The limits of learning: Policy evaluation and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation

This article reviews recent efforts by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) to measure and evaluate the success of its policies. It argues that these efforts have been inhibited by changes in the ministry's political context and the inherent complexity of the issues that innovation policies seek to address. The innovation strategy pursued by the ministry incorporates an element of mediated causality in its program logic, which complicates efforts to determine policy outcomes. When compounded by a changing normative context for judging success, this inherent complexity makes it very difficult to accurately determine and learn from the MRI's policy outcomes. The article concludes by suggesting a preliminary process of inquiry that might address some of these difficulties.     

Zwischen institutioneller Kontinuität und De-Institutionalisierung – Industrielle Dienstleistungen als Parallelwelt überbetrieblicher Arbeitsbeziehungen

This paper focuses on the paradox that the legal foundations of the German collective wage bargaining system have remained stable over the last four decades even though there has been simultaneously a significant decrease in the actual coverage of industry-wide collective agreements. Based on insights from historical institutionalism it is hypothesized that a mismatch between industry-based wage-setting and the inter-firm network as the unit of value creation causes an institutional fragmentation into segregated worlds of wage-setting. In these segregated worlds, employees experience changing wage-differentials according to their contract status although they fulfill similar job tasks within the same work context. Empirically, the paper uses industry-related services as prototypical example to illustrate this sort of institutional fragmentation. A comparison with other types of institutional change shows that fragmentation is characterized by continuous rule ambiguity and rule competition, which undermines the reliability of collective wage-setting while leaving the institutional setting formally untouched.     

Political entrepreneurship and the formation of special districts

Where general purpose governments provide a bundle of services within their boundaries, special district governments provide specific services inside the boundaries of general purpose governments. The alternative to forming a special purpose government is providing the service within a general purpose government. Formation of a special district represents the establishment of a new political enterprise, in contrast to the addition of a new product line to an existing government. We explore the formation of special districts as a particular form of the universal entrepreneurial search for gain or profit from exchange. Political entrepreneurship, like market entrepreneurship, operates inside some framework of rules, and the formation of special districts reflects the search for political gain within that framework of rules. We use an entrepreneurial framework to formulate several hypotheses concerning the formation and organization of special districts.