Unified Actor Research Articles

Social Movements and Collective Identity:

Collective identity entered the social movements literature as an early recognition of the importance of meaning-making in shaping movement participants and influencing movement actions In this article, we go against the more usual practice of treating movements as unified actors, and instead, take a decentered, dialogic approach that recognizes the difficulties and contentiousness of producing movement identities amidst multiple discourses and practices. We illustrate this framework with three ethnographic cases from Canada, Scotland and Nepal, which highlight collective identity and meaning-making through place-based, contingent cultural processes. The cases use the concepts of figured worlds, alter-versions of identity, and cultural artifacts to show how collective identity develops dialogically in practice both within and outside of movements.

Editorial: A sensemaking perspective on corporate social responsibility: introduction to the special issue

In a time when corporate governance seems to be rooted in detailed control systems, where codes of conduct are perceived to give meaning to daily activities and where a global organization parallels a unified actor, it might seem odd to approach CSR from a sensemaking perspective. Still, we believe that much can be learned from such an approach. Research has proven over and over again that a one-sided structure-based approach of stimulating responsible behaviour is missing its goal. Our understanding of CSR can gain considerably from a sensemaking perspective, because it attracts attention to some dubious assumptions behind CSR that are too often taken for granted. For example, it is often stated that CSR is based on shared values, without questioning by whom these values are shared or how a shared meaning of values originates in an organization. Approaching CSR from a sensemaking perspective models CSR as an evolutionary process where many different agents act and react upon each other (Weick 1995). In other words, sensemaking is about how people construct their own reality. Poole & McPhee (1983: 195) refer to this as a duality between people and organizations: ‘People create, maintain, and control organizations, yet organizations attain a life of their own and often overshadow, constrain and manipulate their members . . . The explanation of this complex relationship is one of the great goals of organizational studies and also one of its greatest problems’. This special issue aims to present some insights into this problematic relationship as far as it relates to the concept of CSR. Approaching CSR from a sensemaking perspective means focusing on the dynamic and social processes underlying the development of CSR in organizations. It also means focusing on people’s motivations for acting in a responsible or irresponsible way (Fisscher et al. 2003). This kind of research is generally more qualitative in character, and based on ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions rather than on ‘what’ questions. To give some examples of the application of the Respectively: Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business, Public Administration and Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands; and Professor of Business Ethics, Nyenrode Business University, Breukelen, The Netherlands.

“Bureaucratic Bargaining”: An American Foreign Policy Simulation

The complexities of the governmental machinery and personal perceptions involved in the formulation of American foreign policy are difficult for students to comprehend from the confines of the classroom. Beginning students often enter the study of international relations/political science with a simplistic view of policy making. They tend to accept a priori what Graham Allison (1971) calls the “rational actor model” in which students “package the activities of various officials of a national government as action chosen by a unified actor, strongly analogous to an individual human being.” Students often believe that foreign policy is set by a cohesive group of individuals who share common goals and preferences. The additional tendency to anthropomorphize the state leads undergraduates to write papers in which nation-states are portrayed with such diverse human qualities as sympathy, cruelty, greed, and aggression.Modern scholarship on decision making has expanded beyond this traditional view to encompass differing variables. There is an ongoing debate in the discipline as to what is the most potent variable in American foreign policy. One group of scholars contends that the bureaucratic or role variable is more important. While agreeing that role is a powerful restriction, particularly at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, other scholars argue that the individual perceptions and beliefs of policy makers are more important in the decision-making process.Given the complicated nature of this debate, a creative way to expose beginning students to American foreign policy decision making is through a simulation. Simulations are useful for the study of the decision-making process because the standard lecture-discussion format, which provides a linear overview of the subject, does not adequately communicate the complex structure and multiplicity of factors in operation.

A Statist Interpretation of American Oil Policy toward the Middle East

There has long been a disjuncture between the paradigms used to analyze domestic and international politics. For domestic politics, interest group (or liberal) and, to a lesser extent, Marxist theories have predominated, at least in the United States. For international relations, state-centric, unified actor models have, until very recently, provided the basic orientation. So long as international relations and foreign policy centered on strategic and military considerations this analytic fissure could be glossed over. Since all groups within a society could be presumed to support the defense of territorial and political integrity, each perspective could treat the state as a unified actor: a Marxist perspective (in which only economic groups count); a liberal one (in which all groups count); and a state-centric one. For core objectives the potential divergence between domestic and international modes of analysis could remain latent. However, as economic issues have become more prominent, the analytic strain has increased. Unlike strategic policy, most foreign economic issues have a differentiated impact on societal groups. It is not plausible to assume that groups will naturally accept the preferences of central decision makers. The assumption that the state can be treated as a unified actor, the personification of a single individual, appears increasingly hollow, a shell without an egg. One response to the intellectual problem posed by the disjuncture between international and domestic modes of analysis has been to extend Marxist and liberal approaches into the area of foreign policy. The Marxist perspective has built upon the foundation that has as its cornerstone the discussions of imperialism by Hobson, Hilferding, and Lenin. Advocates of the Marxist inter-

Transgovernmental Interaction in the International Monetary System, 1960–1972

The main hypothesis of this article is that transgovernmental interaction among central banks and finance ministries of industrialized countries was as significant in economic policy formation as intergovernmental interaction. Elite interview data indicate, however, that the international consultative process among deputy central bank governors and deputy finance ministers conformed more closely to the intergovernmental image of international politics than had been expected. Both interaction patterns within the deputies’ consultative group and the impact of international consultations upon national economic policies could be explained moderately well in terms of a unified rational actor model. Examination of the transgovernmental interaction does suggest ways to systematically modify and improve interpretations based upon the rational actor model. In addition, the degree of politicization of issues may prove to be a reliable guide when deciding whether the transgovernmental dimension of an issue requires detailed study.