The Theory of Fields and Its Application to Corporate Governance

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want to argue that there is a great deal of theoretical leverage to be gained by considering law as a field. To make all of this more concrete, I use field theory to offer a stylized account of the rise of the “shareholder value” movement of the 1980s and the use of agency theory as the dominant theory of corporate governance to justify the shareholder value revolt. I end by considering whether or not field theory has normative implications useful for the law

Fields, Power and Social Skill: A Critical Analysis of the New Institutionalisms

"New Institutional" Theories have proliferated across the social sciences. While they have substantial disagreements, they agree that institutions are created to produce local social orders, are social constructions, fundamentally about how powerful groups create rules of interaction and maintain unequal resource distributions, and yet, once in existence, both constrain and enable actors in subsequent institution building. I present a critique of these theories that focuses on their inadequate attention to the role of social power and actors in the creation of institutions. An alternative view of the dynamics of institutions is sketched out based on a more sociological conception of rules, resources, and social skill

The Theory of Fields and Its Application to Corporate Governance

My goal here is twofold. First, I want to introduce the theory of strategic action fields to the law audience. The main idea in field theory in sociology is that most social action occurs in social arenas where actors know one another and take one another into account in their action. Scholars use the field construct to make sense of how and why social orders emerge, reproduce, and transform. Underlying this formulation is the idea that a field is an ongoing game where actors have to understand what others are doing in order to frame their actions. Second, I want to argue that there is a great deal of theoretical leverage to be gained by considering law as a field. To make all of this more concrete, I use field theory to offer a stylized account of the rise of the “shareholder value” movement of the 1980s and the use of agency theory as the dominant theory of corporate governance to justify the shareholder value revolt. I end by considering whether or not field theory has normative implications useful for the law

How the upper and middle classes embraced a culture of household debt and aggressive financial risk taking

The last three decades have seen a growing role for financial markets and institutions in the economy, with households included in this trend. But how have households changed their attitudes and behaviors in relation to financial markets? In new research which looks at survey data on consumer finance, Adam Goldstein and Neil Fligstein find evidence of a new household ‘finance culture’. While financial firms sought out customers of all incomes, the upper and middle classes have embraced household borrowing and have become much more likely to take financial risks

"The institutional terrain of the European Union"

Policy domains form where there exists a constitutional agreement to create legislation, a collective definition of what issues are and who gets to be an actor, and procedures to mobilize the production of new rules in the domain. Policy domains may be entirely constituted by government organizations or may also include nongovernmental groups. We explore the EU as a set of policy domains. We demonstrate that the Treaty of Rome and its subsequent revisions defined the issue arenas. We also show how the organizational structure of the European Council of Ministers and the Commission mirror these domains. Finally we plot the expansion of pressure groups and legislative output to domains over time. We show that the Treaty changes, which changed the decisionmaking rules in the domains, tended to be in domains where there were a large number of nongovernmental organizations and where legislative output was high. For example, the largest number of pressure groups in the EU circa 1980 were attached to the Single Market domain. We view this as a kind of spillover. By our calculations, at least 13 of the 17 policy domains in the EU exhibit a supranational character

The Emergence and Evolution of the Multidimensional Organization

The article discusses multidimensional organizations and the evolution of complex organizations. The six characteristics of multidimensional organizations, disadvantages of the successful organizational structure that is categorized as a multidivisional, multi-unit or M-form, research by the Foundation for Management Studies which suggests that synergies across business divisions can be exploited by the M-form, a team approach to creating economic value, examples of multidimensional firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a comparison of various organization types including the matrix form are mentioned

Advancing the human right to housing in post-Katrina New Orleans: discursive opportunity structures in housing and community development

In post-Katrina New Orleans, housing and community development (HCD) advocates clashed over the future of public housing. This case study examines the evolution of and limits to a human right to housing frame introduced by one nongovernmental organization (NGO). Ferree’s concept of the discursive opportunity structure and Bourdieu’s social field ground this NGO’s failure to advance a radical economic human rights frame, given its choice of a political inside strategy that opened up for HCD NGOs after Hurricane Katrina. Strategic and ideological differences within the field limited the efficacy of this rights-based frame, which was seen as politically radical and risky compared with more resonant frames for seeking affordable housing resources and development opportunities. These divides flowed from the position of the movement-born HCD field within a neoliberal political economy, especially its current institutionalization in the finance and real estate sector, and its dependence on the state for funding and political legitimacy