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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.

A society’s prospects for development depend on its ability to resolve collective-action problems (CAPs). Resolution depends on underlying institutional contexts. Inequality permeates these interactions. This chapter introduces CAPs, institutions, institutional systems, social orders, and political settlements. CAPs arise when individuals, pursuing their own goals, generate undesirable outcomes for some group. First-order CAPs concern forms of free riding; second-order CAPs concern orchestrating the coordination and enforcement that render agreements to limit free riding credible. Discussion proceeds to distinguish informal and formal institutions (norms and rules) from organizations (structured groups of individuals that can take action). Institutional systems are complementary mixes of institutions and organizations, where the latter play critical roles in resolving second-order CAPs. Social orders are large-scale institutional systems. Political settlements are mutual understandings that limit organized violence by addressing broad allocations of authority and benefits.

International environmental law, in spite of its impressive development at the level of treaty law and notwithstanding the abundance of soft law instruments, declarations, and ‘understandings’, remains an immature and underdeveloped body of law. What are the prospects for further developments? At the normative level, a ‘realistic utopia’ entails the recouping of the original promise of the environmental movement, that is the conceptualization and the legal treatment of the natural environment as a ‘public good’ to be administered in the interest of all and of the generations to come. At the institutional level two approaches are possible: consciously to shunning the need for institutional reform as too costly and ineffective and rely on market mechanisms of self-regulation and transnational private enforcement; and a reform of the institutional system of environmental governance by creating effective multilateral institutions that can mirror what has been done in international economic law and human rights. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. They should be complementary because the first one can hardly work without the other.

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.

Chapter 11 examines different institutional systems in developed, developing, emerging, and transitional economies and draws implications for the design and structure of nonmarket strategies. It notes that institutional environments differ considerably around the world, and what works in one context is unlikely to succeed elsewhere. Also, differing institutional conditions pose both challenges and opportunities for firms. For instance, institutional voids can be viewed as a positive or a negative, depending on company culture, resource, and market. Moreover, these international institutional differences have important implications for both market and nonmarket strategies and the relationships between the two. Some environments limit or curtail certain practices or strategies and, therefore, reduce the range of strategic options available to the firm. Companies typically have a range of potential strategic initiatives that are tailored to the specifics of the institutional environment and make the most of company resources and capabilities.

This chapter challenges the Identification Thesis. The Identification Thesis considers our conceptual practices with respect to the term ‘authority’ and states that they entail that an institutional normative system cannot be legitimate unless it is conceptually possible for a subject to determine what its norms require without having to decide themselves what they ought to do. If our conceptual practices with respect to using the terms ‘law’ and ‘authority’ are determined by what competent speakers typically believe and say about law and authority, then those ordinary linguistic practices allow for the possibility of a legitimate legal system with moral criteria of validity. Our conceptual practices are thus inconsistent with the Identification Thesis. As the Identification Thesis expresses the core of the service conception of authority, the service conception is inconsistent with the concept of authority as it is defined by our conceptual practices.

Emancipated and discharged from the Catholic institutional system that raised him, Ed Rohs was brought to a furnished room, given an entry level job and thrown into a world that, because he had been institutionalized for years, he was unprepared to handle. This chapter describes the struggles and discoveries he made about himself and his new world in the years following his discharge. The chapter describes his return to St. Vincent's Home as a part-time, paid football, baseball, and basketball coach and the attendant fear that he took the job because he was still institutionalized at heart. The chapter discusses Ed's first experiences dating, his career as a police administrative aide and then detective investigator with the Kings County District Attorney's Office; and his encounters as a detective with former St. Vincent's friends who had become criminals. He worked with the justice system to help youngsters who had been arrested, and his work earned him an article in the Daily News, which resulted in a letter of commendation from President Nixon and a call from an uncle he had never met. Seeing his name and picture, this relation recognized Ed's resemblance to his father, connecting Ed to relations he never knew existed.

This chapter determines whether the Authority Thesis is true. The Authority Thesis is based on the idea of a conceptual truth that law claims legitimate authority and hence that it is a conceptual truth that law is capable of being legitimate. This is the foundation of the Incorporation Thesis. Insofar as the notion of legitimate authority is a concept with morally normative content, it is important to understand whether it is part of law’s nature that it claims legitimate authority. To this end, the chapter attempts to determine whether the arguments against the Incorporation Thesis succeed, as well as to facilitate a deeper understanding of the conceptual relationships between law and morality.

This book attempts to define, analyse, and evaluate the institutional and ideological systems that empowered and sustained one of the most successful civilizations of the ancient world for a period in excess of three and a half millennia. The main chapters are concerned with the definition and analysis of what seem to be the main aspects of Egyptian culture that gave it its particular character and allowed the Egyptians to maintain that character for an extraordinary length of time and through different kinds of cultural shocks.

Political settlements underlie institutional construction and thus a society’s prospects for development. Without some mutually understood method for settling major disputes through politics rather than organized violence, institutions cannot resolve CAPs that impede development. This chapter develops my approach to categorizing political settlements. It offers a framework that permits systematic inquiry into relationships between distributions of power, institutional evolution, and prospects for resolving a series of context-specific CAPs of achieving economic and political development. Political settlements differ fundamentally according to their social foundations’which groups are party to the settlement’and their configuration of authority among insider elites. A four-quadrant typology distinguishes between broad and narrow social foundations and coherent (unipolar) versus disorganized (multipolar) configurations of authority. Additionally, the presence of resource constraints and mutually understood threats to elite political survival conditions motivations to create institutions.

The chapter derives an analytical framework for position formation inside the European Commission. Based on the heuristics of actor-centered institutionalism, it proceeds in three steps. First, it drops the unitary actor assumption and highlights tensions between hierarchical levels and sectoral divisions in the Commission’s organization. This perspective suggests the individual Directorates-General (DGs) are the most relevant actors in the internal preparation of policy proposals. Second, DGs are shown to operate in institutional contexts that narrow or broaden their room for maneuver when making policy choices. The chapter identifies the legislative status quo ante, internal coordination requirements, the inter-institutional system, and the EU’s wider multi-level governance system as relevant contexts. Third, the chapter deduces a bundle of factors impacting internal policy positions from these contexts. Taken together, these three steps make up the pluri-theoretical approach that structures the empirical parts of the book.

How can social scientists address the complexity of the myriad interrelations between economic development, political development, inequality, and human ability to achieve cooperative collective action across groups and populations of individuals from different backgrounds who hold widely divergent positions, interests, and perceptions? This book navigates the difficult terrain between universal-principle, one-size-fits-all frameworks, on the one hand, and approaches that insist that every society is unique, on the other. Using principles of political economy outlined in five core developmental hypotheses, as well as a method for drawing distinctions between basic types of political-economic context, this book constructs a typology that relates distributions of power to specific configurations of institutional systems and social orders. Each component of the typology points to specific types of collective-action problems that condition a society’s ability to achieve economic and political development. Policy analysis should pay attention to such contextual influence.

In order to better understand the experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) people within the health care and social services systems, researchers must overcome important difficulties inherent in trying to query these populations. This chapter addresses some of the challenges associated with internet based survey research with LGBT people. One of the difficulties in surveying these populations is establishing a sampling frame from which to draw. How many LGBT people are there? How should the researcher define sexual orientation? These difficulties are only compounded when researchers begin to examine international experiences of LGBT people. A dissertation project serves as an example in this discussion which was carefully constructed to maximize participation by using a Tailored Design Method and outing the researcher as a member of the LGBT community. A large quantitative sample (n = 1131) and a large qualitative sample (n = 870) were generated. This chapter discusses specific strategies for generating large and diverse samples by exploring both strengths and limitations of this research project. Topics include: outing the researcher; working with gatekeepers; framing the call for participation; and navigating heteronormative IRB systems.