Governing Interdependent Financial Systems: Lessons from the Vienna Initiative

This paper argues that while financial markets have become transnational, their governance structures have remained national at the core: Fiscal responsibility for crises is ultimately born by the nation state where the crisis occurred – whether or not it bears any responsibility for regulatory or policy failures. The tension between the transnational nature of markets and national responsibility for these markets has been revealed once more by the global financial and the European sovereign debt crises. Against this background, the Vienna Initiative (VI) offers the prospect of an alternative governance regime. The VI was formed to manage the fallout from the global crisis in the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It brought together in an open and deliberative process the key stakeholders in the pan-European financial market, including transnational bank groups, fiscal authorities, regulators and central banks from home and host countries, the European Central Bank (as observer), the European Commission (EC), and several international financial institutions (IFIs). While each of these stakeholders had a manifest interest in a coordinated response, effective coordination required engineering to overcome the collective action problems they faced. The commitments stakeholders ultimately made to fend off a financial collapse went well beyond what they were legally obliged to do. The paper explores the institutional and organizational foundations of the VI and suggests lessons it may hold for other transnational governance challenges

Fragmented Laws, Contingent Choices: The Tragicomedy of the Village Commons in China

Defining the direct conflict between law and social norms as a tragedy and their reconciliation as a comedy, this paper serves as a case study of the mixture of tragedies and comedies of collective land governance in China. The term tragicomedy encapsulates such a mixture. This paper presents two contrasting cases of collective land governance: one village co-op is captured by a mafia and the consequent mafia-style land development business is maintained through violence and the bribing of government officials; the other village co-op from time to time takes actions “in the name of law” in their bargaining for legal property rights with the government and with a hold-out couple who refused to submit their “nailhouse” to the village co-op for redevelopment. This paper reveals that the different identities that village leaders simultaneously assume under different social control systems are key to understanding the co-evolution of property law and norms. It also highlights the essential roles of the laws and communities’ legal strategies in governing common-pool resources

Assimilation and differentiation: A multilevel perspective on organizational and network change

This paper builds on recently derived stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) for the coevolution of one-mode and two-mode networks, and extends them to the analysis of how concurrent multilevel processes of (internal) organizational and (external) network change affect one another over time. New effects are presented that afford specification and identification of two apparently conflicting micro-relational mechanisms that jointly affect decisions to modify the portfolio of internal organizational activities. The first mechanism, assimilation, makes network partners more similar by facilitating the replication and diffusion of experience. The second mechanism, functional differentiation, operates to maintain and amplify differences between network partners by preventing or limiting internal organizational change. We illustrate the empirical value of the model in the context of data that we have collected on a regional community of hospital organizations connected by collaborative patient transfer relations observed over a period of seven years. We find that processes of social influence conveyed by network ties may lead both to similarity and differences among connected organizations. We discuss the implications of the results in the context of current research on interorganizational networks

Taking time seriously:How do we deal with change in historical networks?

The end of the monopoly of sociologists on social scientific network analysis has raised new questions about time and space in networks. This paper, mostly intended to be read by historians, archaeologists and political scientists, reviews existing works and circumscribes open questions as regards time, and especially historical time. It presents two currents of research that have produced cumulative results: on the one hand, the production of interpretable animated visualizations of changing networks, and on the other hand, the so-called "actor-oriented" statistical modeling of network dynamics. It also presents comparatively under-discussed questions: those that have to do with the definition, gathering and coding of data, and the drawing up of hypotheses.Cet article discute des manières de prendre en compte le temps en analyse de réseaux. Il présente la littérature sur le sujet en essayant de distinguer les questions déjà assez bien connues (la présentation visuelle sous forme d'animations, la modélisation de type Siena) et celles, beaucoup moins discutées, qui ont trait à la construction des données, et en particulier à la datation des liens, ainsi qu'à l'élaboration d'hypothèses prenant les temporalités en compte

New Venture Creation: Controversial Perspectives and Theories

New venture creation is a hot topic and different scholars tried to shed light on this fascinating research subject. Despite the vast body of existing literature, there is little consensus about which theoretical perspectives and theories are best suited for describing and explaining the phenomenon. One of the most controversial topics is that “whether this phenomenon could be considered as a process or not?” This paper presents the existing views and theories on new venture creation, and tries to answer the mentioned question. To do so, Moroz and Hindle’s (2012) distinguished views are used. Finally, the paper concludes with some suggestions and remarks. The main contribution of this paper is to criticize the existing perspectives and theories, to categorize them, and to present a more comprehensible view of the phenomenon