Suchergebnisse

A review symposium on a book by Arndt Sorge, The Global and the Local: Understanding the Dialectics of Business Systems. (Oxford, Oxford U Press, 2005). Adapted from the source document.

This article develops a series of causal propositions specifying the institutional conditions under which firms are likely to act in socially responsible ways, as defined by a standard of minimally acceptable corporate behavior. Little theoretical attention has been paid to understanding the causes of corporate social responsibility (CSR). By using institutional theory to explore the determinants of CSR, this article not only sheds light on a blind spot in the literature on CSR but also weds two literatures that have remained largely isolated from each other.

▪ Abstract  Scholars have become acutely interested in how behavior driven by ideas rather than self-interest determines policy-making outcomes. This review examines the literature on this subject. It differentiates among the types of ideas that may affect policy making (i.e., cognitive paradigms, world views, norms, frames, and policy programs) and identifies some of the persistent difficulties associated with studying how ideas shape policy. In particular, studies often do a poor job pinpointing the causal mechanisms that link ideas to policy-making outcomes. More attention needs to be paid to articulating the causal processes through which ideas exert effects. Suggestions for future scholarship that might improve this situation are offered. These include identifying the actors who seek to influence policy making with their ideas, ascertaining the institutional conditions under which these actors have more or less influence, and understanding how political discourse affects the degree to which policy ideas are communicated and translated into practice.

One of the mainstays of political sociology and political science for generationshas been debate about the conditions under which onepolicy regime—that is, a distinct mix of public policies—is replaced by another. For instance, a vast literature seeks to identify the factors that caused the shift from orthodox to Keynesian policy regimes in the United States and Europe after the Second World War, as well as the shift during the 1980s to more conservative neoliberal policy regimes (e.g., Campbell 1998; Gourevitch 1986; Hall 1989, 1992;Weir and Skocpol 1985). Similarly, scholars have argued about whether the process through which regime shifts occur is a slow and incremental one, driven by bureaucratic inertia, muddling through, and path-dependent constraints, or a rapid and abrupt one, sparked by cataclysmic events like war that trigger sharp breaks with past policies (e.g., Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Hall 1993; Krasner 1984; Lindblom 1959; Pierson 1993, 1994). Regime shifts have also captured the imagination of historical sociologists who have recognized that history is marked by critical turning points that differentiate among relatively stable time periods and that this requires scholars to carefully identify historically specific patterns among variables (Abbott 1988, 1992, 1997; Isaac 1997).