Uneven Power and the Pursuit of Peace: How Regional Power Transitions Motivate Integration. CES Working Paper, no. 150, 2007

This paper addresses two related puzzles confronting students of regional and international integration: Why do states willingly pool and delegate sovereignty within international institutions? What accounts for the timing and content of regional integration agreements? Most theories of integration suggest that states integrate in order to solve problems of incomplete information and reduce transaction costs and other barriers to economic growth. In contrast I argue that integration can serve to establish a credible commitment that rules out the risk of future conflict among states of unequal power. Specifically, I suggest that integration presents an alternative to preventive war as a means to preclude a rising revisionist power from establishing a regional hegemony. The implication is that it is not countries enjoying stable and peaceful relations that are most likely to pursue integration, but rather countries that find themselves caught in a regional security dilemma, which they hope to break out of by means of institutionalized cooperation. I evaluate this proposition against evidence from two historical cases of regional integration: the German Zollverein and the European Communities

One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility

Corporate responsibility (CR) has often been criticised as a decoupled organisational phenomenon: a publicly espoused rule that is not followed in daily organisational practices. We argue that a crucial reason for this criticism arises from the dominant in-house assumption of CR literature, which mitigates tensions and contradictions in organisational life by claiming that integrated rules result in coupled practices. We aim to provide new insights by problematising this in-house assumption and by examining how members of two organisations discursively make sense of CR, as a daily rule-bound practice, via three strategies: integration, differentiation and fragmentation. We elaborate the contemporary literature on CR as a daily organisational practice by examining the significance of discursive sensemaking for organisational rules for further development and learning regarding CR. We then discuss the significance of our results for understanding CR as a coupled/decoupled phenomenon.peerReviewe