Global Standards in Action: Insights from Anti-Money Laundering Regulation

As organizations have come under the increasing influence of global rules of all sorts, organization scholars have started studying the dynamics of global regulation. The purpose of this article is to identify and evaluate the contribution to this interdisciplinary field by the ‘Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research’. The latter’s key proposition is that while global regulation often consists of voluntary best practice rules it can nevertheless become highly influential under certain conditions. We assess how innovative this approach is using as a benchmark the state of the art in another field of relevance to the study of global regulation, i.e. ‘International Relations’. Our discussion is primarily theoretical but we draw on the case of global anti-money laundering regulation to illustrate our arguments and for inspirations of how to further elaborate the approach

Global public policy, transnational policy communities, and their networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word "state." Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through "global public–private partnerships" and "transnational executive networks," new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation-state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is "global public policy"? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the "global agora." The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple-authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration

Context and HRM: theory, evidence, and proposals

Human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. In this article, we outline the need for HRM to take full account of context, particularly national context, and to use both cultural theories and, particularly, institutional theories to do that. We use research publications that utilize the Cranet data to show how that can be done. From that evidence, we develop a series of proposals for further context-based research in HRM

Metaphorical and interlingual translation in moving organizational practices across languages

Organizational scholars refer to translation as a metaphor in order to describe the transformation and movement of organizational practices across institutional contexts. However, they have paid relatively little attention to the challenges of moving organizational practices across language boundaries. In this conceptual paper, we theorize that when organizational practices move across contexts that differ not only in terms of institutions and cultures but also in terms of languages, translation becomes more than a metaphor; it turns into reverbalization of meaning in another language. We argue that the meeting of languages opens up a whole new arena for translator agency to unfold. Interlingual and metaphorical translation are two distinct but interrelated forms of translation that are mutually constitutive. We identify possible constellations between interlingual and metaphorical translation and illustrate agentic translation with published case examples. We also propose that interlingual translation is a key resource in the discursive constitution of multilingual organizations. This paper contributes to the stream of research in organization studies that has made translation a core aspect of its inquiry

Universities’ pursuit of inclusion and its effects on professional staff: the case of the United Kingdom

This paper explores the proliferation of non-academic professionals as a cultural response to universities’ mission of inclusion. Departing from a neo-institutionalist perspective, the author argues that the diffusion of highly rationalised models of institutional action shapes universities as formal organisations who engage with new levels of professional expertise in the pursuit of goals and missions. The United Kingdom (UK) offers an illustrative example, the emergence of statutory equality duties on public institutions (race equality duty 2001, disability equality duty 2006 and gender equality duty 2007) nurturing an image of universities as strategic for the pursuit of demographic inclusion. Using yearly longitudinal data on 109 UK universities from 2003 to 2011, the author shows that universities increase their professional staff in catering for demographic inclusion in terms of ethnicity and disability, revealing highly rationalised institutional responses to the aforementioned equality duties. The findings contribute to the neo-institutionalist literature drawing attention to the transformation of universities into organisational actors (i.e. highly integrated entities, strategically oriented towards the pursuit of formally articulated goals and targets), which contrasts with traditional conceptions of the university as an institution with a taken-for-granted societal role and loosely defined organisational backbone. The findings provide the impetuous for further empirical research into the role of professional staff as universities assimilate new goals and missions

Administrators in higher education: organizational expansion in a transforming institution

Recent European research has revealed growth in the number of administrators and professionals across different sections of universities—a long established trend in US universities. We build on this research by investigating the factors associated with variation in the proportion of administrators across 761 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in 11 European countries. We argue that the enactment of expanded and diversified missions of HE is one of the main factors nurturing universities’ profesional and administrative bodies. Our findings support such an assertion; regardless of geographical and institutional differences, HEIs with high levels of “entrepreneurialism” (e.g. in service provision and external engagement) are characterized by a larger proportion of administrative staff. However, we find no empirical support for arguments citing structural pressures and demands on HEIs due to higher student enrolments, budget cuts or deregulation as engines driving such change. Instead, our results point towards, as argued by neo-institutionalists, the diffusion of formal organization as a model of institutional identity and purpose, which is especially prevalent at high levels of external connectedness

The Worldwide Triumph of the Research University and Globalizing Science

This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of volume 33 in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team. The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period. The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and increasingly are the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that fostered scientific research. The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume overcome these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period

Machina ex Deus? From Distributed to Orchestrated Agency

In this chapter, the author draws on a historical case study of the Australian wine industry to explore variations in collective agency. The inductively derived process model illustrates the emergence of a new profession of scientific win- emaking, which unfolds in three phases. Each phase is characterized by a dis- tinct form of agency: distributed agency during the earliest phase, coordinated agency during later phases, and orchestrated agency during consolidation. In addition to exploring the temporal shifts in agency, the study includes a detailed analysis of the early stages of distributed agency, examining how col- lective agency is achieved in the absence of shared intentions

Role of Plant-Specific N-Terminal Domain of Maize CK2β1 Subunit in CK2β Functions and Holoenzyme Regulation

Protein kinase CK2 is a highly pleiotropic Ser/Thr kinase ubiquituous in eukaryotic organisms. CK2 is organized as a heterotetrameric enzyme composed of two types of subunits: the catalytic (CK2α) and the regulatory (CK2β). The CK2β subunits enhance the stability, activity and specificity of the holoenzyme, but they can also perform functions independently of the CK2 tetramer. CK2β regulatory subunits in plants differ from their animal or yeast counterparts, since they present an additional specific N-terminal extension of about 90 aminoacids that shares no homology with any previously characterized functional domain. Sequence analysis of the N-terminal domain of land plant CK2β subunit sequences reveals its arrangement through short, conserved motifs, some of them including CK2 autophosphorylation sites. By using maize CK2β1 and a deleted version (ΔNCK2β1) lacking the N-terminal domain, we have demonstrated that CK2β1 is autophosphorylated within the N-terminal domain. Moreover, the holoenzyme composed with CK2α1/ΔNCK2β1 is able to phosphorylate different substrates more efficiently than CK2α1/CK2β1 or CK2α alone. Transient overexpression of CK2β1 and ΔNCK2β1 fused to GFP in different plant systems show that the presence of N-terminal domain enhances aggregation in nuclear speckles and stabilizes the protein against proteasome degradation. Finally, bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assays show the nuclear and cytoplasmic location of the plant CK2 holoenzyme, in contrast to the individual CK2α/β subunits mainly observed in the nucleus. All together, our results support the hypothesis that the plant-specific N-terminal domain of CK2β subunits is involved in the down-regulation of the CK2 holoenzyme activity and in the stabilization of CK2β1 protein. In summary, the whole amount of data shown in this work suggests that this domain was acquired by plants for regulatory purposes

Glycolate Oxidase Isozymes Are Coordinately Controlled by GLO1 and GLO4 in Rice

Glycolate oxidase (GLO) is a key enzyme in photorespiratory metabolism. Four putative GLO genes were identified in the rice genome, but how each gene member contributes to GLO activities, particularly to its isozyme profile, is not well understood. In this study, we analyzed how each gene plays a role in isozyme formation and enzymatic activities in both yeast cells and rice tissues. Five GLO isozymes were detected in rice leaves. GLO1 and GLO4 are predominately expressed in rice leaves, while GLO3 and GLO5 are mainly expressed in the root. Enzymatic assays showed that all yeast-expressed GLO members except GLO5 have enzymatic activities. Further analyses suggested that GLO1, GLO3 and GLO4 interacted with each other, but no interactions were observed for GLO5. GLO1/GLO4 co-expressed in yeast exhibited the same isozyme pattern as that from rice leaves. When either GLO1 or GLO4 was silenced, expressions of both genes were simultaneously suppressed and most of the GLO activities were lost, and consistent with this observation, little GLO isozyme protein was detected in the silenced plants. In contrast, no observable effect was detected when GLO3 was suppressed. Comparative analyses between the GLO isoforms expressed in yeast and the isozymes from rice leaves indicated that two of the five isozymes are homo-oligomers composed of either GLO1 or GLO4, and the other three are hetero-oligomers composed of both GLO1 and GLO4. Our current data suggest that GLO isozymes are coordinately controlled by GLO1 and GLO4 in rice, and the existence of GLO isozymes and GLO molecular and compositional complexities implicate potential novel roles for GLO in plants