The institutional evolution of central banks

This article contributes to the literature on central banks’ institutional rationale and evolution by analyzing the early development of the Bank of England as a case study. The history of the Bank is scrutinized under the framework of entangled political economy, revealing its origins in a process of bank and political bargains. The account clarifies the process by which the political and economic order becomes increasingly intertwined throughout the banking system, via political bargains under incomplete contracts. The analysis suggests that entanglement allows governments and non-profit organizations to transmit some of their features to banking organizations in exchange for financial benefits. Transmitting nonmarket characteristics through recurrent bargains leads a for-profit bank to gradually transform into a central bank. The article proposes an alternative rationale for the unintended emergence of central banks, providing evidence in favor of their politically oriented development, rather than their alleged intrinsic nature.

The Textual Evolution of the Ottoman Şeyhülislams’ Fetvas: A Cross-Corpora Computational Analysis

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislams’ fetvas between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetvas underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam’s fetva office (fetvahane) that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetvas: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain shorter responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetvas’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislams. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents.

SQER: Establishing the sciences of religion in Quebec: A work still in progress1

This article identifies and problematizes the institutional and epistemological issues of the study of religion in Quebec. Its thesis is the unfinished foundation of the discipline that is primarily devoted to it, the social sciences of religion. The first section traces the institutional evolution of the field of study of religion in Quebec, from theology to the social sciences of religion, from faculties and departments to centers and institutes. The second section measures the progress made in the social sciences of religion since the first programs and assessments devoted to it. The authors note a growing difficulty in understanding the religion of the “center”, that of the majority of Quebecers. The third section deepens this point by drawing up a panorama of the main religious trends observed in contemporary social sciences of religions. Three related trends are identified: advanced secularization, increasing diversity and the unexpected survival of religion. In conclusion, the authors argue for the consolidation of the social sciences of religion in Quebec.

Explaining the European Union’s Interorganizational Influence on Other Regional Organizations

This chapter examines the European Union’s influence on other regional organizations through a statistical analysis of a dataset that contains information on the institutionalization of 36 regional organizations from 1950, or the year of their establishment, until 2017. The analysis shows that both the intensity of a regional organization’s engagement with the EU (active influence) and the EU’s own institutional trajectory (passive influence) are correlated with the level of institutionalization in other regional organizations. Second, these effects are strongest in regional organizations that are based on contracts containing open-ended commitments. Together, these findings suggest that the creation and subsequent institutional evolution of the EU has made a difference to the evolution of institutions in other regional organizations. Counterfactually, member states would have built less institutionalized regional organizations in the absence of the EU.

“How on earth did this happen?” The relationship of practical consciousness and institutional evolution

Institutional theory assumes that actors’ reflexivity—their discursive consciousness—is the precondition that enables institutional change. We argue that such focus on discursive consciousness disregards one elementary source of institutional change: practical consciousness—the domain of nonreflective cognitive processes. Our article offers a major contribution to the literature: By elaborating the important difference between discursive consciousness and practical consciousness, we contribute to the theorization of the cognitive apparatus of actors in institutional theory. We apply this theorization to highlight institutional evolution as a previously unnoticed mode of institutional change that explains why, and how, institutions change in a nonreflective way. We also provide implications for the ways in which our work might stimulate future empirical research.

EMBEDDED AND AUTONOMOUS MARKETS IN NORTH KOREA'S FISHING INDUSTRY: RESOURCE SCARCITY, MONITORING COSTS, AND EVOLVING INSTITUTIONS

North Korea today is a most unusual post-socialist state. Market actors and market prices are integral to economic life, but private property remains illegal, and private enterprise outside the household is de jure non-existent. In such an institutional context, some market processes are more autonomous in relation to the state, while others are more embedded within state structures. In this article, we offer a theoretical account of the shape that North Korea's market economy has taken, developed from a set of fishing industry case studies. We note four broad categories of enterprises: closely embedded, loosely embedded, semi-autonomous, and autonomous. By relative autonomy/embeddedness we mean control over fixed assets, cash flow, and operational decisions such as wage and price setting. We postulate three major determinants of embeddedness/autonomy: (1) relative strategic resource scarcity between state and market actors, (2) monitoring costs, and (3) institutional evolution that reflects these realities, though to varying extents.

Beyond Computation

This chapter explores the institutional evolution of ‘scenario planning’ from the inception of the management technique in the mid-1960s. It examines the effect of scenario planning on changing visions of the future from a singular entity to a matrix of multiple possibilities. Emerging as a countermodel to the predictive power of the computer, scenario planning incorporated a number of new age and countercultural spiritualities that seemed to support the pluralized futurity it advocated. The chapter pays attention to the metaphysical assumptions of the technique, charting its origins in the RAND Corporation during the 1960s to its expansion into corporate management in Shell Oil during the 1970s and 1980s.