scholarly journals Tracing divergence in crisis governance: responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden compared

2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232097935
Author(s):  
Sabine Kuhlmann ◽  
Mikael Hellström ◽  
Ulf Ramberg ◽  
Renate Reiter
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Containment Measures ◽  
Local Discretion ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
Decentralized Management ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Legally Binding Regulations ◽  
Governance Modes

This cross-country comparison of administrative responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in France, Germany and Sweden is aimed at exploring how institutional contexts and administrative cultures have shaped strategies of problem-solving and governance modes during the pandemic, and to what extent the crisis has been used for opportunity management. The article shows that in France, the central government reacted determinedly and hierarchically, with tough containment measures. By contrast, the response in Germany was characterized by an initial bottom-up approach that gave way to remarkable federal unity in the further course of the crisis, followed again by a return to regional variance and local discretion. In Sweden, there was a continuation of ‘normal governance’ and a strategy of relying on voluntary compliance largely based on recommendations and less – as in Germany and France – on a strategy of imposing legally binding regulations. The comparative analysis also reveals that relevant stakeholders in all three countries have used the crisis as an opportunity for changes in the institutional settings and administrative procedures. Points for practitioners COVID-19 has shown that national political and administrative standard operating procedures in preparation for crises are, at best, partially helpful. Notwithstanding the fact that dealing with the unpredictable is a necessary part of crisis management, a need to further improve the institutional preparedness for pandemic crises in all three countries examined here has also become clear. This should be done particularly by way of shifting resources to the health and care sectors, strengthening the decentralized management of health emergencies, stocking and/or self-producing protection material, assessing the effects of crisis measures, and opening the scientific discourse to broader arenas of experts.

scholarly journals Opportunity management of the COVID-19 pandemic: testing the crisis from a global perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 002085232199210
Author(s):  
Sabine Kuhlmann ◽  
Geert Bouckaert ◽  
Davide Galli ◽  
Renate Reiter ◽  
Steven Van Hecke
Keyword(s):  
Crisis Management ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Windows Of Opportunity ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Crisis Responses

This article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of COVID-19 crisis governance in the first half of 2020 from a cross-country comparative perspective. It focuses on the issue of opportunity management, that is, how the crisis was used by relevant actors of distinctly different administrative cultures as a window of opportunity. We started from an overall interest in the factors that have influenced the national politics of crisis management to answer the question of whether and how political and administrative actors in various countries have used the crisis as an opportunity to facilitate, accelerate or prevent changes in institutional settings. The objective is to study the institutional settings and governance structures, (alleged) solutions and remedies, and constellations of actors and preferences that have influenced the mode of crisis and opportunity management. Finally, the article summarizes some major comparative findings drawn from the country studies of this Special Issue, focusing on similarities and differences in crisis responses and patterns of opportunity management. Points for practitioners With crises emerging in ever shorter sequences of time, governing turbulence and using crises for strategic institutional decisions has become an increasingly important issue for policymakers. Aiming at effective and proportionate responses, policymakers must take the institutional conditions, administrative traditions and relevant actor constellations of crisis management into account, which are key to learn from other countries’ experiences. Comparing these experiences and analyzing the politics of crisis governance from a cross-country perspective may help policymakers to identify strengths and weaknesses of their own national/regional approaches and to seize crisis-related windows of opportunity for institutional reforms at the national and international levels.

Tourism Collaborative Governance and Rural Community Development in Finland: The Case of Vuonislahti

2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parhad Keyim
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Collaborative Governance ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Community Tourism ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Potential Benefits ◽  
Effective Community ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
The Village

Tourism is recognized as a potential development mechanism for peripheral rural communities encountering various changes and challenges. However, a relatively unexplored theme in previous studies is that tourism’s potential benefits to rural communities are affected by rural development policies and practices: specifically, a collaborative governance approach. Based on a case study from Vuonislahti, a peripheral locale in the municipality of Lieksa, Finland, this article frames a community tourism collaborative governance approach. The study suggests that the village community receives limited tourism benefits because of various constraints rooted in the specific socioeconomic and institutional settings of the village and beyond. However, the struggle to formulate a fair and effective community tourism collaborative governance approach may bring positive socioeconomic benefits to the village and to other similarly declining rural communities in Finland and beyond. The approach is conceptually tentative in nature and its theoretical development needs to be complemented with additional research findings from empirical case studies conducted in diverse rural socioeconomic and institutional contexts of countries under different regimes.

Guangdong in the Twenty-first Century: Stagnation or Second Take-off? Edited by Joseph Y.S. Cheng. [Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2000. 460 pp. $34.00. ISBN 962-937-066-2.]

2003 ◽  
Vol 173 ◽  
pp. 214-251
Author(s):  
Fung Kwan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Pearl River Delta ◽  
Central Government ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pearl River ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Contributing Factors ◽  
Pragmatic Development ◽  
Institutional Settings

The economic success of Guangdong since 1978 has been widely studied and its contributing factors are several, including the geographical and economic proximity to Hong Kong and Macau, the special economic policies and institutional settings granted by the central government, the pragmatic development strategies – especially those practised in the Zhu (Pearl) River delta, and the extensive overseas Chinese clan relationship.

scholarly journals How National Institutions Shape Skilled Immigrants’ Chances of Getting Hired: Evidence from Harmonised Factorial Surveys with Employers in Germany and England

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (S1) ◽  
pp. 351-373
Author(s):  
Felix Stumpf ◽  
Andreas Damelang ◽  
Martin Abraham ◽  
Sabine Ebensperger
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Education System ◽  
Survey Design ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Education Systems ◽  
Skilled Immigrants ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Contexts Of Reception

Abstract This study provides novel insights into the institutional conditions under which skilled immigrants get hired for skilled jobs in different countries. We argue that immigrants’ hiring chances depend on the interplay between institutions in sending countries, which determine the type of education that immigrants bring, and institutions in receiving countries, which shape employers’ preferences for certain types of education. We develop a research design that considers this interplay and allows us to directly compare how education from sending countries with different institutional arrangements is rated by employers in two countries with widely divergent institutional contexts of reception, Germany and England. Using harmonised factorial surveys, we simulate hiring processes and evaluate the chances of German and English employers inviting foreign-educated immigrants to interviews for jobs commensurate with their education. The survey design makes it possible to experimentally vary the institutional settings in which immigrants acquired their education in the sending country, and isolate their effect on employers’ ratings. Our key finding is that immigrants from sending countries with highly standardised occupation-orientated education systems prevail in the hiring competition, irrespective of the education system in the receiving country.

scholarly journals Understanding Variation in Processes of Institutional Formation

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivien Lowndes ◽  
Maximilian Lemprière
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Design ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Institutional Formation ◽  
City Regions ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Institutional Actors

The article asks why institutional reforms work in one place and not another and why old ways of doing things can prove so resilient. It argues in favour of a concept of institutional formation, which is different from ‘institutional design’ as a time-limited event or ‘institutional change’ as an open-ended historical trajectory. Institutional formation is conceptualised as an animated, nested and embedded process. A multi-level framework is developed that specifies the links between institutional actors, institutional rules and institutional contexts. The model is elaborated with reference to a case study of local government reform in England, specifically the devolution of responsibilities from central government to voluntary collaborations of elected local authorities (‘combined authorities’). The model is used to explain variation in the process of institutional formation in two different city-regions, focusing on the role of leaders, legacies and localities.

Procedures without borders: The language-ideological anchorage of legal-administrative procedures in translocal institutional settings

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrijn Maryns
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Institutional Discourse ◽  
Institutional Practice ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Communicative Practice ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Asylum Procedure ◽  
Procedural Outcomes

AbstractTheoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings. (Institutional discourse analysis, multidiscursivity, language ideology and identity, sociolinguistic mobility, asylum procedure, assize court procedure)*

scholarly journals Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Frye ◽  
Anna Woźny
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Markets And Institutions ◽  
Illicit Market ◽  
The Social ◽  
Underperforming Students ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Moral Frameworks ◽  
Moral Justifications ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Institutional Cultures

Abstract: Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but have paid less attention to how producers’ moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda’s top universities. We identify three groups of researchers— Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. While Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of “fit” with their respective institutional cultures, the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers’ moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market.This article is forthcoming at the American Sociological Review.

scholarly journals The Politics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 381
Author(s):  
Uma Purushothaman ◽  
John S. Moolakkattu
Keyword(s):  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Central Government ◽  
State Level ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Medical Supplies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Containment Measures ◽  
The Government ◽  
Union Government

India responded to the COVID-19 measures abruptly and in a tough manner during the early stages of the pandemic. Its response did not take into consideration the socio-economic life of the majority of people in India who work in the informal sector and the sheer diversity of the country. The imposition of a nationwide lockdown using the Disaster Management Act 2005 enabled the Union Government to impose its will on the whole country. India has a federal system, and health is a state subject. Such an overbearing role on the part of the Central Government did not, however, lead to coordinated action. Some states expressed their differences, but eventually all complied with the central guidelines. The COVID-19 pandemic struck at a time when an agitation was going on in the country, especially in New Delhi, against the Citizen Amendment Act. The lockdown was imposed all of a sudden and was extended until May 31. This led to a humanitarian crisis involving a large number of domestic migrant workers, who were left stranded with no income for survival and no means of transport to go home. Indians abroad who were intending to return also found themselves trapped. Dissenting voices were silenced through arrests and detentions during this period, and the victims included rights activists, students, lawyers, and even some academics. Power tussles and elections continued as usual and the social distancing norms were often compromised. Since COVID-19 containment measures were carried out primarily at the state level, this paper will also selectively draw on their experiences. India also used the opportunity to burnish its credentials as the ‘pharmacy of the world’ by sending medical supplies to over a hundred countries. In the second wave, there were many deaths, but the government was accused of undercounting them and of not doing enough to deliver vaccines to Indians. This paper will deal with the conflicts, contestations and the foreign policy fallout following the onset of the pandemic and the measures adopted by the union government to cope with them, with less focus on the economic and epidemiological aspects of pandemic management. This paper looks at previous studies, press reports, and press releases by government agencies to collect the needed data. A descriptive and analytical approach is followed in the paper.

Meditation, Buddhism, and Science

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Buddhist Studies ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Humanistic Study ◽  
Institutional Contexts

This volume discusses modern transformations of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation and the scientific studies of these practices from the humanistic perspective of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Buddhist Studies. Meditation, particularly “mindfulness” meditation, has garnered enormous attention in recent years as the object of scientific study, to the point of redefining the very conception of meditation in the popular imagination and the academy. For millennia, these practices occurred almost exclusively in monastic contexts for soteriological purposes. Yet today, the institutional settings, goals, and the practices themselves have undergone momentous changes. Contemporary practice often focuses on practical matters, such as health, relationships, and work life, with little to no consideration given to the beliefs, values, or cosmologies that underpin such practice from the Buddhist point of view. Moreover, meditation’s institutional homes have gone from the monastery to some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including public universities, hospitals, multinational corporations, and the US military, as well as many non-institutional settings. The plethora of scientific studies conducted in recent years have, in fact, not only undergirded these transformations, but have helped to create them. The contributors to this volume seek to understand these changes within their broader historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. Their chapters show the importance of the humanistic study of the complex interrelations between Buddhism and the scientific study of meditative practices.

scholarly journals Social innovation as a process to overcome institutional voids: a multidimensional overview

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 72-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
MANUELA RÖSING AGOSTINI ◽  
LUCIANA MARQUES VIEIRA ◽  
MARILIA BONZANINI BOSSLE
Keyword(s):  
Social Innovation ◽  
Financial Education ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Multidimensional Analysis ◽  
Institutional Voids ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Innovative Solution ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Methodological Aspects ◽  
Multiple Actors

ABSTRACT Purpose: The objective of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework to explore social innovation as a response to institutional voids in a multidimensional analysis. Originality/gap/relevance/implications: Approaching the social innovation of the theoretical lens of institutional theory, in the institutional voids perspective. One of the gaps is to propose a multidimensional perspective that will occur through the examination of multiple actors in different institutional settings. Key methodological aspects: To support the framework, six theoretical proposals were developed from theoretical gaps identified in a systematic literature review, started in Web of Knowledge database. Summary of key results: Results indicate dimensions that can be investigated in social innovation initiatives that fill institutional voids. The following dimensions were found: dimensions of institutional contexts (considering different contexts and the interference of political, financial, education/work and cultural systems); dimension of multiple actors (giving voice to different actors who have complementary objectives); dimension of the institutional pillars (cognitive, normative and regulative) and dimensions of social innovation (modify/transform a social need; innovative solution, implementation of social innovation, involve actors and stakeholders and effective results). Key considerations/conclusions: This framework can be further tested in comparative studies among countries with distinguished levels of development. We identified the importance to analyze different social contexts and the diverse actors who are involved in social innovation initiatives. We identify new areas that are influencing social innovation and we propose new possibilities to investigate this field.

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