conditions of human deprivation than the more conventional policy objective of moving households above a given poverty line. To that end, social protection programmes need to move beyond the protection of individual risks to address more substantive market-driven risks which originate from the structural injustices of society. A body of ideas has been outlined to reduce vulnerabilities which can provide the basis for further debate. Individual countries in South Asia may draw on these ideas to calibrate their agendas for structural change to the specific institutional arrangements and underlying political economy of their respective societies.

Form and function in China’s urban land regime: The irrelevance of “ownership”

China’s urban land is typically said to be owned by the state, with private parties “merely” permitted to own long-term use rights of up to seventy years. This regime has been praised by those who believe it embodies socialist values and criticized by those who believe it will hamper growth. This article argues that both views are mistaken; that the features of the long-term use rights are not significantly different from those attaching to full private fee simple ownership, and that the main features of China’s system are shared by other jurisdictions such as Hong Kong where the existence of a well functioning real estate market and satisfactory economic growth have never been doubted. In short, ownership is a sufficiently elastic concept that something called “state ownership” can easily accommodate any number of specific institutional arrangements that serve different functions. There is thus no substitute for a fine-grained analysis of the specific details of any particular land tenure regime before reaching conclusions about its economic effects.This article also offers support for the idea that property rights cannot be understood as simply exogenously imposed rules of the game that must be followed. The rules of the game reflect and affect wealth and influence, which can be put to the service of changing the rules themselves. Although governments can attempt to create institutions, whether and how they will actually function in society is difficult to control.

Social value of mitigation activities and forms of carbon pricing

In the Decision accompanying the Paris Agreement, the Conference of the Parties “recog-nizes the social, economic and environmental value of voluntary mitigation actions and their co-benefits to adaptation, health and sustainable development”. This paper argues that this Social Value of Mitigation Activities (SVMA) can lay the ground to a new set of tools in climate policies, complementary to more traditional carbon pricing strategies. It first proposes a summary of the economic and political reasons which lead to this article 108 of the Paris Agreement, and the follow-up that emerged since December 2015. It then gives a theoretical back-up to this necessity of SVMA as a climate policy tool by deriving it from the more usual concepts of Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) and Shadow Price of Carbon (SPC). The use of such a value to help fund projects at the micro-level is proposed in a specific institutional arrangement, especially when carbon pricing strategies fail to be implemented at the optimal level. Its potential to bridge the macro-level funding gap between developed and developing or emerging countries is also developed. The last section concludes on the perspectives opened by the recent Stern-Stiglitz report and its corridor of carbon prices to the local and global implementation of SVMAs.

Adult education as a common good: conceptualisation and measurement

ABSTRACTThe article outlines a theoretical framework for conceptualising adult education – and more broadly, lifelong learning – as a common good. It argues that the extent to which adult education as a common good is accomplished in a given society/country reflects its accessibility, availability, affordability and the social commitment to its functioning and that it depends on a country’s specific institutional arrangements. Building on this conceptualisation and using data from the Adult Education Survey (AES), the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS) for 24 European countries, the authors develop a composite index, based on these four dimensions, which measures the extent to which adult education as a common good is practiced in a given country. This index can be used to assess the effectiveness of national policies in the sphere of adult education across Europe. The results indicate substantial cross-country differences, with North European states and Luxembourg scoring best and Romania scoring worst. Finally, applying cluster analysis, the article identifies six distinctive clusters of countries with regard to the extent of adult education as a common good; the authors designate these cluster categories as reality, feasible, ambiguous, problematic, possible and invisible.

State–Corporate Crime and the Case of Bt Cotton: On the Production of Social Harm and Dialectical Process

State–corporate crime research has been critiqued for fetishizing events and specific institutional arrangements. In recent years, this tendency has been changing as researchers are increasingly transcending the empiricist orthodoxy by giving more attention to relations and processes behind events and institutional arrangements. This is evidenced in the UK by the work of Steve Tombs, David Whyte and Kristian Lasslett. Their complementary concepts of “state–corporate crime symbiosis” and “regimes of permission” direct the analysis of social harm at systemic relations and processes expressed through state and corporate practices constitutive of capitalism. Following from this, Kristian Lasslett's application of Marxist dialectic to the study of state crime provides a scientific vantage point for the analysis advocated by Tombs and Whyte. Drawing lessons from their works, the article attempts a Marxist dialectical analysis of the Bt cotton and its contribution to the agrarian crisis in India.

Assessing consumer benefits in the Ontario residential retail natural gas market: ontario residential retail natural gas market: Why marketer entry did not help

When the institutions governing transactions in the energy sector changed in Canada thirty years ago, the changes were heralded as pro-competitive for natural gas markets, and subsequently authorities and some stakeholders have suggested that households would benefit from gas commodity marketer entry. Using an analysis of the institutions together with a model of the cost pass-through regulatory process, I show that households as a group would not benefit from purchasing the gas commodity from unregulated commodity marketers rather than buying it bundled with delivery from the regulated utility. I next use monthly price data collected from the public web pages of these unregulated sellers to confirm the theoretical prediction. Depending on the time period, five-year natural gas contract commodity prices average more than 75% higher than the utility's regulated cost of gas. On average over the sample period, signing up meant paying over C$400 more for the gas commodity annually. The analysis suggests that claims about the effects of policy change should be informed by a careful assessment of the specific institutional arrangements and the new incentives created by institutional evolution.

The link between UHC reforms and health system governance: lessons from Asia

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how and to what extent the design and implementation of universal health coverage (UHC) reforms have been influenced by the governance arrangements of health systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC); and how governments in these countries have or have not responded to the challenges of governance for UHC.Design/methodology/approachComparative case study analysis of three Asian countries with substantial experience of UHC reforms (Thailand, Vietnam and China) was undertaken using data from published studies and grey literature. Studies included were those which described the modifications and adaptations that occurred during design and implementation of the UHC programme, the actors and institutions involved and how these changes related to the governance of the health system.FindingsEach country adapted the design of their UHC programmes to accommodate their specific institutional arrangements, and then made further modifications in response to issues arising during implementation. The authors found that these modifications were often related to the impacts on governance of the institutional changes inherent in UHC reforms. Governments varied in their response to these governance impacts, with Thailand prepared to adopt new governance modes (which the authors termed as an “adaptive” response), while China and Vietnam have tended to persist with traditional hierarchical governance modes (“reactive” responses).Originality/valueThis study addresses a gap in current knowledge on UHC reform, and finds evidence of a complex interaction between substantive health sector reform and governance reform in the LMIC context in Asia, confirming recent similar observations on health reforms in high-income countries.

Institutional Path Dependence in Competitive Dynamics: The Case of Paper Industries in Finland and the USA

Prior research on competitive dynamics has failed to offer tools to understand distorted patterns of competition that emerge from distinct institutional and historical contexts. Our analysis suggests that a joint effect of institutional rules, governance structures, and shared cognition plays a pivotal role in firm‐level competitive behavior and capability development. We show how globally significant market positions can result from specific institutional arrangements between firms and governments, especially if coupled with interfirm contractual commitments. Our results call for more attention to these interfirm commitments that are built on formal rules and governmental support, but whose impact they yet exceed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Institutional Complexity as a Driver for Innovation in Service Ecosystems

This paper extends research on innovation as institutional change within service science and service-dominant (S-D) logic by conceptualizing the emergence of novel solutions in service ecosystems. We pay particular attention to how actors (individuals and organizations) are able to create new solutions that change the very institutional arrangements that guide and constrain them. We propose that institutional complexity—the multiplicity of institutional arrangements confronting actors with conflicting prescriptions for action—drives the emergence of novelty. Institutional complexity reduces the influence of prevailing institutions by activating conscious problem solving and making available multiple institutional “toolkits.” These dynamic toolkits consist of the cultural norms and meanings, as well as material practices, associated with specific institutional arrangements, with which actors can jointly reconstruct and change value cocreation practices and advance change in the institutional arrangements of service ecosystems. This paper contributes to service science and S-D logic by providing a more comprehensive understanding of innovation driven by institutional complexity, in which the stability of institutional arrangements is reconciled with the actor-driven creation of novel solutions constitutive of institutional change.

See Paris and… found a business? The impact of cross-cultural experience on opportunity recognition capabilities

Internationally mobile individuals such as migrants and expatriates exhibit a higher level of entrepreneurial activity than people without cross-cultural experience. Current research suggests that this pattern is rooted in specific resources and institutional arrangements that increase the attractiveness of exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. In this study, we provide an additional explanation: We argue that cross-cultural experience increases the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities. This argument is supported by two complementary studies—a longitudinal quasi-experiment and a priming experiment. We find convergent evidence that cross-cultural experience increases a person's capabilities to recognize particularly profitable types of opportunities by facilitating the application of cross-cultural knowledge for the discovery of arbitrage opportunities and creative recombination.

The Claims and Duties of Socioeconomic Human Rights

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this ‘claimability objection’, and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to ‘socioeconomic consideration’. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomic-consideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical.

The discursive (de)legitimisation of global governance: political contestation and the emergence of new actors in the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body

The World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body provides the teeth of the global trade regime – empowering it with substantial means to adjudicate in disagreements between Memberstates over the implementation of WTO law. The WTO's teeth have, however, also helped make the organisation controversial. The Dispute Settlement Body has frequently found itself at the centre of a much wider societal critique of the broader WTO – as well as contemporary global trade governance – in which its legitimacy to operate has been fiercely questioned. The political sensitivity of its work has been made most apparent in those cases where the principles of WTO law appear to run counter to environmental or consumer safety concerns, taking the system into the mass media and making it the subject of street protests. Yet, where rulings have given new access to non-state actors campaigning for these concerns (e.g. amicus curiae provisions), there has been further controversy amongst Member-states over whether the Dispute Settlement Body has acted outside its delegated authority by effectively rewriting ‘who’ or ‘what’ is an actor in the system. The changing character of this specific institutional arrangement is approached in the article as part of a wider struggle over the terms of what is ‘legitimate’ in global governance. Where WTO Dispute Settlement has been re-politicised, both inside and out-side the formal institution, a contradiction becomes visible – between its legal-technocratic identity and a world that is fundamentally political. The legal normalisation of new actor identities needs to be understood in this context, as an attempt to manage that tension and reinforce the claim that WTO Dispute Settlement is legitimate. How the institution has changed and new identities emerged since its birth in 1995 is enhanced if understood in the context of a struggle in which the terms of what is legitimate in global governance are ultimately unfixed.

Decentralized Administration and Minority Accommodation in Sri Lanka: Analyzing Status, Issues, Challenges and Prospects

One of the major objectives of decentralization is to facilitate the administrative machinery of a government to deliver public services efficiently and effectively to all segment of public, including the minority groups living within a state. In a multi-ethnic country, the decentralized administration with specific provisions and institutional arrangements can help to promote and protect the rights and privileges of minorities. However, in Sri Lanka, decentralization has been a contested topic of debate in terms of minority accommodation. This study attempts to access the constitutional and institutional arrangement of ethnic minority accommodation in decentralized administration, the status of their practice, and the related issues in Sri Lanka. The finding reveals that even though Sri Lanka has adopted decentralized administrative system at different levels, but it has failed to accommodate the rights and interests of ethno-linguistic minorities within the system. The study identifies the non-implementation of the constitutional provisions on minority language (Tamil) in administrative affairs as one of the key factors motivated to the minority grievances in decentralized administration in Sri Lanka. It is further identified that the lack of commitment to follow and implement the constitutional provisions and the acts of ethnic discrimination and marginalization in administrative affairs have compelled the minorities to claim and advocate for more institutional and policy reforms in decentralization discourse in Sri Lanka. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s1p533

Bureaucratic Caesarism

In 2010, the Eurozone became the epicentre of the world crisis. The vulnerability of Europe appears to be linked to the specific institutional arrangement which organises monetary, financial and budgetary policies within the Eurozone. This article tries to understand the evolution of theeuduring a short but decisive historical sequence (2007–12) in a theoretical framework that puts elements of Gramsci’s reflections on the theme of crisis, and especially his notion of ‘Caesarism’, at its centre. It addresses the current debate concerning the relationships between democratic politics and neoliberalism, while focusing on how the radicalisation of the crisis put at stake the co-construction of capitalism and representative democracy in the Western world sincewwii.

Competition and Regulation Reforms in Spain in 2013: The CNMC - An International Perspective

This paper reviews, from an applied, policy-oriented point of view, the process of the creation of the new macro regulator in Spain, the CNMC, which concluded at the end of 2013. The institutional reform merged the competition authority with practically all sector regulators (except for the financial regulator). The aim is to ascertain in which respects the Spanish reform is approaching, or deviating, from international best practices in the matter. Although there is no universally superior model in terms of specific institutional arrangements, there is enough knowledge on similar episodes of institutional reform to state that, in the Spanish case, important shortcomings remain with the proposal that has finally been adopted. The paper also deals with a non-institutional dimension of the reform: the regulatory and competition competences that, in the midst of the CNMC process, the Spanish government has recovered for itself.

Workers’ participation in a former labour-managed economy: The case of Serbian transition

It is well known that Serbia - along with the other Southeast European successor states of former Yugoslavia - emerged from a country recognized for its specific labour-managed institutional arrangement. The paper recalls the main premises of the literature on the labour-managed firm and the theoretical contributions on participatory forms of management that seem most relevant to a transition economy like Serbia?s. It proceeds to analyze the main changes that occurred in Serbia during transition to a market economy, illustrating some of its specific features and how privatization led to the conversion of workers self-management into property rights. In order to analyze the role of employees in decisionmaking, and more generally their current position in privatized and newly established private firms, a survey was undertaken in 2013 based on a questionnaire for managers in 69 Serbian firms. The survey suggests that internal relations in enterprises are relatively undeveloped, particularly regarding the distribution of responsibilities in decision making at various organisational levels, hampering the efficient fulfilment of firms? objectives. It appears that decision-making processes are usually designed in such a way as to give an excessive role to the owner as the exclusive decision-maker. The position of workers seems to be particularly poor regarding their rights to be informed, to make proposals, and/or to participate in decision-making in general. Moreover, even traditional workers? rights are neglected (unionization, collective bargaining etc.). The survey also suggests that in those firms with a more active role of workers, there is a higher degree of workers? satisfaction and loyalty to the firm.

Double-breasting employee voice: An assessment of motives, arrangements and durability

This article explores employee voice within the specific institutional arrangement of double-breasting. Double-breasting is when multi-plant organizations recognize trade unions in some company sites, with non-union arrangements at other company plants, or where a unionized firm acquires a new site that it then operates on a non-union basis. We examine three research questions in four separate case study organizations that operate employee voice double-breasting arrangements across 16 workplace locations on the island of Ireland. These questions consider employer motives for double-breasting, the practices that characterize double-breasting employee voice, and the micro-political implications of double-breasting. The article contributes to knowledge on the emergence and impact of double-breasting and employee voice systems. We subsequently advance two theoretical propositions: the first theorizing employer motives for double-breasting, and the second explaining the extent to which the practice of double-breasting is durable over time.

Research Article: Access to Nuclear Safety Information in China

China is advancing in its development of nuclear energy in order to satisfy its hunger for increased energy. Several legal instruments have been part of the historical change in the development of China's open-information culture, including the Regulations on Open Government Information, the Measures on Open Environmental Information, and specific institutional arrangements on nuclear information disclosure. However, it might be difficult for the newly formulated nuclear safety information disclosure system to grant people real access to nuclear information. This is principally because of the lower rank of the new instruments in the legislative hierarchy, numerous exceptions for disclosure, legislative objectives that are more propagandistic than human-oriented, and, above all, the absence of a clear definition of the people's right to know.