Traditional Institutional Framework Research Articles

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This paper explores the distinctive features of Yann Martel’s novels, specifically focusing on the role of animals and the theme of belief in his works Life of Pi and The High Mountains of Portugal. The analysis delves into Martel’s unconventional views on belief, which deviate from traditional religious perspectives. The study investigates Martel’s underlying motivations for consistently employing animals as vehicles for conveying his perspectives on belief. This paper argues that Martel employs animals as potent vehicles to underscore the limitations of rationality and objectivity emphasizing the role of belief in human existence. In Life of Pi, the protagonist’s survival with a Bengal tiger in a lifeboat prompts a deeper inquiry into the essence and significance of belief. Blurring the lines between realism and fantasy, Martel proposes a new idea of faith that transcends traditional institutional frameworks of religion. In The High Mountains of Portugal, Martel appropriates Christian narratives to depict the three stages of human belief. Animals are employed as symbols of the protagonists’ spiritual states. They also serve as guides in their spiritual journey, driving the protagonists toward belief Overall, Martel’s exploration of belief employing animals illustrates human need for belief and the interconnectedness of beliefs and stories.

Interruptions, interventions, and innovations in social services during COVID‐19 in Bangladesh

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic affected almost all sectors including the social services in Bangladesh. The authorities struggled to provide services to the pandemic‐affected people who suddenly lost their jobs, falling into a state of poverty. This study aims to investigate interruptions, interventions, and innovations in government social services because of social policy responses during COVID‐19 considering different theoretical models of institutionalism. Following the qualitative method, the study conducted in‐depth interviews with 39 representatives of social service agencies that delivered services in the Sylhet district during the pandemic. The study finds that COVID‐19 interrupted social service programs leading to interventions and innovations based on the new situation that emerged. It reveals innovations like launching virtual service, introducing a hotline number for help seekers, creating WhatsApp and Messenger groups among the service providers, emphasizing community engagement, etc. in social services which seem to go along with the punctuated equilibrium model or the first‐order change that integrates new policies or innovations within the traditional institutional framework to deal better with the problems caused by COVID‐19. However, these initiatives were insufficient since pressing issues like mental health and domestic violence that substantially increased during COVID‐19 failed to draw the attention of the authorities.

Some Notes and Reflections about the Institutional Context to Study the Westphalian Dilemma

The current society of global challenges and opportunities is projected as a dynamic reality that will bring even greater challenges, on the shoulders of information and communication technologies. The complexity involved has overflowed the traditional institutional framework – centered around the Westphalian state. Many strategies have been proposed and there is a growing supra-state institutionality. All this requires a deeper understanding so that humanity can better face global threats. The observation of nation-states is subject to the paradox of observing them diminished, on the one hand, while pointing them out as obstacles to coordinated global action. Institutions of an international or global character also endure the paradoxical gaze of wishing them to be more effective while fearing for their lack of democratic roots. These paradoxes are also dilemmas between trusting the politics to centralized global institutions or to nation-states. Proposing to examine the absorption of the complexity of the current world, in terms of Ashby's law, looking at the roles of institutions and organizational systems in times when networks make the edges of organizations less solid, in general, opens a vast field of study to look at the current way humanity is handling complexity and possible alternatives. This work, just the beginning of research on the subject that demands greater efforts and resources to achieve its purpose of influencing the formulation of policies, is a journey through institutional aspects that aims to contribute with further reflections beyond the institutions.

Hospital acquisitions, parenting styles and management accounting change: An institutional perspective.

Many healthcare scholars have applied institutional theories to the study of management accounting systems (MAS) change. However, little attention has been devoted to MAS change within groups. Kostova etal. highlight the limitations of traditional institutional frameworks in studying groups since they are characterised not only by the existence of external institutional environments but also by intra-organisational (meso-level) ones. Given this background, the research question is: how does the meso-level institutional environment affect MAS change in healthcare groups? We use a longitudinal multiple-case study design to understand the role of headquarters in shaping local MAS change. We would expect companies to adopt similar MAS. However, we argue that the relationship between external institutions and MAS change cannot be wholly understood without taking into consideration the role of headquarters. Our analysis shows how hospitals facing the same external institutional environment implement different MAS as a consequence of different parenting styles. From a scientific perspective, our article contributes to broaden traditional institutional theoretical frameworks.

E-Collaboration Within, Between, and Without Institutions

This paper discusses different ways for the exchange of knowledge in networks - within, between, and without institutions, as well as their implication on networks in economy and society. Network systems based on technologies and architectures of participation offer a new model of online knowledge sharing, cooperation, and collaboration, that are different from the traditional institutional framework. This paper suggests that this model opens new horizons for both companies and non-profit organizations. By developing an e-networked business model, companies can make as much or even more money in the long tail of power low distribution than they were making at the head of the curve in the traditional business model. This opens to everyone the possibility of participating and contributing content, non-profit organization and online communities, including Communities of Practice and online learning communities, which can ensure reaching the “critical mass” of contributors and involvement level that will keep these communities active. This paper concludes with an example illustrating how the ideas discussed could facilitate knowledge exchange in companies, organizations or educational institutions.

Carbon prices, institutions, technology and electricity generation firms in two Australian states

A relationship exists for the liberalised Australian electricity supply industry between institutional structures and technological change. The traditional institutional framework has been based on centralised generation and a regulated vertically integrated monopoly structure. This paper investigates the issues of institutional and technological change using the social cost perspective (including externalities), and focuses on the imperatives of greenhouse gas emission reductions. An Australian context has been chosen for the paper, in light of a proposed price on carbon; be that via an emission trading scheme or carbon tax. The power generation sector is dominated by coal- and gas-fired power plants due to the large reserves of coal and gas available in Australia. If carbon pricing of up to AU$40/tCO 2 is introduced then the merit order for dispatch changes but coal-fired power generation sources remain an option.

Entering the Social Experiment: A Case for the Informed Consent of Graduate Engineering Students

Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers‐in‐the‐making of the broader social dimensions of the research they are learning to conduct would help ensure their future capacity to act as ethically responsible social experimenters. The paper also argues that graduate engineers have a right to be informed participants in activities that may have broader social dimensions than are recognized by formal research evaluation or educational processes. The process of obtaining the informed consent of graduate engineering students, if implemented effectively, would thus help ensure both their capacity to act as moral agents and their own moral integrity. Since the eventual outcomes of research can be uncertain, complex, and contested, most traditional institutional frameworks—such as principle‐based codes of conduct and risk–benefit frameworks—provide an insufficient basis to inform engineers and citizens. Rather, we recommend an ongoing discursive process that explores a number of different actors, contexts, and scenarios, and that evolves with the social context of the engineering research in question. While this may seem burdensome to the engineering research process, it can be integrated directly into the group research meetings and mentorship activities that typically already go on. Moreover, it can actually be seen to benefit engineering practices.

Where did all the land go? Enclosure & social struggle in Kivu (D.R.Congo)

Kivu's traditional patrimonial system revolved around the distribution of access rights to communally held land in return for rents that were redistributed through the system. The social capital embedded in this institutional framework was a public good. The introduction of a ‘modern’ land law in 1973 destroyed the social cohesion of that patrimonial system; it sanctioned efforts to capitalise and appropriate the full value of these rents. At the time of the law's introduction, market mechanisms for factor markets including land, were not developed, so they had to be simulated. The core of this simulation consisted of exchanging social capital, built up in networks that involved political power-holders and state administrators, for assets. The social capital embedded in these networks was a ‘club good’ rather than a public good; both are non-rival in nature, but with a club good, unlike public goods, exclusion is workable. Its effect was therefore marginalisation and dispossession of those not belonging to the ‘club’, and the erosion of the existing social capital tied up in the traditional institutional framework by breaking the patterns of reciprocity and assurance featured in it. This evolution has contributed to a change of social structure and a crisis of legitimacy that increased social tensions and the potential for conflict. The customary leadership was able to cling to their positions by mobilising their clientele on an ethnic platform, conveniently using the issue of nationality: ‘foreigners’, especially the Banyarwanda and Banyamulenge, were accused of having unrightfully appropriated customary land and of having subverted the customary order.

Politics and the Struggle to Define: A Discourse Analysis of the Framing Strategies of Competing Actors in a 'New' Participatory Forum

On account of the current wave of environmental consciousness, the state is adapting to the phenomena of systems of negotiations outside of the traditional institutional framework on environmental issues in an attempt to preserve cultural support. However recent experiments in discursive democracy have proven to be a modality for the transmission of productivist culture and for the reassertion of corporatist tendencies. This interpretation finds support here primarily through a discourse analysis based on a three-dimensional framework. The analysis begins by examining the structure of discursive formations of various participating actors at the Irish National Recycling Conference in 1993, and explores the ways in which actors struggled at the symbolic level to define the rules constitutive of this space of play. It argues from the perspective of discourse as social practice and justifies this approach by assessing the degree of synchronization between collective actors' systems of discursivity and the socially structured institutional sites within which they are embedded. Finally, by examining the position of this field vis-à-vis the field of political power, this research will show how broader relations of domination and traditional power asymmetries came to be reasserted in a 'new' participatory arrangement.

Gorbachev's political elite in the terminal stage of the USSR: A reputational analysis

Reputational analysis can be a valuable tool to supplement other approaches to the study of political elites. Such an analysis of the influences on Gorbachev in the late 1980s identifies him as very much located within the traditional institutional framework. Very few members of the political counter‐elite appear to have been influential, and the new economic forces and the working class‐both identified in Marxist theory as of particular significance ‐ were of marginal significance. By contrast, the leaders of republics and regions, on the one hand, and the leaders of the democratic movement, on the other, appear to have had the greatest impact on the former leader, with the backing of conservative and capitalist leaders of the West.

Institutional change in Icelandic agriculture, 1780–1940

Abstract This article examines the restructuring of the institutional framework of Icelandic agriculture with emphasis on institutional arrangements inhibiting the modernization of agriculture and the growth of non-agrarian sectors. Two institutions were of particular importance in this respect. One was the system of land tenures with its heavy obligations to landlords and insecure farm leases, which discouraged fixed capital investment on the farms. The other was a wide-ranging social legislation set up to regulate family formations and to maintain a balance between agriculture and the fishing sector in favour of the former. The most effective regulatory device was a stringent labour bondage which had few parallels in Europe. The paper analyses the disintegration of the traditional institutional framework from the late eighteenth century onwards, and points to the historical circumstances at work.

The Discourse of Pious Science

The ArgumentThis paper, an attempt at an institutional history of ideas, compares patterns of reproduction of scientific knowledge in Catholic and Protestant educational institutions. Franciscus Eschinardus'Cursus Physico-Mathematicusand Jean-Robert Chouet'sSyntagma Physicumare examined for the strategies which allow for accommodation of new contents and new practices within traditional institutional frameworks. The texts manifest two different styles of inquiry about nature, each adapted to the peculiar constraints implied by its environment. The interpretative drive of Eschinardus and a whole group of “modern astronomers” is here seen as pushing beyond the traditional task of “saving the phenomena,” towards celestial hermeneutics which is thoroughly experimental and mathematical. In spite of the insistence on physical interpretation of celestial phenomena, Eschinardus' astronomical discourse is yet constrained by a complex game of intellectual-political considerations. Commitment to the Thomistic organization of knowledge, which sets a boundary between a science of motion (physica) and the “geometry of heavens” (mathematical astronomy), suppresses any impulse to ask about the mechanical causes of celestial appearances. The Copernican cosmology is thus rejected qua an attempt to cross this guarded boundary. Chouet in Geneva, by contrast, frees himself from these constraints on the organization of natural knowledge. By strictly separating philosophy from theology, he can combine physics and astronomy, favor a Copernican cosmology and adopt a Cartesian mechanistic worldview. Moreover, unlike the Jesuit Eschinardus, Chouet seeks toexplainnatural phenomena in terms of causes, rather than justinterpretthem. Yet he does so within a philosophical discourse largely scholastic in nature, which best suits the conservative institutional framework in which he teaches. Whereas the Jesuit Eschinardus employs a new type of discourse without severing his links with the traditional Thomistic worldview, the Calvinist Chouet adopts a new Cartesian worldview and adapts it to a largely traditional type of discourse.

The Eighteenth-Century: Towards an Interdisciplinary Model

No area of humanistic endeavor makes plainer than the study of the eighteenth century that the generic divisions among disciplines and the traditional institutional frame-work of specialized university departments are incongruent with the prismatic nature of current leading research. No century - dominated as it was by the comparativist met-aphor in the study of human activity - makes plainer the pressing need for establishing workable models to assess the efficacy of individual, and competing hypotheses, and for determining how these are to be placed within a well-articulated, cross-disciplinary, or as yet unspecialized, con-text.

The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism

Jewish mysticism represents the totality of the attempts to interpret in terms of mystical conceptions the meaning of rabbinical Judaism as it has crystallized in the time of the Second Temple and later. Such a development, of course, could take place only after this process of crystallization had attained a certain degree of fixity. This holds good for both the type of legal Judaism which Philo of Alexandria tried to interpret, as well as for the more developed type of Talmudic Judaism which served as a frame for the spiritual efforts of the Medieval Kabbalists. It is not my purpose to discuss here the historical problems of the development of Jewish mysticism, and especially of Kabbalism; I have done so in other places, especially in my book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. On the other hand, the subject with which I propose to deal here occupies a central place in Jewish mysticism. In a religious system that is based on Divine Revelation and the acceptance of Holy Scriptures which determine its tenets, the questions connected with the essential nature of such revelation in Scripture are obviously vital ones. Moreover, in a time of crisis—andmysticism as a historical phenomenon is a child of times of crises—such questions are especially pressing. Mystics are people who, through their own experience and speculation on such experience, detect new layers of meaning in their traditional religion. If this kind of experience and speculation does not lead them to break away from the traditional institutional framework of their religion, then the first question bound to come up is how to find their own experience reflected or anticipated in their sacred texts; also how to reconcile their vision of things with that accepted by their own tradition. It is, of course, a truism that allegorical interpretation makes its appearance spontaneously whenever new ideas clash with those of a holy book, seemingly standing in contradiction to them and requiring some process of reconciliation. What is true of allegorical interpretation applies even more so to mystical interpretation in a more precise sense.