PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS IN THE ROAD TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM PUBLIC SECTOR PROCUREMENT

This article provides a conceptual framework for understanding key psychological barriers to implementing sustainable development in procurement process by local government and health care authorities. This task is an important one as a comprehension of psychological barriers is a prerequisite for understanding how individuals engage with the often more visible technical, budgetary or regulatory barriers in sustainable procurement. The article highlights how progress towards sustainable procurement is hampered by a combination of (1) individual factors; (2) organizational factors; (3) small group adaptation processes; (4) adaptation processes within the organization; and (5) external adaptation processes between organizations. The framework thus contributes to filling the conceptual space between human agent and organizational structure by pointing to the importance of cognitive filters and ideational resources that interact at various levels within an organization and in the complex network of formal or informal partners that surround it.     

Explaining the immigration policy mix: Countries' relative openness to asylum and labour migration

Western democracies have developed complex policies to manage migration flows. Much of the scholarly literature and political discourse assume that countries have become increasingly selective and that they prioritise economic intakes. Despite clear efforts by policymakers to distinguish between refugees and migrant workers, we know surprisingly little about how countries combine different policy dimensions and which factors shape their relative openness to different target groups. In this article, we shed light on how countries combine two of the main admission channels, asylum and labour migration, by introducing the concept of the ‘immigration policy mix’. A comparative analysis of 33 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010 examines the pattern and drivers behind their immigration policy mix: Does the policy mix follow a pattern of convergence, is it subject to political dynamics or is it path dependent? The results reveal that despite a shift in political sympathies from asylum to labour migration, countries' immigration policy mixes have strongly converged into more liberal policies overall. The immigration policy mix primarily reflects governments’ limited room to manoeuvre due to competing political pressures. These insights demonstrate that the immigration policy mix serves to enhance our understanding of countries’ complex regulation of immigration.