Organizational control rationales in knowledge-intensive organizations: An integrative review of emerging trends

This theoretical paper uses a complete review of organizational control configuration (OCC) literature to illustrate the innovation, complexity and dynamics of control in knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs). On the basis of interdisciplinary analysis of the extant literature on OCC, the paper offers a comprehensive look at the “control pathway” taken by the various KIOs. By means of this integrative review of existing theory and research, the paper argues for greater attention to KIOs' control rationales in OCC theory and research. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive conceptual framework for the study of control in KIOs and suggests a number of propositions for future research.     

Institutional checks and corruption: The effect of formal agenda access on governance

Legislative checks give whoever wields them influence over policy making. It is argued in this article that this influence implies the ability not only to affect legislative content, but also to direct public resources toward private ends. Rational politicians should use access to checks to make themselves better off – for example, by biasing policy toward private interests or creating opportunities to draw directly from the public till. Disincentives exist only to the extent that those able to observe or block corruption do not themselves benefit from it. Political opponents thus can use checks to stymie each other, but legislative checks controlled by political allies create conditions for collusion and corruption. Testing this claim against data from a sample of 84 countries, the results presented in this article show strong support for the hypothesised relationship between institutional checks and corruption.     

我国立法腐败及其治理的政治学分析

作为隐蔽性极强的腐败类型,立法腐败一直未引起足够重视。因其特殊的危害性,必须加强研究和治理。研究发现:首先,立法腐败包括行政部门立法寻租、立法人员权钱交易式腐败和基于部门利益考量的行政立法不作为三种基本类型;其次,立法腐败与制度缺陷、制度执行力不足、公民政治参与无序化和非均衡化、查处力度不够等密切相关;最后,治理立法腐败应从完善制度机制、加大制度执行力、规范公民政治参与和加大治理力度等方面入手。治理立法腐败是艰难的,也是可行的。     

知识密集型组织激励机制研究

本文首先对知识型员工的特点进行了分析,然后通过对知识密集型组织中企业和员工之间的委托人-代理人博弈的分析,在员工是风险中性者的假设前提下,建立了一种激励相容约束和参与约束,并在此基础上设计了"租赁经营制"这种薪酬激励机制。     

Leadership as practice meets knowledge as flow: Emerging perspectives for leaders in knowledge-intensive organizations

The goal of this paper is to help leaders in all parts of knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs) rethink leadership and knowledge to enhance creative potential. KIO contexts are dynamic, and their work is steeped in social complexity. Global trends impact organizational norms; cross-cultural interactions surface value dilemmas; and constant change elevates the value of agility over stability. Traditional ways of viewing leadership and knowledge can accentuate stability. By reframing leadership and knowledge generation and sharing as natural parts of knowledge-intensive practices, leaders can enhance creativity and agility. Rather than associating leadership with powerful individuals, it can be seen as distributed or an emergent property of collaborative knowledge work. Embedded in this more dynamic and fluid view of knowledge-intensive work is the assumption that governance needs to focus on networks, communication, and trust. This paper presents new ideas to guide leadership in complex, KIOs. Case studies illustrate how these new perspectives can lead to enhanced creative potential.     

When private governance impedes multilateralism: The case of international pesticide governance

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state-led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, a treaty-based information-sharing mechanism that allows countries to refuse hazardous chemical imports. We find that private agricultural standard-setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention's pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention's intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state-based governance to become more stringent. We characterize this as a “confounding interaction” whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance.     

Institutionalized social skill and the rise of mediating organizations in urban governance: the case of the Cleveland Housing Network

In this paper we build on an expanding literature that attempts to understand the changing organizational and institutional dimensions of contemporary urban governance. We do so by utilizing the Cleveland Housing Network as a lens through which salient characteristics of contemporary governance become visible. Doing so enables us to highlight the distinctive challenges of the multi-institutional nature of contemporary governance arrangements and “heterarchic” governance in particular. These challenges situate mediating organizations as central components of governance arrangements. Finally, by focusing on the distinctive characteristics of the organization's leaders, we demonstrate that mediating organizations are usefully thought of as institutionalized forms of the “social skill” of institutional entrepreneurs.     

Responsibilization: The case of road safety governance

Governments are increasingly turning to new modes of governance to induce nonstate actors to voluntarily take responsibility for societal problems. Using the concept of responsibilization as a theoretical lens, this article analyzes changes in road safety governance in Sweden. How, why, and to whom has the responsibility for road safety been attributed in Swedish policymaking, and how have state authorities engaged in processes of responsibilization during its implementation? The results show a shift in attribution of responsibility from individual road users to a broad set of so-called system designers, based on moral, causal, and preventive rationales. Responsibilization both occurs within the state apparatus and is imposed by state authorities on nonstate actors using soft governance measures. Responsibilization provides a fruitful theoretical lens for governance studies by identifying shifts in responsibility (including deresponsibilization), explicating normative/ethical underpinnings of new governance modes, and helping to open the “black box” of the state.     

Making sense of multilevel governance and governance coordination in Brazil: The case of the Bolsa Verde Programme

Brazil is an example of a challenging governance context par excellence: continental size, multi-levelled governance structures and diverse administrative cultures meet with ambitious, large-scale policy needs and objectives. The multilevel governance approach is applied here to analyse implementation and governance coordination of the Bolsa Verde Programme (BVP). Through a close reading of the narratives told by three programme officials – and zooming in on jointly exercised governance functions known from the metagovernance approach – we analysed how BVP’s programmatic governance coordination was made sense of. The analysis showed that our interviewees were well aware of the shortcomings of the governance coordination in BVP, understood as rather hierarchical, centrally driven and often tackling challenges of vertical multi-actor coordination in a reactive ad-hoc manner. However, since the implementers have been able to creatively and skilfully solve governance coordination challenges, possibilities for developing more systematic and inclusive (meta)governance approaches seem feasible.     

Orchestrating sustainability: The case of European Union biofuel governance

This article provides an empirical analysis of orchestration – that is, the initiation, support, and embracement of private governance arrangements through public regulators – in the field of European Union biofuel governance. It examines the emerging sustainability regime and shows that orchestration has been extensively practiced. Regulators in the European Union have used a range of directive and facilitative measures to initiate and support private biofuel certification schemes and to incorporate them in their regulatory frameworks. This has given rise to a hybrid regime in which public and private approaches are closely intertwined. Discussing the benefits and complications of engaging with private biofuel sustainability governance, the article's findings point to a partial failure of orchestration in this policy area.     

Between governance-driven democratisation and democracy-driven governance: Explaining changes in participatory governance in the case of Barcelona

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top-down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b) vice-versa, the mechanisms through which bottom-up, open spaces can be co-opted through institutionalisation. This paper seeks to unpick dynamic interactions between different spaces of participation by looking specifically at two forms of participatory governance, or participatory forms of political decision making used to improve the quality of democracy. First, Mark Warren's concept of ‘governance-driven democratization’ describes top-down and technocratic participatory governance aiming to produce better policies in response to bureaucratic rationales. Second, we introduce a new concept, democracy-driven governance, to refer to efforts by social movements to invent new, and reclaim and transform existing, spaces of participatory governance and shape them to respond to citizens’ demands. The paper defines these concepts and argues that they co-exist and interact in dynamic fashion; it draws on an analysis of case study literature on participatory governance in Barcelona to illuminate this relationship. Finally, the paper relates the theoretical framework to the case study by making propositions as to the structural and agential drivers of shifts in participatory governance.     

Ideological influences on governance and regulation: The comparative case of supreme courts

A key influence on governance and regulation is the ideology of individual decisionmakers. However, certain branches of government – such as courts – while wielding wide ranging regulatory powers, are expected to do so with no attitudinal influence. We posit a dynamic response model to investigate attitudinal behavior in different national courts. Our ideological scores are estimated based on probability models that formalize the assumption that judicial decisions consist of ideological, strategic, and jurisprudential components. The Dynamic Comparative Attitudinal Measure estimates the attitudinal decisionmaking on the institution as a whole. Additionally, we estimate Ideological Ideal Point Preference for individual justices. Empirical results with original data for political and religious rights rulings in the Supreme Courts of the United States, Canada, India, the Philippines, and Israel corroborate the measures' validity. Future studies can utilize Ideological Ideal Point Preference and the Dynamic Comparative Attitudinal Measure to cover additional courts, legal spheres, and time frames, and to estimate government deference.     

The rise of the constitutional regulatory state in Colombia: The case of water governance

This article interprets the regulatory state in Colombia as the result of a dialectic process between transnational knowledge and domestic politics, which influence, transform, and inspire each other. Such a process results in an interesting constitutional variant of the regulatory state, in which neo‐constitutionalism becomes a counterbalance to the unchecked expansion of neo‐liberal regulatory practices. I, therefore, distinguish between neoliberal and constitutional regulatory states. As a result of neo‐constitutionalism, the domestic judiciary is empowered, and becomes a crucial actor to understand both the specific traits of this regulatory experience, and its interaction with global centers of power.     

The impact of state governance structures on management and performance of public organizations: A study of higher education institutions

Legislative statutes are passed by political majorities which support structures that insulate the implementing agency from its political opponents over time. Political actors also respond to different constituencies. Depending on the broad or narrow base of these constituencies, actors favor different kinds of governance structures. We apply this theoretical framework to the question of whether the state governance structures of boards of higher education affect the way university managers allocate resources, develop sources of revenue, and promote research and undergraduate education. Over the past two decades state governments have given considerable attention to state governance issues, resulting in many universities operating in a more regulated setting today. This paper develops a classification of higher education structures and shows the effects of differences in these structures on university management and performance using a data set that covers the period from 1987 to 1998. The analysis suggests that, for most of the measures, productivity and resources are higher at universities with a statewide board that is more decentralized and has fewer regulatory powers. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Regulation and voluntarism: A case study of governance in the making

In this article I analyze a multi‐stakeholder process of environmental regulation. By grounding the article in the literature on regulatory capitalism and governance, I follow the career of a specific legislative process: the enactment of Israel's Deposit Law on Beverage Containers, which aims to delegate the responsibility for recycling to industry. I show that one crucial result of this process was the creation of a non‐profit entity licensed to act as a compliance mechanism. This new entity enabled industry to distance itself from the responsibility of recycling, and thereby frustrated the original objective of the legislation, which was to implement the principle of “extended producer responsibility.” Furthermore, this entity, owned by commercial companies and yet acting as an environmentally friendly organization, allowed industry to promote an anti‐regulatory agenda via a “civic voice.” The study moves methodologically from considering governance as an institutional structure to analyzing the process of “governancing,” through which authoritative capacities and legal responsibilities are distributed among state and non‐state actors. Two key findings are that this process and its outcome (i) are premised on an ideology of civic voluntarism, which ultimately delegates environmental responsibilities to citizens; and (ii) facilitate an anti‐regulatory climate that serves commercial interests.     

加强企业基层组织和党员队伍建设实践研究

高楼大厦只有根基稳固,才能经受住狂风暴雨和自然灾害的侵害。中国共产党能长期成为执政党,就是因为我们党始终把根扎在基层,不断加强对基层权力点的控制和管理。我们党在革命初期就把党支部建在连上,这不是一时的随意,是共产党第一代领导人的智慧所在,深知党指挥枪的重要性,才使共产党从小到大,由弱到强,并领导人民建立了新中国。     

Sport,civil society and social integration: The case of Norwegian voluntary sport organizations

Abstract

Voluntary sport organizations make up the largest part of voluntary sector in many countries. Yet, in light of the renewed social and political interest in civil society, we do not know very much about how sport organizations operate and function. Accordingly, this article addresses the question of how voluntary sport organizations contribute to social integration through differences in community structures. First a theoretical framework making it possible to distinguish between various forms of community structures—strong, weak, mediated and pragmatic communities—is developed. Then, the first empirical part describes how members in sport organizations belong to such various forms of communities. Next, the article explains differences in social integration through social background, variation in participation in sports and various recruitment channels. Finally, the article explores how differences in community structures matters for the experience of sport activity, for organizational democracy and social capital (trust and political interests).     

The role of intermediaries in corruption

The aim of the article is to examine a briber initiated corrupt transaction and the role of intermediaries in such a transaction, using a game theoretical model. Clients applying the intermediaries do so to be able to get rid of high red tape applied by the officers. They prefer using intermediary instead of offering a bribe to the officers directly since they do not know which officers are corrupt (accepts a bribe offer) and how much bribe should be given to the corrupt officers. In our model, the client wants to offer a bribe to get rid of red tape, however, she hesitates due to the possibility of offering a bribe to an honest public officer and as a result getting a penalty. Client also hesitates due to the possibility of offering an amount of bribe lower than the reservation price of the corrupt officer; thus being rejected. Intermediaries, knowing which officers are corrupt and the reservation prices of those corrupt officers, decrease the risk of offering a bribe. Two cases; one with intermediary, the other without, in such a scenario is examined and the results of the two are compared.     

腐败的发生机理及腐败风险的预警

腐败的本质是权力的滥用和异化,腐败的发生具有其内在机理。权力是腐败发生的根本性基础,制度或体制的缺陷是腐败发生的客观条件,腐败动机和成分分析是腐败发生的决定性因素。预防腐败的重点是能够发现腐败的苗头、把握腐败的发展趋势。因此,构建腐败风险预警机制就十分必要,腐败风险防范机制、发现机制和警示机制构成了腐败风险预警机制的基本结构。结合教育、制度、监督等反腐败途径,以预防腐败为工作重点,依据腐败行为的发生过程,科学设定腐败风险预警机制的运行程序,保证预防腐败行为的发生和蔓延。     

The limits and variety of risk‐based governance: The case of flood management in Germany and England

Risk‐based governance is argued by many to hold the promise of a more rational and efficient state, by making explicit the limitations of state interventions and focusing finite resources on those targets where probable damage is greatest. This paper challenges the assumption that risk‐based governance has the potential for universal and uniform application, by comparing contemporary flood management in Germany and England. On first inspection, flooding appears to be a paradigmatic case of risk colonizing European policy discourses, with the traditional notion of flood defense giving way to flood risk management in the context of climate change, increasingly frequent flood disasters, political and cost pressures on flood protection, and publicly available European‐wide flood assessments. Drawing on in‐depth empirical research, this paper shows how the role, and even the definition, of “risk” is institutionally shaped, and how the respective institutional environments of German and English flood management practices impede and promote risk colonization. In particular, the use and conceptualizations of risk in governance are variously promoted, filtered, or constrained by the administrative procedures, structures, and political expectations embedded within flood management and wider polities of each country. The findings of this research are important for the design and implementation of supranational policies and regulations that endorse risk‐based approaches, such as the recent EU Flood Directive, as well as scholarly debate as to how to legitimately define the limits of governance in the face of uncertainty and accountability pressures.