Individual Judicial Style and Institutional Norms

Author(s):  
Andrew Lynch
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 346-370
Author(s):  
Jae Han

AbstractThis article investigates the nature of Manichaean pedagogy as expressed through the late antique codices known as the Kephalaia of the Teacher and the Kephalaia of the Wisdom of my Lord Mani. By paying attention to a range of contextual cues that frame each moment of instruction, it first argues that much like their rabbinic and Christian neighbors, Mesopotamian Manichaeans did not study in academic institutions. Rather, instruction took place on an ad-hoc, individual basis, often based on happenstance events; there is no mention of a building dedicated to learning, a standard curriculum, or a semester schedule. This article then contextualizes this form of non-institutionalized Manichaean instruction by comparing three formulae found in the Kephalaia codices that have parallels in the Babylonian Talmud: the formula of Mani “sitting among” his disciples (or of his disciples “sitting before” Mani), of Mani’s disciples “standing before” Mani, and of various people “coming before” Mani. In so doing, this article ultimately argues that the Babylonian Rabbis and Syro-Mesopotamian Manichaeans shared a common pedagogical habitus, one expressed through bodily comportment and hierarchy rather than through the imposition of institutional norms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 671-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mitchell Mahoney ◽  
Christopher J. Clark

Women have organized around their gendered identity to accomplish political goals both inside and outside legislatures. Formal and informal institutional norms shape the form this collective action takes and whether it is successful. What, then, are the favorable conditions for organizing women's caucuses inside legislatures? Using an original dataset and employing an event history analysis, we identify the institutional conditions under which women's caucuses emerged in the 50 US states from 1972 to 2009. Within a feminist institutional framework, we argue that women's ability to alter existing organizational structures and potentially affect gender norms within legislatures is contextual. Although we find that women's presence in conjunction with Democratic Party control partially explains women's ability to act collectively and in a bipartisan way within legislatures, our analysis suggests that institutional-level variables are not enough to untangle this complicated phenomenon. Our work explains how gender and party interact to shape legislative behavior and clarifies the intractability of institutional norms while compelling further qualitative evidence to uncover the best conditions for women's collective action within legislatures.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014920632110578
Author(s):  
Daisuke Uchida

In the face of increasing pressure to comply with institutional norms, firm managers may retreat from previous commitments to comply once they realize the challenges involved. This study examines how firms respond to institutional pressures in a particular way called reversion, in which an organization's managers temporarily comply when there are no consequences but resist when it is in their interest to resist. By integrating institutional and agency theories, we model the reversion decision as a tension between institutional constituents and organizational managers. An empirical analysis of a sample of Japanese firms that scheduled annual shareholder meetings during the 2001 through 2014 period was performed. Our findings show that although organizations’ susceptibility to certain institutional pressures determines initial organizational compliance, managers whose interests diverge from those of the institutional constituents can revert their decisions, especially when they have discretion in decision making to protect their own interests. These findings highlight the temporary nature of organizational responses to institutional pressures and help us understand how organizational agency can limit institutional control over an organization's actions.


Author(s):  
Mark Minett

Accounts of Altman’s career trajectory tend to efface dynamic intra- and intermedial relationships in favor of presuming the constraint and emergence of norm-breaking expressivity. Industrial filmmaking is paradoxically said to have groomed Altman to be an observational documentarian while also somehow training him in Hollywood’s illusionist norms. Filmed television is taken to be a forum in which Altman’s expressive agency was shackled by the producer-dominated medium’s attenuated version of Hollywood style, inadvertently fueling his later desire to reject Hollywood’s norms. Chapter 5 employs archival material and formal analysis to specify the contingencies of Altman’s industrial contexts and to demonstrate how they actually contributed to his development, steering him toward practice-oriented preferences and providing opportunities to push beyond standard approaches. The manner in which Altman’s elaborative attitude toward institutional norms extends across “Earlier Altman” to “Early Altman” challenges hierarchizing assumptions about the nature and direction of cross-media influence.


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