Responding to competing strategic demands: How organizing, belonging, and performing paradoxes coevolve

This article develops an empirically grounded process model of how managers in organizations respond to coexisting paradoxical tensions. With a longitudinal real-time study, we examine how a telecommunications firm copes with an organizing paradox between market and regulatory demands and how this paradox influences belonging and performing paradoxes for managers. These paradoxes coevolve over time as managers shift from defensive responses that attempt to circumvent paradox to active responses that accept and work within paradox. Our process model clarifies the recursive relationship between different kinds of paradox, the cumulative impact of responses to paradox over time, and the way that responses to paradox become embedded in organizational structures

Institutional Transplant as Political Opportunity: The Practice and Politics of Indian Electricity Regulation

India has a decade-long experience with independent regulatory agencies in public services as an institutional transplant from the industrialized world. Introduced at the behest of international donor agencies, regulators in India are intended, somewhat naively, to provide an apolitical space for decision making to assuage investor concerns over arbitrary administrative actions, and thereby stimulate private investment. In practice, regulators have had to negotiate a terrain over which the state has continued to exercise considerable control. Regulators have also been been shaped in their functioning by national and sub-national political traditions and by administrative and political practices. The result is a hybrid institutional form that combines politics as usual with intriguing new, and unanticipated, opportunities for political intervention. This paper will explore the origins of electricity regulation as a form of institutional isomorphism. It will then compare the regulatory experience in India\u27s electricity sector across two Indian states to understand the implications of transplanting regulatory agencies in the global south. An examination of the process through which regulatory decisions are reached illustrates how existing bureaucratic and technocratic networks, transplanted procedures, and administrative cultures combine to conservatively manage long-standing political tensions around electricity. In seeking to manage those tensions, regulators often take decisions - on tariff setting, for example - based on a political reading that belies the technocratic narrative on which institutional credibility rests. At the same time, civil society groups ranging from residential associations to professional associations to individuals are using newly created regulatory spaces to structure a more deliberative decision process

Telling stories about European Union Health Law: The emergence of a new field of law

The ideational narrative power of law has now solidified, and continues to solidify, ‘European Union health law’, into an entity with a distinctive legal identity. EU health law was previously seen as either non-existent, or so broad as to be meaningless, or as existing only in relations between EU law and health (the ‘and’ approach), or as consisting of a body of barely or loosely connected policy domains (the ‘patchwork’ approach). The process of bringing EU health law into being is a process of narration. The ways in which EU health law is narrated (and continues to be narrated) involve three main groups of actors: the legislature, courts and the academy

Will REDD+ safeguards mitigate corruption? Qualitative evidence from Southeast Asia

High levels of faith and finance are being invested in REDD+ as a promising global climate change mitigation policy. Since its inception in 2007, corruption has been viewed as a potential impediment to the achievement of REDD+ goals, partly motivating ‘safeguards’ rolled out as part of national REDD+ readiness activities. We compare corruption mitigation measures adopted as part of REDD+ safeguards, drawing on qualitative case evidence from three Southeast Asian countries that have recently piloted the scheme: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. We find that while REDD+ safeguards adopt a conventional principal-agent approach to tackling corruption in the schemes, our case evidence confirms our theoretical expectation that REDD+ corruption risks are perceived to arise not only from principal-agent type problems: they are also linked to embedded pro-corruption social norms. This implies that REDD+ safeguards are likely to be at best partially effective against corruption, and at worst will not mitigate corruption at all

Regulation:Managing the Antinomies of Economic Vice and Virtue

In the quarter-century that SLS has been published, regulation has emerged as a new, and for many exciting, inter-disciplinary field. The concept itself requires a wider view of normativity than the narrow positivist one of law as command. It is certainly protean, ranging over many fundamental questions about the changing nature of the public sphere of politics and the state, and its interactions with the ‘private’ sphere of economic activity and social relations, as well as the mediation of these interactions, especially through law. This survey aims to outline and evaluate some of the main contours of the field as it has developed in this recent period, focusing on the regulation of economic activity. Regulation is seen as having emerged with the withdrawal by governments from direct provision of many economic and social services, to be replaced by corporatist bureaucracies and quasi-public agencies managing the complex public-private interactions of financialised capitalism. The arguments for ‘smart’ regulation have, in an era fixated on neo-liberalism, generally legitimised delegation of responsibility to big business. Its advocates, having been drawn into policy fields, have perhaps too often lost their critical edge, and allowed it to become instrumentalised, reflecting the technicist character of its practice

Juridification, new constitutionalism and market reforms to the English NHS

Market reforms to the English National Health Service within the neo-liberal era have diverted money away from patient needs to market bureaucracies and the coffers of private companies and undermine cross subsidy and risk pooling within the National Health Service. Consequently, governments within the neo-liberal era have sought to remove the deleterious effects of their market reforms from political contestation through strategies of depoliticisation. I assess the success of the strategies of juridification (the increase of formal law) and new constitutionalism (transnational legal rules which restrict national policymaking to the model of liberal democratic capitalism) in depoliticising market reforms to the English National Health Service. As the National Health Service was increasingly marketised, European Union public procurement and competition laws became increasingly applicable, although scope exists for exceptions. The discretion afforded to commissioners by the regulations passed pursuant to S.75 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) regarding tendering is disputed. Many commissioners have acted as though their discretion was curtailed in practice. However, there are countervailing forces to competition, such as resource constraints and recent moves towards integration (although this may also afford private sector companies with new opportunities). I contend that the privatisation that marketisation has facilitated appears highly politicised, as is evidenced by increased campaigning activity in opposition to it. Recent responses to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and prospective post-Brexit trade deals indicate a heightened awareness of the ability of external constitutional constraints to restrict National Health Service policymaking. This suggests that neither the strategies of juridification nor new constitutionalism have been successful in depoliticising market reforms to the English National Health Service

Operation of a fluidized-bed bioreactor for denitrification

Two denitrification fluidized-bed bioreactors of the same length (i.e., 5 m) but with different inside diameters (i.e., 5 and 10 cm) have been operated on feed ranging in nitrate concentration from 200 to 2000 g/m/sup 3/; thus far, good agreement has been obtained. Two 10-cm-ID bioreactors operating in series have also been tested; the results are in accordance with predicted results based on the performance of a 5-cm-ID bioreactor. The overall denitrification rate in the dual 10-cm-ID bioreactor system was found to be 23 kg N(NO/sub 3//sup -/)/day-m/sup 3/ using feed with a nitrate concentration of 1800 g/m/sup 3/. Data obtained in operating-temperature tests indicate that the maximum denitrification rate is achieved between 22 and 30/sup 0/C. These data will form the basis of the design of our mobile pilot plant which consists of dual 20-cm-ID by 7.3-m-long bioreactors