The missing link: Bringing institutions back into the debate on economic globalisation

In der Auseinandersetzung mit der Globalisierung von Wirtschaftsprozessen kann sich die sozialwissenschaftliche Institutionentheorie nicht mehr auf die Untersuchung nationaler Konfigurationen beschränken, sondern sollte der transnationalen Rekombination institutioneller Arrangements mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken. Für die Untersuchung solcher Prozesse sind veränderte analytische Werkzeuge erforderlich. Die Autorinnen dieses Beitrags schlagen eine Synthese von National Business Systems- und Varieties of Capitalism- Ansätzen mit kulturalistischen und phänomenologischen Varianten der Institutionentheorie vor. Es werden drei Aspekte der institutionellen Analyse vertieft, die zu einem besseren Verständnis des Verhältnisses von Globalisierung und Institutionen beitragen: Institutionalisierung als Prozeß, Rekombination als Mechanismus der Institutionengenese und des Institutionenwandels und eine Mehrebenenanalyse des Zusammenspiels von institutionellen Veränderungen auf nationaler und transnationaler Ebene. Die vorgeschlagene Synthese verschiedener institutionalistischer Ansätze bietet einerseits Ansatzpunkte für die Untersuchung der Rolle nationaler Akteure in der Genese und Entwicklung transnationaler Institutionen. Andererseits trägt sie zu einem besseren Verständnis der Rekombination von Elementen verschiedener institutioneller Arrangements sowie der Herausbildung neuer Institutionen auf transnationaler Ebene bei. Diese Entwicklungen im transnationalen Raum wirken wiederum auf Institutionen in nationalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsräumen ein. Die Autorinnen des vorliegenden Beitrages argumentieren, daß die Abfolge und Kombination einer Reihe gradueller und zunächst geringfügiger Veränderungen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg zu einem signifikanten Wandel von gesellschaftlichen Institutionen führen können. -- Faced with ongoing debates on globalisation, societal institutionalism in its traditional form is showing its limits. In this paper, we suggest that a serious sociologically grounded and institutional contribution to the ongoing debate on global governance calls for a shift in focus away from the preoccupation with national configurations and towards an attempt at understanding transnational recombinations. The investigation of transnational recombination calls for new analytical tools. Here we argue that the solution may come from an hybridisation of NBS and VOC approaches with other variants of the institutionalist argument in particular those we label cultural or phenomenological. We elaborate on three aspects of institutional analysis that we identify as key to getting a better understanding of the relationship between globalisation and institutions. Firstly, we propose an interpretation of institutionalisation as a process and not a state of things. Secondly, we reinterpret institutional genesis and institutional change as revealing recombination. Thirdly, we argue for a more systematic analysis of the interplay of such processes of recombination across different levels of analysis, particularly the national and the transnational. With a conceptual framework so reformulated, it is possible to take in the transnational reality in its full complexity. We show, on the one hand, how the NBS and VOC perspectives are an interesting starting base to look at the structuration and stabilisation of the transnational reality. On the other hand, we gain new insights in the ways in which institution building and recombination at the transnational level become reflected often progressively and somewhat incrementally at the national business system level. Our proposition is that the succession and combination, over a long period of time, of a series of incremental and sometimes minor transformations could lead in the end to consequential and significant change.

Transnational governance through standard setting:The role of transnational communities

This chapter explores the role that community forms of social organization play in transnational standard setting. We compare the evolution of two cases through time – the International Competition Network/Community and the Creative Commons Community. Those two transnational communities exhibit quite distinct features and character. The International Competition Network has been, from the start, a selective and exclusive community bringing together public or quasi-public agencies to buttress an existing and dominant agenda. The Creative Commons community, on the other hand, emerged as a bottom-up, civil society based social movement, constructed around a challenger agenda with an inclusive grassroots philosophy. Our comparison of those two quite different cases does not uphold the expectation that different types of transnational communities would show distinctive strengths and weaknesses. Rather, we show that each of those communities deployed strategies to deal, through time, with their own particular weaknesses and that both have been quite successful in their overall objective to strengthen and spread a given standard across multiple boundaries

The missing link: bringing institutions back into the debate on economic globalisation

"Faced with ongoing debates on globalisation, societal institutionalism in its traditional form is showing its limits. In this paper, we suggest that a serious sociologically grounded and institutional contribution to the ongoing debate on global governance calls for a shift in focus - away from the preoccupation with national configurations and towards an attempt at understanding transnational recombinations. The investigation of transnational recombination calls for new analytical tools. Here we argue that the solution may come from an hybridisation of NBS and VOC approaches with other variants of the institutionalist argument in particular those we label 'cultural' or 'phenomenological'. We elaborate on three aspects of institutional analysis that we identify as key to getting a better understanding of the relationship between globalisation and institutions. Firstly, we propose an interpretation of institutionalisation as a process and not a state of things. Secondly, we reinterpret institutional genesis and institutional change as revealing recombination. Thirdly, we argue for a more systematic analysis of the interplay of such processes of recombination across different levels of analysis, particularly the national and the transnational. With a conceptual framework so reformulated, it is possible to take in the transnational reality in its full complexity. We show, on the one hand, how the NBS and VOC perspectives are an interesting starting base to look at the structuration and stabilisation of the transnational reality. On the other hand, we gain new insights in the ways in which institution building and recombination at the transnational level become reflected - often progressively and somewhat incrementally - at the national business system level. Our proposition is that the succession and combination, over a long period of time, of a series of incremental and sometimes minor transformations could lead in the end to consequential and significant change." (author's abstract)"In der Auseinandersetzung mit der Globalisierung von Wirtschaftsprozessen kann sich die sozialwissenschaftliche Institutionentheorie nicht mehr auf die Untersuchung nationaler Konfigurationen beschränken, sondern sollte der transnationalen Rekombination institutioneller Arrangements mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken. Für die Untersuchung solcher Prozesse sind veränderte analytische Werkzeuge erforderlich. Die Autorinnen dieses Beitrags schlagen eine Synthese von 'National Business Systems'- und 'Varieties of Capitalism'-Ansätzen mit kulturalistischen und phänomenologischen Varianten der Institutionentheorie vor. Es werden drei Aspekte der institutionellen Analyse vertieft, die zu einem besseren Verständnis des Verhältnisses von Globalisierung und Institutionen beitragen: Institutionalisierung als Prozess, Rekombination als Mechanismus der Institutionengenese und des Institutionenwandels und eine Mehrebenenanalyse des Zusammenspiels von institutionellen Veränderungen auf nationaler und transnationaler Ebene. Die vorgeschlagene Synthese verschiedener institutionalistischer Ansätze bietet einerseits Ansatzpunkte für die Untersuchung der Rolle nationaler Akteure in der Genese und Entwicklung transnationaler Institutionen. Andererseits trägt sie zu einem besseren Verständnis der Rekombination von Elementen verschiedener institutioneller Arrangements sowie der Herausbildung neuer Institutionen auf transnationaler Ebene bei. Diese Entwicklungen im transnationalen Raum wirken wiederum auf Institutionen in nationalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsräumen ein. Die Autorinnen des vorliegenden Beitrages argumentieren, dass die Abfolge und Kombination einer Reihe gradueller und zunächst geringfügiger Veränderungen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg zu einem signifikanten Wandel von gesellschaftlichen Institutionen führen können." (Autorenreferat

Rethinking Path Dependency:The Crooked Path of Institutional Change in Post-War Germany

At the end of the Second World War, American occupying forces denounced the German tradition of cartelization and its contribution to the building up of Nazi power. While Germany was far from being the only European country with a tradition of cartelization, it was probably the country where the systematic organization of markets had gone furthest by the mid-1940s. Fifty years later, cartels have been all but formally outlawed from the German economy through, in particular, the double effect of a national anti-cartel act and of European competition law. At first sight, this suggests that, over a period of fifty years or so, the German regime governing competition has been radically reoriented. It has moved away from a deep mistrust of market competition (defined here as opposed to any form of collusion between competitors) and a marked preference for systematic inter-firm cooperation towards an overall endorsement of the liberal competition principle and a negative perception of cartelization. [First paragraph

Governing Globalization – Bringing Institutions Back In

The image of a ‘runaway world’ (Giddens 2000) – a very fast train without drivers going along the tracks of market and technological evolutions – will probably remain associated with the 1990s. During that decade, this image triggered essentially three kinds of reactions. [First paragraph

Adaptation, Recombination and Reinforcement:The Story of Antitrust and Competition Law in Germany And Europe

We consider, in this paper, national business system change in relation to transnational institution building. Our field of exploration is antitrust regulation and competition law, its emergence and development both in Germany and at the European level. It is increasingly acknowledged that legal frameworks structure market economies and constrain economic behavior (Laporta et al. 1998, De Soto 2000, Fligstein 2001, Berglöf et al. 2001). We see the legal treatment of competition issues as important in that respect (Dobbin and Dowd 2000, Djelic 2002). [First paragraph

Overcoming path dependency: path generation in open systems

Studies on societal path dependencies tend to focus on mechanisms that Anchor and stabilize national trajectories while paying less attention to transnational interactions and multilevel governance. This paper explores processes of path transformation in societies that are presumed to have the characteristics of open systems. Two pairs of casestudies are presented and compared. The first illustrates institutional change through collision, when a national path meets with another. The second describes the emergence of transnational institutional paths and the impact of that process on national institutions and their (potential) transformation. The results indicate that path transformation often stems from a gradual succession and combination of incremental steps and junctures – change is gradual but consequential. They also point to increasing co‐evolutionary interaction between national path transformation and transnational path creation. This implies a need for analytical tools that are adapted to the analysis of multi‐level, nested processes of institutionalization and de‐institutionalization. The paper suggests that the concept of path generation allows for a better specification of the conditions for change in existing societal paths and for the emergence of new paths in the case of open systems than the concept of path dependency