Chinese Bureaucracy Through Three Lenses: Weberian, Confucian, and Marchian

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Xueguang Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Informal Institutions ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Loose Coupling ◽  
Distinct Mode ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
High Responsiveness ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Formal Rules

ABSTRACT Chinese bureaucracy, with its long history and distinctive characteristics, has provided the organizational basis of governance and played a pivotal role in the economic takeoff in recent decades. Chinese bureaucracy also shows intriguing dualism between entrepreneurial activism and bureaucratic inertia, between formal rules and informal institutions, and between high responsiveness and noticeable loose coupling. In this study, I explore these distinctive features of Chinese bureaucracy through three lenses: Weber's comparative-historical approach helps locate Chinese bureaucracy in a distinct mode of domination; the Confucian lens identifies the prevalence of informal institutions that underlie bureaucratic behaviors; and the Marchian lens sheds light on the organized anarchy and set of mechanisms that shape the key characteristics of Chinese bureaucracy.

scholarly journals Response to governmental COVID-19 restrictions: the role of informal institutions

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Bentkowska
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
Special Case ◽  
Formal Rules

Abstract This paper explains how informal institutions influence the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic and the response to formal restrictions. I claim that it is not enough to introduce countermeasures, as individuals must follow them if they are to be effective. The acceptance of such measures is reflected in individuals' degrees of mobility decrease and contact reduction, the aims of governmental restrictions. I identify a group of attitudes connected with individuals' responses that differ across countries. They are associated with social relations and approaches to dealing with problems. The analysis confirms that formal restrictions can be seen as successful only if they are supported by strong informal institutions. In some cases, they even define individuals' reactions more than formal recommendations. The findings are useful not only for explaining the special case of reaction to pandemic restrictions but also for investigating what generally determines individuals' compliance with formal rules.

scholarly journals Some Distinctive Features of Narrative Environments

Interiority ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Austin
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Public ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Practice ◽  
Narrative Medium

This paper explores key characteristics of spatial narratives, which are called narrative environments here. Narrative environments can take the form of exhibitions, brand experiences and certain city quarters where stories are deliberately being told in, and through, the space. It is argued that narrative environments can be conceived as being located on a spectrum of narrative practice between media-based narratives and personal life narratives. While watching a screen or reading a book, you are, although often deeply emotionally immersed in a story, always physically ‘outside’ the story. By contrast, you can walk right into a narrative environment, becoming emotionally, intellectually and bodily surrounded by, and implicated in, the narrative. An experience in a narrative environment is, nonetheless, different from everyday experience, where the world, although designed, is not deliberately constituted by others intentionally to imbed and communicate specific stories. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for space as a narrative medium and offers a critical analysis of two case studies of exhibitions, one in a museum and one in the public realm, to support the positioning of narrative environments in the centre of the spectrum of narrative practice.

Some thoughts on the development and structure of the New Zealand life insurance industry

1994 ◽  
Vol 121 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Life Insurance ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
Insurance Market ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Life Insurance Industry ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The Government

AbstractThis paper seeks to explain key characteristics of the New Zealand life insurance industry, in particular the important role played by overseas-controlled mutual companies, and the dearth of regulation relative to other countries. It proposes that the dominance of mutual companies reflects the historical development of the New Zealand life insurance market. It also examines how agency theory may help to explain how the market has come to be dominated by mutual companies, and suggests that the unregulated nature of the life insurance industry may reflect the New Zealand government's historical role of direct intervention in the market through the Government Life Office. Further light on this issue is shed by the economic theory of regulation. This theory suggests that cartelisation and reinsurance may help to explain the existence of the unregulated insurance market in New Zealand. The paper concludes that many socio-economic and historical reasons may account for the distinctive features of the New Zealand life insurance industry. The possibilities are presented in this paper as a stimulus for further insurance markets-based research.

Christopher Duggan, the mafia and Fascism

Modern Italy ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-380
Author(s):  
Vittorio Coco
Keyword(s):  
Historical Research ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Key Aspects

This article starts by discussing aspects of Christopher Duggan’s first book La mafia durante il fascismo, published in 1986, whose main topic was the anti-mafia campaign led by the prefect Cesare Mori in the latter half of the 1920s. The book’s distinctive features were its rigorous historical approach and use of archival sources: these set it apart from most other work on these topics at the time, when the idea that the mafia could be subjected to historical research had not yet been properly established. In its central thesis Duggan’s book was influenced by previous interpretations of the mafia, then still widely shared, that denied its nature as a structured organisation. Duggan argued here that Fascism used accusations of mafia involvement essentially as a way of attacking its political opponents. The final part of the article presents key aspects of a newer area of research on the mafia and Fascism, the 1930s, when a new campaign to suppress the mafia was not made use of for propaganda purposes.

Are institutional transplants viable? An examination in light of the proposals by Jeremy Bentham

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN PABLO COUYOUMDJIAN
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Design ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Practical Point ◽  
The Core ◽  
Institutional Transplantation ◽  
Formal Rules

Abstract:The problem of institutional transplantation is an important issue. In Jeremy Bentham's work, we find practical as well as theoretical proposals regarding this problem. Here, we view his work as an invitation to reflect on the overall nature of the question of institutional design and transplantation. The transfer of institutions requires knowledge of ‘place and time’ that will allow for an accommodation of the transferred institutions to their new soil. However, an awareness of this type of knowledge and thus relying on its actually being available is not viable from a practical point of view. This is due to the fact that the core of informal institutions is tacit, which imposes a fundamental constraint on the process of institutional transplantation; informal norms must co-exist with formal rules, and such merging requires some accommodation of both types of rules.

scholarly journals The nature of accessibility studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-232
Author(s):  
Gian Maria Greco
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
New Research ◽  
Vast Range

Accessibility has come to play a pivotal role on the world’s stage, gradually pervading different aspects of our lives as well as a vast range of fields, giving rise to a plethora of fruitful new ideas, methods and models, and becoming an ever more key issue within a process that is reshaping the very fabric of society. The ubiquitous effects of accessibility have led to the emergence of a new research field, namely accessibility studies (AS). This paper presents both the path that has led towards the emergence of AS as well as the distinctive features of this new field. AS is defined as the field concerned with the investigation of accessibility processes and phenomena, and the design, implementation and evaluation of accessibility-based and accessibility-oriented methodologies. The analysis is carried out mainly, though not exclusively, in reference to media accessibility (MA), as it is one of the most mature areas in which the process of the formation of AS has been taking place. It concludes by arguing that AS is a timely field that addresses the most pressing issues our society is facing nowadays and appealing to MA to embrace its identity as an area of AS.

scholarly journals Geographic particulars of the world’s population food ration

2020 ◽  
Vol 166 ◽  
pp. 13007
Author(s):  
Ihor Kholoshyn ◽  
Liudmyla Burman ◽  
Tetiana Nazarenko ◽  
Svitlana Mantulenko ◽  
Natalia Panteleeva
Keyword(s):  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Food Ration ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Population Growth Rates ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The World ◽  
Geographic Differences ◽  
Supply Level

The research of a human food ration is caused by the great social significance in solving the problem of proper supply the population with food in the world countries. The food problem has a most evident geographic character. The world countries having at their disposal various agro-climatic conditions, demographic resources and population growth rates, socio-economic potential, specialization and labor productivity of agriculture production, are essentially distinguished by the food supply level of population and by structural characteristics of food ration. The formation particulars of the world countries population food ration were considered and characterized in the article. The key characteristics and factors of the world population’s food ration were analyzed there. The geographic differences of food ration, as well as the world countries typology by distinctive features of food consumption through their division into groups (nutrition types) according to the content and quantity of basic components in food ration were determined in it.

scholarly journals A Humean theory of moral intuition

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antti Kauppinen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Emotions ◽  
Moral Intuition ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
Moral Intuitions ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Humean Theory

According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according to which the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content.

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