Social capital, regional governance and economic performance of rural areas - concept and empirical evidence from case studies in East and West Germany

During the last two decades the economic and social conditions of rural areas in Europe have become more and more varying in accordance with different development processes. In addition to ?traditional? location factors such as infrastructure, conditions of labour markets and accessibility, so-called ?soft? location factors like social capital, regional governance and the role of local actor networks have increasingly been taken into consideration in recent studies to explain observable differences in economic performance of the regions. The paper is mainly focussed on the relationships between social capital and governance at the regional level from a theoretical and empirical point of view. Complementary to the well-known concept of social capital the term ?regional governance? is used in the sense of weakly institutionalised and network-oriented modes of co-operation between regional actors to achieve common goals. The properties of the concept will be discussed in relation to other "soft" location factors of rural economic development. The approach is developed on the basis of empirical findings drawn from a number of pair-wise comparisons of differing rural areas in terms of economic performance. The results of the case study analysis are referring to selected rural areas in the eastern and western parts of Germany. The data are derived from business surveys and computerised network analysis, which have been elaborated as the German part of an EU-funded research project regarding dynamics of rural areas (DORA). After explaining the case study approach and clarifying the definition and theoretical properties of ?regional governance? an operational conception of indicators for characterising the term in relation to social capital embodied by formal (professional-related) and informal (private-related) types of local actor networks will be presented with regard to regional-economic analysis. Differing location conditions and socio-economic contexts are taken into account. Furthermore, expert interviews with local/regional actors as well as findings derived from postal business surveys serve as information bases for the investigation. From the comparison of the two regions and their path-depending contextual properties the following conclusion can be derived: existing regional differences regarding the quality of regional governance in combination with the accumulated stock of social capital can contribute considerably to the explanation of differing development paths under similar context conditions. Therefore, the structural elements of governance at the regional and local levels of decision making should be more strongly taken into account for impact assessment of rural development policy.

Institutional theory and legislatures

Institutionalism has become one of the dominant strands of theory within contemporary political science. Beginning with the challenge to behavioral and rational choice theory issued by March and Olsen, institutional analysis has developed into an important alternative to more individualistic approaches to theory and analysis. This body of theory has developed in a number of ways, and perhaps the most commonly applied version in political science is historical institutionalism that stresses the importance of path dependency in shaping institutional behaviour. The fundamental question addressed in this book is whether institutionalism is useful for the various sub-disciplines within political science to which it has been applied, and to what extent the assumptions inherent to institutional analysis can be useful for understanding the range of behavior of individuals and structures in the public sector. The volume will also examine the relative utility of different forms of institutionalism within the various sub-disciplines. The book consists of a set of strong essays by noted international scholars from a range of sub-disciplines within the field of political science, each analyzing their area of research from an institutionalist perspective and assessing what contributions this form of theorizing has made, and can make, to that research. The result is a balanced and nuanced account of the role of institutions in contemporary political science, and a set of suggestions for the further development of institutional theory

Organizational Institutionalism and Sociology: A Reflection

[Excerpt] In 1991, DiMaggio and Powell observed: Institutional theory presents a paradox. Institutional analysis is as old as Emile Durkheim\u27s exhortation to study \u27social facts as things\u27, yet sufficiently novel to be preceded by new in much of the contemporary literature. (1991: 1) We argue that this paradox is, at least in part, the result of a long-standing tension in sociology between more materialist, interest-driven explanations of behavior and ideational, normative explanations, a tension that has often driven oscillating waves of sociological theorizing. It underlies many classical debates (e.g., between Spencer and Durkheim, Weber and Marx, and even Parsons and Mills), and the waves of theory associated with it have produced a variety of \u27neo-isms\u27, including neo-Marxist as well as neo-institutionalist theories. This distinction in explanatory approaches is linked to a more general theoretical problematic for sociologists: how to provide a single, coherent account of both stable, persisting patterns of social behavior, and the breakdown and elimination of what were once deeply-entrenched patterns. In this chapter, we examine the history of these distinctive explanatory approaches in sociology, and locate the origins of contemporary institutional work on organizations within this context. We also consider how more recent organizational analyses in the tradition of institutional theory have been driven by and reflect this basic tension

Measuring the Performance of Local Government Entities and Analysis of their Managers’ and Personnel’s Information Needs in the Context of New Public Management

This article fits into the scope of world research on the implementations of the NPM concept and uses New Institutional Economy to better understand the implementation of management accounting in the public sector.Badanie zostało przeprowadzone w formie wywiadu - ankiety audytoryjnej, skierowanej do 45 respondentów reprezentujących jednostki samorządu terytorialnego. Uzyskane rezultaty potwierdzają, iż system pomiaru dokonań stosowany przez jednostki samorządu terytorialnego w Polsce jest wynikiem silnego oddziaływania instytucjonalnego na system zarządzania tymi jednostkami i nie jest przydatny dla kierowników i pracowników tego sektora, a także nie spełnia wymagań stawianych przez założenia koncepcji NPM

The rise of policy coherence for development: a multi-causal approach

In recent years policy coherence for development (PCD) has become a key principle in international development debates, and it is likely to become even more relevant in the discussions on the post-2015 sustainable development goals. This article addresses the rise of PCD on the Western donors’ aid agenda. While the concept already appeared in the work of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the early 1990s, it took until 2007 before PCD became one of the Organisation’s key priorities. We adopt a complexity-sensitive perspective, involving a process-tracing analysis and a multi-causal explanatory framework. We argue that the rise of PCD is not as contingent as it looks. While actors such as the EU, the DAC and OECD Secretariat were the ‘active causes’ of the rise of PCD, it is equally important to look at the underlying ‘constitutive causes’ which enabled policy coherence to thrive well

The Process of Thinking by Prospective Teachers of Mathematics in Making Arguments

This study aimed to describe the process of thinking by prospective teachers of mathematics in making arguments. It was a qualitative research involving the mathematics students of STKIP PGRI Jombang as the subject of the study. Test and task-based semi structural interview were conducted for data collection. The result showed that 163 of 260 mathematics students argued using inductive and deductive warrants. The process of thinking by the prospective teachers of mathematics in making arguments had begun since they constructed their very first idea by figuring out some objects to make a conclusion. However, they also found a rebuttal from that conclusion, though they did not further describe what such rebuttal was. Therefore, they decided to construct the second ideas in order to verify the first ones through some pieces of definition