scholarly journals Bringing Art Market Organizations to China: Cross-Border Isomorphism, Institutional Work and its Unintended Consequences

2019 ◽  
Vol 240 ◽  
pp. 1087-1107
Author(s):  
Svetlana Kharchenkova

AbstractThis study proposes a new explanation for institutional differences of organizations in China. It focuses on how two organizational forms dominant in contemporary art markets – commercial galleries and auction houses – were first established in China in the 1990s. Based on archival and interview data, it argues that the organizational forms were introduced to China due to mimetic isomorphism, and that their divergences from the foreign models are the result of unintended consequences of institutional work. It highlights the role of individual agency, including the role of foreign nationals, in organization-building in China. The findings also have implications for institutional theory: the article shows how the political, cultural and institutional context in China shaped institutional work that needed to be conducted and led to unintended consequences of institutional work.

2021 ◽  
pp. 026732312110121
Author(s):  
Montse Bonet ◽  
David Fernández-Quijada

This article aims to study how private European radio is becoming commercially international through the expansion of radio brands beyond their national market. It is the first ever analysis of the expansion strategies of radio groups across Europe, including their footprint in each market in which they operate, from the political economy of cultural industries. The article maps the main radio groups in Europe, analyses cross-national champions in depth and establishes three main types. This study shows that, thanks to the possibilities of a deregulated market, strengthening the role of the brand and the format, and the agreements with other groups, broadcasting radio has overcome the obstacles that, historically, hindered its cross-border expansion.


Author(s):  
Herbert Kawadza

A number of landmark judicial review decisions and the resultant political backlash are arguably to supportive of the claim that political and legal constitutionalism are entrenched in South Africa. The common thread in the legislature and executive's reaction to judicial review decisions is that government supremacy is under threat from legal constitutionalism. More specifically, there is a perception that courts are meddling in the political space through judgments that are aimed at weakening the government's authority and power. Nonetheless, such decisions have had an effect of reinforcing the judiciary's legal constitutional role of reviewing the lawfulness of the other branches' activities. There is need for strategies to minimize this tension as the continued antagonism can have unintended consequences such as the delegitimisation of the judiciary    


Author(s):  
Lucas Lixinski

This chapter focuses on the multiple definitions of ‘heritage’ in UNESCO instruments, and particularly on their relationship to the idea of ‘property’, with respect to communities’ engagement with heritage. It examines the drafting history of the key UNESCO treaties in the area, to identify the role of communities and other stakeholders in the definitions, as well as the political compromises made. The chapter also re-examines the move from ‘cultural property’ to ‘cultural heritage’, an important part of the elevation of the field to one overseeing international public goods. The chapter argues that this shift has had unintended consequences, key among which is the exclusion of communities. The field would do well to revisit the idea of ‘property’, but, as the chapter discusses, as a specific understanding of property that goes against conventional wisdom based on property as the ultimate bastion of individual liberty.


Author(s):  
Andrey Manoilo ◽  
Ilya Katkov

The research featured the political role of the Nord Stream 2 project in Russian foreign policy and in building constructive relations with Russia's partners in the European Union. The paper describes the strategy, tactics, forms, and methods involved in the cross-border pipeline project implemented by Russia and its foreign partners. The focus is on the political relations between the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russian state-owned corporations, foreign governments, and foreign multinational corporations, i.e. the negotiations within the international consortium. The research objective was to identify the role of cross-border pipeline projects in Russian foreign policy in Europe. The methodological basis included system and comparative-political approaches, as well as the methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, and deduction. The methods of political comparativistics revealed how the competing parties were able to affect the negotiations and implementation of Nord Stream 2. The method of system analysis made it possible to examine the interactions between the state structures and the oil and gas companies. The authors identified the conflict directions between the supporters and the opponents of the project, as well as between the Russian Federation and the United States of America. The paper describes the political tools that promote the interests of the project in conditions of acute rivalry in the energy area. The Russian Federation and Gazprom managed to bring the project to its final stage. However, the success would have been impossible without the help of their European partners.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-39
Author(s):  
Qijie Xiao ◽  
Anton Klarin

Institutional work research shows how actors purposively create, maintain, and disrupt institutions. Failed or unintended consequences of institutional maintenance remain relatively unexplored, for two reasons. First, the role of coercive disruption actors (e.g., a state) has not been fully explored. Second, existing literature takes scant account of power and disregards the resistance tactics of subordinate actors. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of a migrant workers’ union in China, we show how subordinate actors were first able to maintain institutional arrangements followed by a maintenance failure under the disruption work performed by the authoritarian state. This study extends the institutional maintenance literature in two ways. First, subordinate actors can sustain institutions insofar as they collectively deploy superficial deference and hidden forms of resistance. Second, maintenance work is vulnerable in the sense that it is contingent on the systems of domination and the level of pressure exerted by the disruption actors.


2019 ◽  
pp. 017084061986772 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pilar Acosta ◽  
Aurélien Acquier ◽  
Jean-Pascal Gond

This article analyses the political dynamics taking place within a Colombian supplier company during the implementation of a client’s global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, which radically transformed the local understandings of the supplier’s social responsibilities. We distinguish two forms of politics in political CSR – coercive and deliberative politics – and examine how they unfold through lower-level managers’ institutional work. Our longitudinal case study identifies four types of institutional work, which combine into three political configurations – irreconcilable politics, complementary politics and aligned deliberative politics – resulting in the hybridization of explicit and implicit CSR. By analysing how local managers from emerging countries and at the bottom of the supply chain cope with the new political role of MNCs, we expand the political microfoundations of CSR and highlight the interactive and political nature of institutional work aimed at addressing major societal challenges.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Yvonne Hammer

The problematic relationship between urban dislocation, the proscribed spaces of urban childhood, child marginnalisation and the societal invisibility of under-age citizens is widely thematised in contemporary children's literature. This article examines how childhood agency, as a form of power, becomes aligned with resilience through intersubjectivity in the narrative representations of marginalised child subjects in Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown (1987) and Julie Bertagna's The Spark Gap ( 1996 ). Depictions of child homelessness, which construct resilience in the determination to survive experiences of marginalisation, dislocation and loss, offer an opportunity to examine representations of child subjectivity. This discussion centres on the role of intersubjectivity as an alternative construction to some humanistic frames that privilege the notion of an individual agency divested of childhood's limitations. It identifies the experiential codes which more accurately reflect the choices available to young readers, where liminal spaces of homelessness that first establish social and cultural dependencies are re-interpreted through depictions of relational connection among displaced child subjects. The discussion suggests that these multifocal novels construct dialogic representations of social discourse that affirm intersubjectivity as a form of agency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


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