Transnational Activism in Support of National Protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

This article considers the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media whilst organizationally remaining localized. It examines a corpus of social media data collected in the course of two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data supplemented with interview findings revealed concerns with protest logistics as common across the transnational networks of protest localities on both Facebook and Twitter, a finding that testified to the coordinated character of the protests. On the other hand, collective identity emerged as the fruit of attempts to surmount localized protest experiences of geographically disparate but civically-minded social media users

The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations

We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a simulation model of organizational dynamics, we show that the production of violent events tends to accelerate with increasing size and experience. This coupling of frequency, experience and size arises from a fundamental positive feedback loop in which attacks lead to growth which leads to increased production of new attacks. In contrast, event severity is independent of both size and experience. Thus larger, more experienced organizations are more deadly because they attack more frequently, not because their attacks are more deadly, and large events are equally likely to come from large and small organizations. These results hold across political ideologies and time, suggesting that the frequency and severity of terrorism may be constrained by fundamental processes.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, supplementary materia

Organization Development for Social Change

The field of organization development (OD) has emerged from efforts to improve the performance of organizations, largely in the for-profit sector but more recently in the public and not-for-profit sectors as well. This paper examines how OD concepts and tools can be used to solve problems and foster constructive change at the societal level as well. It examines four areas in which OD can make such contributions: (1) strengthening social change-focused organizations, (2) scaling up the impacts of such agencies, (3) creating new inter-organizational systems, and (4) changing contexts that shape the action of actors strategic to social change. It discusses examples and the kinds of change agent roles and interventions that are important for each. Finally, it discusses some implications for organization development intervention, practitioners, and the field at large.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 25. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers

Authority, politicization, and alternative justifications: endogenous legitimation dynamics in global economic governance

Recent mobilization against core tenets of the liberal international order suggests that international institutions lack sufficient societal legitimacy. We argue that these contestations are part of a legitimation dynamic that is endogenous to the political authority of international institutions. We specify a mechanism in which international authority increases the likelihood for the public politicization of international institutions. This undermines legitimacy in the short run, but also allows broadening the justificatory basis of global governance: Politicization allows civil society organizations (CSOs) to transmit alternative legitimation standards to global elite discourses. We trace this sequence for four key institutions of global economic governance – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the NAFTA – combining data on authority and protest counts with markers for CSOs and legitimation narratives in more than 120,000 articles in international elite newspapers during 1992–2012. The uncovered patterns are consistent with a perspective that understands legitimation dynamics as an endogenous feature of international authority, but they also show that alternative legitimation narratives did not lastingly resonate in the global discourse thus far. This may explain current backlashes and calls for active re-legitimation efforts on part of international institutions themselves

Why and how do national monopolies go global? International competition, supranational regionalism and the transnational reorganization of postal and logistics companies in Europe

The paper documents and analyses the rise of a transnational transport and logistics' industry within the European Union. Neither a global commodity chain, nor a national business system approach is considered adequate to help comprehend trans border reorganization within the European Union signalling a need for an approach to organization research able to tackle transnational institutionalization processes. To illustrate the extent to which transformation and 'denationalization' of traditional transport industries has proceeded in the 1990s, the paper starts with an account of the very recent ascent of the largest European diversified logistics service company: the German Post office (now Deutsche Post AG). The rapid conversion of the public postal system (by way of aggressive M&A activity mainly) into a transmodal, transnational, and information technology intensive private organization able to supply a wide range of both uniform and highly specialized services across borders is used to introduce the argument on: a) the overall transformation of national European transport systems and on b) new structures of competition and cooperation with regard to an emerging transnational production related service branch. -- Der Beitrag dokumentiert und analysiert die Enstehung einer transnationalen Transport- und Logistikindustrie in der Europäischen Union. Weder der 'global commodity chain'-Ansatz, noch der 'national business system'-Ansatz werden als hinreichend erachtet, grenzüberschreitende Reorganisationsprozesse innerhalb der Europäischen Union zu bearbeiten. Damit wird auf die Notwendigkeit verwiesen, einen organisationssoziologischen Ansatz zu entwickeln, der transnationale Institutionalisierungsprozesse erfassen kann. Um die Reichweite der Transformations- und De-Nationalisierungsprozesse zu illustrieren, vermittelt das Papier einen Überblick über die jüngste Entwickung des größten diversifizierten europäischen Logistikdienstleistungsunternehmens: die Deutsche Post AG. Die Analyse des rapiden Umbaus der öffentlichen Postverwaltung (vorwiegend durch aggressive Übernahme- und Fusionsaktivitäten) in eine transmodale, transnationale und informationstechnologieintensive privatwirtschaftliche Organisation, welche eine breite Palette von einheitlichen und hochspezialisierten Dienstleistungen grenzüberschreitend anbieten kann, wird aus zwei Gründen vorgenommen: zum einen zur Darstellung der generellen Transformation der nationalen europäischen Gütertransportsysteme und zum anderen zur Erfassung der neuen Strukturen von Wettbewerb und Kooperation in einer im Entstehungsprozess befindlichen, transnationalen produktionsbezogenen Dienstleistungsbranche.