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During the past three decades, “new institutionalism” has become the main methodological battleground among political scientists. This is because political scientists differ in their preferred “new institutionalist” approach to political science. There are four basic institutionalist approaches: three older new institutionalisms—rational choice, historical, and sociological institutionalism—plus a fourth newer new institutionalism, called discursive institutionalism. This chapter explores the relationship between ideational and discourse analysis, on one hand, and various forms of new institutionalism, on the other hand. It makes the case for a discursive institutionalism, concerned with ideas and discourse, because it has the greatest potential for reconciling existing institutionalist approaches.

This introduction motivates the central question of how international is able to influence state behavior despite the absence of a coercive enforcement mechanism. It also lays out some methodological issues relating to the book and explains the relationship between the institutionalist approach used in the book and alternative approaches.

This chapter develops a theoretical framework for analysing the character of transfer and innovation in the international company. This draws on labour process theory and institutionalist approaches to develop an analysis of system, society, and dominance effects as competing pressures on, and sources of diversity among, overseas manufacturing subsidiaries. The operations of these factories are influenced by such contextual features as corporate structures, sector dynamics, the local setting, and wider national institutions and traditions, but these features are themselves mediated and manipulated in power struggles between collective and individual agents at workplace level. Thus, changes in work and employment relations cannot be read off from existing organizational templates or external constraints, but involve tensions and contention between different groupings within management and between managers and workers. The implications of these arguments are drawn out by considering rival interpretations of the operations of overseas subsidiaries, as transplants, hybrids, or branch plants.

This chapter sets out an analytical ‘national institutionalist’ framework together with the ways in which it is to be tested in the present study. It examines general institutionalist approaches to national policy making and then relates them to change.

This chapter attempts to strengthen the institutionalist approach to the justification of preventive war. It seeks to refute the claim that preventive war as such is unjust because it involves violations of the rights of at least some of those who are targeted in the preventive action. It argues that even the strongest ‘rights-based’ objection is incapable of supporting the assertion that preventive war is never morally permissible and that properly designed institutions provide an effective reply to the consequentialist objections.

This chapter looks at the birth of the Virginia School of economics by focusing on two of the approaches developed in Virginia in the 1960s. The first one—named after Ronald Coase—is the Coasian institutionalist approach, which is a clear attempt to maintain the sort of Classical Liberal thought fashioned in an earlier period by Frank Knight. The second one—named after James Buchanan—is the Buchanan political economy approach, which also had a stronger commitment to Classical Liberal methodology than did the Stigler/Friedman/Director version rapidly spreading within the Chicago campus. Neither one became a recognized Classical Liberal standard bearer. Instead, their combined work was seldom considered to be part of any broader mainstream approach that differed significantly in terms of methodology. By the end of the 1960s, the Virginia School was no more.

In this chapter, I will review what I see as the essential characteristics of the Obama foreign policy style and analyze whether we can discern a clear “Obama doctrine” from his foreign policy actions and rhetoric. In order to do so, I will lay out the four major approaches to American foreign policy-making and then assess how Obama’s policies fit within these approaches. Obama’s early foreign policy moves emphasized reconciliation and a more focused approach on counterterrorism as opposed to regime change. However, domestic political and international geopolitical constraints came to limit his ambitions. As the first Black president, Obama’s initial soaring rhetoric of change was replaced by cautionary tales of avoiding mistakes. After laying out the four schools of American foreign policy (nationalist, realist, liberal institutionalist, neoconservative), I discuss Obama’s policy style—the “nonideological doctrine”—that was purposively deliberative and cautious, in contrast to the ideological Bush regime-change crusade. Obama was careful to weigh the costs and benefits of policy options, keeping an eye on his predilection that foreign affairs must not interfere with the domestic agenda. This caution, which avoided major commitments to overseas conflicts, came under criticism from both the Left and Right of the political spectrum.

This chapter briefly reviews the main theoretical perspectives on the informal economy. The review begins with the dual economy model, the dominant conceptual framework for understanding the informal economy, followed by the neo-Marxian, the legalist, and institutionalist perspectives on informal economy. The chapter argues that these approaches broadly correspond to the two mutually exclusive and diagonally opposite views—informality as exploitation and informality as accumulation. The underlying vision of the neo-Marxian and dualistic approaches is that informality—whether understood as a relation or as a characteristic of the firm, the sector, or the economy—is inherently exploitative while the legalist and the institutionalist schools envisage the informal sector as inherently dynamic and a means of accumulation.