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This chapter summarizes the contributions that institutional theory has made to our understanding of the forces driving the internationalization of financial accounting which is characterized by the harmonization of accounting standards and the creation of integrated global markets for accounting services and accounting labour. Institutionalism is defined broadly to include a broad spectrum of multidisciplinary scholarship at the micro, mezzo, and macro level of analysis. The chapter argues that institutional analysis, broadly defined, is capable of interrogating not only the social and cultural underpinning of accounting practice, but also the political and economic forces that underlie the internationalization of financial accounting. Directions for future international accounting research aimed at understanding developments within the accounting field within the context of the financialization of the world political economy over the past quarter century are discussed.

Provides an overview of institutional analysis, which comprises all questions in political science. Discusses issues in political theory and the normative role of institutions, and traces the decline and re‐emergence of institutions in political science. Reviews methodological and theoretical issues in institutional analysis, such as the ontology of institutions, agency and causation, their stability, and change. The future of institutional political science is in the combination of knowledge and whether it can be applied to normative institutional goals.

The research question of this chapter on corporate governance in France and Germany is two-pronged: to account for their different patterns of evolution, and to assess the implications for their respective models of capitalism. The focus indicator of this chapter is the rise of hedge and mutual funds — two categories of short-term, impatient investors — in large French and German companies. The presence of these two types of institutional investors with their focus on shareholder value and the short-term trading strategies constitutes a novel and potentially radical developments in European corporate governance. The empirical data on the investment patterns of these two groups of investors reveals the greater attractiveness of French firms over their German counterparts. The argument presented in this chapter highlights the importance of firm-level institutional arrangements of workplace organization in accounting for this divergence in investment patterns. The high degree of power concentration of French firms provides for a better fit with the short-term horizons of hedge and mutual funds. Patterns of adjustment in French companies are unilaterally orchestrated, in sharp contrast to the negotiated nature of restructuring strategies in German firms. Key notions of the Varieties of Capitalism perspective — institutional interaction, institutional latency, and the distinction between institutional framework and the mode of coordination that follows from these institutions — illustrate the central role performed by firm-level institutional arrangements of workplace organization, and provide important theoretical insights to account for the divergence in the investment patterns of hedge and mutual funds.

This chapter applies a ‘comparative institutional analysis’ approach to CG. It criticizes the property right approach for being a special case, and develops a more general model of governance with shifting allocations of property rights to different internal and external actors, contingent to the overall economic performance of the firm. This contingent relational governance solution is deemed to be complementary with an uncontingently horizontal organization, at least in innovative activities. The Silicon Valley model is discussed as supportive evidence of this mode of CG.

This concluding chapter resumes the argument and discusses the role of power imbalances. It then presents a research programme for the next stage of neo-institutional analysis. Elements of the programme include defining the context, specifying capacities, specifying the available governance range, ranking the modes, mapping the fields, and observing the actors.

What accounts for the observed differences across national systems of corporate governance? This chapter analyzes the importance of diversity in regard to institutional arrangements of corporate governance. Institutional analyses of comparative corporate governance raise many issues also found in other areas of the social sciences: the interaction between different institutional features of an economy; and the importance of complex causation resulting from the presence of many institutional variables. The analysis of these issues in this chapter is structured around the three two most prominent theoretical perspectives: law and economics, and politics. Additional materials drawing from economic sociology are also presented. The chapter concludes by highlighting two important tasks: accounting for divergence across national systems of corporate governance in a context of change; assessing the relative weight of causal factors in processes of complex causation.

First, this chapter summarizes the five narratives concerning collective bargaining and wage setting, intermediary organization, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance and then points out how these independent yet interrelated institutional settings have intersected in a number of points. The differences between the conditions in all five situations, both before and after the period, may be seen as less fundamental since collective bargaining in Germany is still more organized than in other countries, social welfare is still high in Germany, and there still are certain governing institutions that control most German companies. This chapter then explains why there is a need to understand systemic change and how shifting from a sectoral to a systemic perspective gives a new light to institutional analysis.

This chapter examines two development assistance projects undertaken by Sida in India. These case studies demonstrate the use of institutional analysis as a diagnostic tool, and illustrate how problems of motivation and asymmetric information arise within the complex mix of actors involved in a project, presenting distinct challenges for sustainable development.

This chapter demonstrates the conceptual payoff in the context of the interplay between state and national legislative and executive power by focusing on two recurring problems of cooperative federalism: state implementation of federal programmatic directives, and state administrative borrowing of federal regulatory standards. In both of these situations, the state constitution may constrain the ability of state agencies to administer programs in the way they desire, most commonly through a strict nondelegation doctrine purportedly rooted in the state constitutional separation of powers. The chapter rejects the approaches to these problems worked out by both federal and state courts in favor of an approach based on comparative institutional analysis, informed by the dual enforcement model. On this view, state constitutions should not be construed to bar state administrative compliance with or adoption of federal legal norms because state constitutional nondelegation doctrines are better understood as responses to governance failures peculiar to state-level democracy; failures that have no relevance when a state legislature indirectly delegates power to the national government rather than to an organ of state government. This helps to shed light on the nature of executive power at the state level, particularly where national goals are at issue.

In recent decades governments have initiated a range of policies to encourage universities to commercialize research results. This chapter focuses on academic scientists as the key drivers behind the commercialization of research, and argues that commercialization activities are primarily conditioned by organizational incentives and constrained structured by national research systems. The chapter explores how involvement in commercialization activities can be used to improve the competitiveness of scientific laboratories to varying degrees within different national research systems, and thus to contribute to our understanding of the continuing contrasts in patterns of research commercialization between differently organized public science systems. The analysis pays particular attention to labour market dynamics within different research systems, exploring at a micro-level how national research system institutions affect patterns of competition at the laboratory level within the United States and Germany. To provide empirical support for key claims, the chapter also presents short empirical case studies of the organization of labour markets within the cell biology field in the United States, and labour market ties between academic labs and spin-offs in Germany.

This chapter analyses the processes of institutionalisation and institutional reform in Catalonia and Scotland in order to identify and explain the capacity of regional politicians to act collectively in pursuit of their collective self-interest. It examines whether politicians have attempted to reform their institutions according to their own professional self-interest and how successful they have been in these attempts. The institutional analysis reveals that the collective action of regional politicians as a class for itself is related back to the institutional structure enabling and restricting their behaviour and to the established career patterns and to the internal structure of the political class in itself that are conditioning its territorial and functional cohesion.

This chapter looks at how the Ostroms and their collaborators have tried to respond to the methodological and epistemological challenge of heterogeneity and institutional diversity via the construction of a knowledge-systematization, heuristic and analytical instrument: the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The chapter presents this original conceptual device central to the Bloomington School and advances its case by articulating a fresh and more refined theoretical sense of its significance, nature and functions

This chapter elaborates a model of society as an inter-institutional system by developing a new institutional logic — the community logic. This elaboration extends Thornton's (2004) proliferation of Friedland and Alford's (1991) initial formulation of the inter-institutional system. The inter-institutional system is one of the central innovations of the institutional logics perspective. Developed as a model of ideal types, the chapter discusses the inter-institutional system's usefulness as a theoretical and methodological tool for developing institutional logics research. In particular, it discusses how it can be used to identify solutions to theoretical problems in institutional analysis, such as the partial autonomy of social structure and action, the definition of an institutional field, and the relationship between the concepts of power and agency.

This chapter combines tools and methodologies from institutional analysis, political economy, and history. It argues that the creation of a stable, growth-enhancing constitution requires a set of steps. These include a consensus on a shared set of values capable of commanding support over time, a self-enforcing institutional structure that reflects those values, and regulatory mechanisms for policy-making that enable trade-offs of inclusion. By trade-off of inclusion, it means a process whereby institutional access is extended differentially across the domains of politics, economics, law, and society to increase prosperity without jeopardizing stability. The chapter aims to weave strands of the literature to provide a theoretically rigorous and empirically new account of constitutional emergence and endurance. It also connects the study of constitutions to the study of the conditions that foster political and economic development.

Can we do institutional analysis without institutional theory? Should we? These provocative questions prompt a reflection on institutional thought, but they also serve as an invitation for scholars in adjacent fields—process scholars among them—to reconsider the boundaries between fields and the benefits of crossing them. Such benefits are evident in the work of the founders of institutional theory, none of who were self-consciously “institutional” as they embarked on their careers. Reviewing their work reveals four keys for doing institutional analysis without institutional theory, and the importance of doing so. It also reveals some of the limits of contemporary institutional theory: The dominance of institutional theory in organizational studies is problematic in the sense that many of the most important insights and developments in institutional theory emerged through cross-fertilization across multiple fields, rather than the narrow cultivation of one.

This chapter explores the microfoundations of institutional logics and their role in the continuing reproduction and alteration of institutions and organizations. It considers Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) and DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) neoinstitutional theory which was developed as a theory of structural effects on organizations with a limited capacity for agency. It then considers more recent approaches which highlight the importance of social actors in various institutional practices. The chapter argues that social actors are in fact key to understanding institutional persistence and change. The chapter further elaborates on the model of microfoundations began in Chapter 3. This model, the chapter explains, is based on an understanding of actors as situated, embedded, and boundedly intentional actors. The model allows both for automatic taken-for-granted behavior, and agency and reflexivity. The chapter ends with a summary of what this model encompasses, how it differs to past theories and its future relevance.