This study examined the direct influence of national economic condition, as well as the indirect effects through the strength of noneconomic institutions on supervisors’ ethical reasoning using the institutional anomie theory developed by Messner and Rosenfeld :1393–1416, 2001). Utilizing data of 20,025 supervisors across 52 countries, the analyses showed that high disparity in the economic distribution directly and indirectly leads to unethical values. High economic inequality in a country resulted in high tendency of supervisors to justify unethical (...) acts. In addition, some of this influence went through the institutional strength of family, education, polity, and religion, thereby indicating partial mediation. As a result, the study presented the important roles of social institutions in explaining supervisors’ attitude and behavior. The findings of this research contribute to the institutional anomie theory by clarifying the multilevel path of the macrostructures’ conditions in explaining supervisors’ ethicality. Moreover, since some of the relationships between variables resulted in the direction opposite to the propositions of the theory, this study suggested other theoretical models that may be integrated with IAT. Along with these theoretical contributions, practical implications to businesses and society are discussed to strengthen supervisors’ ethics. (shrink)

This article studies the underinvestigated but fascinating issue of the sociological determinants of accounting misbehavior while focusing on an allegedly illicit accounting practice (i.e., restatement) in family- vs. nonfamily-controlled corporations. Under the framework of institutional anomie theory, we examined whether sociological structures (i.e., legal forces and cultural values) influence accounting errors inducing restatements. By applying a multivariate regression analysis to a sample of restating firms listed in 23 countries during the 2006 to 2014 period, we found that (...) legal forces and cultural values significantly moderate the severity of accounting errors. The results of this study suggest that investors, managers, and policymakers should more fully consider the sociological structures of societies when debating the feasibility of corporate misbehaviors, as combining firm-level and country-level analyses could help to predict a firm’s accounting misbehaviors, such as more severe accounting errors. (shrink)

In this study, we used the framework of institutional anomie theory The future of anomie theory, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997) to examine the relationship between supervisors’ ethics and their personal value orientation, including achievement and pecuniary materialism. We further investigated whether these individual-level associations were moderated by societal factors consisting of income inequality, government efficiency, foreign competition, and technological advancement. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze data of 16,464 supervisors from 42 nations obtained (...) from the 2010–2014 wave of the World Values Survey. Results showed that strong achievement value orientation was positively related to willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors; government efficiency and technological advancement, respectively, had negative and positive moderating effects on this relationship. On the other hand, foreign competition had a positive moderating effect on the association between pecuniary materialism and ethicality. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the conception of “institutional moral theory” that Allen Buchanan lays out in his work. I argue that it moves within a trilemma of grounding. The trilemma arises because the three routes to grounding we find in Buchanan’s works – the anthropological route appealing to human nature, the liberal route appealing to liberal values and the institutionalist route appealing to practice-immanent values – are mutually exclusive. But more than that, each horn of the trilemma (...) encounters counterarguments from within Buchanan’s own thought, not only from the perspective of the other horns. Finally, I suggest a fourth alternative that refers to a notion of “justificatory responsibility” that Buchanan also suggests. (shrink)

This paper reports a preliminary sketch of a framework for integrating perspectives on economics, ethics, strategy, and stakeholders (Jones, 1995). It may notbe desirable in management practice to separate such considerations (Harris & Freeman, 2008). There are three general types of collective choice institutions: governments, markets, and voluntary associations. There are four general types of moral theory: moral rules (Kantianism), consequentialism (utilitarianism), virtuousness (bundling virtue theory, religion, and moral intuitionism), and social contract. There are three general positions concerning (...) social responsibilities of individuals and corporations (i.e., a licensed group of individuals). One position asserts zero social responsibility beyond compliance with laws. The polar-opposite position asserts significant social responsibilities by moral obligation. An intermediate position asserts social responsibility by agent cost-benefit analysis. The framework seeks to map these types of institutions, moral theories, and social responsibility conceptions relative to one another. The purpose is to see whether insight can be obtained concerning certain key developing debates. The paper explores implications of the work of Ostrom and Williamson (winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences) for this framework. That work addresses choice institutions—to which moral theories and social responsibility theories can be added. (shrink)

Durkheim's underdeveloped notion of fatalism is the keystone for a bridge between two conceptual categories central to Marxian and Durkheimian theory: alienation and anomie. Durkheim does not necessarily disagree with Marx that excessive regulation can be socially damaging but chooses to highlight the effects of under- regulation. A Durkheimian critique of overregulation becomes possible if we turn away from anomie and toward Durkheim's idea of fatalism-a concept that I will argue here is unexpectedly consistent with Marx's notion (...) of alienation. We can infer that Durkheim presents us with a notion of an "optimal" human condition that exists between anomie and fatalism. The structure of modern societies, it will be argued, is characterized not just by excessive control leading to alienation or by a lack of integrative restraint leading to anomie but also by active efforts to optimally regulate social life. (shrink)

In recent decades, research in the square of opposition has increased. New interpretations, extensions, and generalizations have been suggested, both Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian ones. The paper attempts to compare different versions of the square of opposition. For this reason, we appeal to the wider categorical model-theoretic framework of the theory of institutions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Institution of TheoryPaul M. HedeenThe Institution of Theory, by Murray Krieger; xi & 103 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $35.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.Murray Krieger is an insider who promoted literary theory as an “instrument” (p. 80) and watched it go on to become an “institution” (p. 80). In this volume he recounts its rise, assesses it, and suggests its revision.For Krieger, theory (...) is a continuation of traditional institutional battles. The debate between the old historical scholarship and the new criticism, which he describes in his first chapter, parallels the current debate between new historicism and deconstruction (p. 25). But Krieger shows that there is a much older parallel in the debate between the Tories with their myth of the Golden Age and the Whigs with their myth of progress (p. 27). American criticism divides itself between formalists who emulate “the great literatures of the West” (p. 35) and historicists who value literature “shaped by and... reflect[ing] American experience” (p. 35). For Krieger, the ancient quarrel between formalism and historicism is the real context for this century’s debate between new criticism and the older and newer historicisms (p. 38–40).The first of his four chapters describes the old historicism’s resistance to theory, especially its resistance to the formal principles of the new criticism, the preinstitutionalized theory of the 1950s. The new criticism could be defended as being “for the text” (p. 8), but the theories that came after it—structuralism, poststructuralism, and their “interdisciplinary mixtures” (p. 10)—established successive hybrids built upon “the domain of contingency” (p. 12). Krieger argues that this process, coupled with the rise of human sciences and the demystification of literary values, has resulted in a full-scale assault upon institutions, advancing the “anti-institutional institution” (p. 19) of theory and replacing discipline-based “academic structures” (p. 19).Thankfully, Krieger mitigates these relatively crude oppositions by discussing how poststructuralism has energized the intramural debates within the theoretical camps. In the end he finds the current opposition between deconstruction (with its embrace of textuality) and new historicism (its embrace of contingencies) to be an either/or fallacy. The “poem... helps create history,” he asserts, “even as... history had to help create the poem” (p. 45).In his third chapter, Krieger relies upon this “middling” insight to describe [End Page 403] the fight between those who see literary works as tools of ideology and those who regard them as resistant to ideology (p. 48). The tradition of resistance may support “a given ideological structure,” but at the same time it believes that literature is a “structure of complexities that eludes any attempt to make [it] into an ideology’s servant” (p. 55). And so Krieger escapes from “unified meaning” (p. 64), an escape he traces through a history of literary thought that culminates in Paul de Man.Krieger is now ready for some classifying of his own: the new historicism in one category, grouped with the ideological (closed, totalizing, and controlling traditions); deconstruction in a separate category, grouped with the counterideological (open and liberating traditions). He does not reject ideological theories out of hand; he proposes “a balancing act [of letting] loose the counterideological potential of” certain texts “while resisting the universalizing thematic consequences” of this very process (p. 76).Having traced the institutionalization of theory, having contextualized and thus legitimized the many sides of contemporary theory’s debates, Krieger concludes by uttering an enlightened “plea for theory to reengage the lingering promise of the aesthetic [and] to allow a chance for the extraordinary particular, which is not already contained within a ruling universal” (pp. 90, 91). If this were possible—and he has shown it to be both historically and theoretically defensible—then one should also acknowledge “the authority of human consciousness” (p. 91), for it alone is receptive to that “extraordinary particular.”More than the usual powder for theory’s morning-after headache, Krieger’s volume is a compelling argument for theory to acknowledge the very traditions it has sought to discredit and exclude.Paul M. HedeenWartburg CollegeCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This research investigates firms’ bribery motivations in China. Based on resource dependence theory and anomie theory, we identify resource conditions as firms’ proactive motivation to bribe and firms’ perceived institutional environment as their passive motivation to bribe. We use the data from 2002 World Business Environment Survey, collected by the World Bank, to investigate firms’ bribery in the world’s largest emerging market, China. We employ a multi-level logistic model to test our hypotheses. The results show that (...) unsatisfactory general and task environmental conditions may trigger firms to bribe in order to compete for better resources and opportunities; institutional conditions such as the security expenditure and anomie climate may make firms perceive bribery as a common phenomenon and thus induce firms to bribe. This research provides some insights to understand business bribery behaviors in emerging market. It also discusses some managerial implications and guidelines for policy-making from the findings. (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of recent doctrines of legal interpretation that can be subsumed under the common name “institutional turn” in theories of legal interpretation. Among the reviewed theoretical positions are the ones from Jeremy Wаldron, Victoria Nourse, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule, Scott Shapiro. It is concluded that the institutional turn in legal interpretation offers some significant insights into legal interpretation and interesting perspectives on the appropriate interpretative methodologies. The turn, however, does this by eschewing parts of (...) traditional accounts of legal interpretation that are arguably worth preserving in any theory of legal interpretation. (shrink)

It is conventional wisdom among political philosophers that ideal principles of justice must guide our attempts to design institutions to avert actual injustice. Call this the ideal guidance approach. I argue that this view is misguided— ideal principles of justice are not appropriate "guiding principles" that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable. In this paper, I develop an alternative approach to institutional design, which I call institutional failure (...) analysis. The basic intuition of this approach is that our moral assessment of institutional proposals is most effective when we proceed from a detailed understanding of the causal processes generating problematic social outcomes. Failure analysis takes the institutional primary design task to be obviating or averting institutional failures. Consequently, failure analysis enables theorists to prescribe more effective solutions to actual injustice because its focuses on understanding the injustice, rather than specifying an ideal of justice. (shrink)

In institutional legal theory, norms and facts are reciprocally operating elements: an interplay in which meaning construction is closely connected with acting: the pragmatic understanding of legal language in terms of its uses. With the semiotic elements of institutional theory, extended by the notion of ‘semiotic groups’, an analytical framework can be constructed to analyze a case study on the shifts in the concept of war which have taken place since the 1945 UN Charter and in (...) the aftermath of 9/11. The semiotic aspects of the institutional approach can offer insight into the complexity of the processes of meaning attribution in the field of law and war. (shrink)

On normative order -- On institutional order-- Law and the constitutional state -- A problem : rules or habits? -- On persons -- Wrongs and duties -- Legal positions and relations : rights and obligations -- Legal relations and things : property -- Legal powers and validity -- Powers and public law : law and politics -- Constraints on power : fundamental rights -- Criminal law and civil society : law and morality -- Private law and civil society : (...) law and economy -- Positive law and moral autonomy -- On law and justice -- Law and values : reflections on method. (shrink)

he first institutional theory of art is outlined in a 1964 essay by Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” which ruminates on the paradox that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes is art though any of its perceptually indistinguishable twins—any stack of Brillo boxes in a grocery store—is not. Danto’s offers this solution to the paradox: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Ultimately, though, (...) it is “art theory” that makes Warhol’s stack of silk screened plywood boxes into art. (shrink)

This short paper begins with a summary of the views of a sympathetic game theorist on the current state of play in what is still called the New Institutional Economics. It continues with a much abbreviated summary of my own attempts to treat justice as a kind of institution in the hope that this will serve as a case study in how game theory can serve as a useful intellectual framework for the study of human institutions.

Technology regulation is one of the most important public policy issues facing society and governments at the present time, and further clarity could improve decision making in this complex and challenging area. Since the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, a number of approaches to technology regulation have been proposed, prompted by the associated changes in society, business and law that this development brought with it. However, over the past decade, the impact of technology has been profound and (...) the associated issues for government have extremely challenging, ranging across cyber security, artificial intelligence, and many other areas. To that end, this article introduces a Theory of Institutional Technology Actors and Norms (TITAN), a normatively informed and institutionally-based account of technology regulation. It focuses on the moral and legal (including regulatory) rights and responsibilities of the relevant actors and seeks to inform the development of regulation that is both fit for purpose, rights compliant and fair for all concerned. The account incorporates the perspectives of four key categories of groups in society: producers of technology, users of technology, government regulators, and normative policy shapers. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates. What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The (...) rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France. (shrink)

The objective of the paper is to explore the issue that despite the absence of adequate formal and systematic ways for the poor and disadvantaged people to get access to health benefit like in a rich liberal society, there are active social customs, feelings and individual and collective responsibilities among the people that help the disadvantaged and poor people to have access to the minimum health care facility in both liberal and non-liberal poor countries. In order to explain the importance (...) and functional contribution of the social norms in this respect, some examples will be illustrated from Bangladesh which is a poor liberal country. There will be two sections of the paper. In the first section, it will be exhibited how the naturally and socially disadvantaged people in a liberal society get benefit following Rawls‟ theory of distributive justice. In the second section, it will be showed that in a poor country where there are less resources of the government to provide enough services to the poor and disadvantaged people, the communal feelings and the informal social institutions play a vital role that helps the disadvantaged and poor people to get access to the health benefit. The traditional social norms impose indirect sanction on its people to come forward to help the worse off people of the country. It is depicted that Rawlsian theory of distribution does not work properly in these countries, rather the communitarian feelings is more welcomed for the benefit of the overall welfare of the society and this will be shown in the conclusion of the paper. (shrink)

This book makes two important contributions toward a general and systematic theory of rights-a powerful philosophical analysis of the language of rights and an explanation of the nature of rights. In working out these ideas, Wellman has provided a new and cohesive way of thinking and talking about rights of every sort. Wellman succeeds in bringing all kinds of rights-moral, legal, institutional, etc.-under one unified theory in a way that illuminates their similarities and differences. This enables him (...) to deal in a consistent way with a very broad range of philosophical questions, questions that are too often dealt with in isolation from each other. (shrink)

Institution Theory Institution theory is a very general mathematical study of formal logical systems—with emphasis on semantics—that is not committed to any particular concrete logical system. This is based upon a mathematical definition for the informal notion of logical system, called institution, which includes both syntax and semantics as well as the relationship between … Continue reading Institution Theory →.

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the explanatory (...) benefits of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

This paper explores the benefits that might arise from an appropriate fusion of the version of Activity Theory being developed by Yrjo Engestrom and the sociology of the late Basil Bernstein. It explores the common roots of the two traditions and on the basis of empirical work carried out in British special schools formulates an approach to the development of a language of description which would extend the analytical power of Activity Theory.

:Most game-theoretic accounts of institutions reduce institutions to behavioural patterns the players are incentivized to implement. An alternative account linking institutions to rule-following behaviour in a game-theoretic framework is developed on the basis of David Lewis’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein's respective accounts of conventions and language games. Institutions are formalized as epistemic games where the players share some forms of practical reasoning. An institution is a rule-governed game satisfying three conditions: common understanding, minimal awareness and minimal practical rationality. Common understanding has (...) a strong similarity with Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of lebensform while minimal awareness and minimal practical rationality capture the idea that rule-following is community-based. (shrink)

Institutional differentiation has been one of the central concerns of sociology since the days of Auguste Comte. However, the overarching tendency among institutionalists such as Durkheim or Spencer has been to treat the process of differentiation from a macro, "outside in" perspective. Missing from this analysis is how institutional differentiation occurs from the "inside out, "or through the efforts and struggles of individual and corporate actors. Despite the recent efforts of the "new institutionalism" to fill in this gap, (...) a closer look at the literature will uncover the fact that (1) it has tended to conflate macro-level institutions and meso-level organizations and (2) this has led to a taken for granted approach to institutional dynamics. This article seeks to develop a general theory of institutional autonomy; autonomy is a function of the degree to which specialized corporate units are structurally and symbolically independent of other corporate units. It is argued herein that the process by which these "institutional entrepreneurs" become independent can explain how institutions become differentiated from the "inside out." Moreover, this article offers five dimensions that can be operationalized, measuring the degree to which institutions are autonomous. (shrink)

This article has already been published in, and is available in open access from Time and Society, 0, 2017, pp. 1-29. We thank Stanley Blue for his permission to republish it here.: The practice turn in social theory has renewed interest in conceptualising the temporal organisation of social life as a way of explaining contemporary patterns of living and consuming. As a result, the interest to develop analyses of time in both practice theories and practice theory-based - Sur (...) le concept de rythme. (shrink)

Over the last decade, scandals within the UK Financial Service sector have impacted their legitimacy and raised questions whether a compliance culture exists or not. Several institutional changes at the regulatory and normative levels have targeted stakeholders’ concerns regarding compliance culture and led to changes in the legitimation process. This paper attempts to address a gap in the literature by asking the following question: How is the UK financial institutions’ compliance culture shaped by the institutional environment and changing (...) legitimacy claims? Towards achieving this objective, the paper draws on the institutional theory and pays attention to the various configurations of the legitimacy notion :451–478; 2017). The paper utilises a longitudinal interpretive design and undertakes a qualitative content analysis of fines issued by the UK regulator and the communicated response of violating firms as well as non-sanctioned firms. Our findings indicate that there is a cyclical ‘evolutionary compliance’ rather than the more widely recognised state of ‘compliance culture’. This culture is fuelled by interchangeable isomorphic forces where the majority of violating firms are seen to issue similar responses to the regulators sanction to maintain their reputation and legitimacy in the market. Notably, legitimacy is now defined within an interactive process between the regulator and firms rather than being static and achieved by ticking the box. (shrink)

This book is about the conceptual foundations of an intermediate way between liberalism and socialism: a synthesis of classical and Keynesian political economy. Classical theory deals with proportions between individuals or collectives and society in tackling problems of distribution and value. Keynesian theory is concerned with the scale of economic activity as explained by effective demand. The economy considered is primarily a monetary production economy, not a market or a planned economy. The author sets up a system linking (...) political economy with other social sciences, i.e. sociology, law and politics in the traditional sense, thus establishing the unity of the social sciences. To complete the picture, issues of method associated with the theory of knowledge in the social sciences and the problem of linking theory with historical reality are also covered. (shrink)

In 1987 Jerrold Levinson wrote, in a review of George Dickie's _The Art Circle_, that in reading it he felt 'caught in a kind of aesthetic time warp'. I had the same feeling, and indeed have the same feeling when I read papers published since on Dickie's theory. A recent criticism in this journal by Oswald Hanfling is a case in point. To be fair, Hanfling explicit states that he is discussing the 1974 version of the theory rather (...) than Dickie's current views. However, this weakens the paper as a contribution to the current debate. Dickie no longer advocates the 1974 theory, as opposed to the 1984 version. Hanfling also directs most of his argument against the second disjunct of that definition, largely ignoring the first. furthermore, following recent work on the theory by others, Dickie's theory has become a more protean creature than Hanfling suppose. Criticism are rarely decisive; what works against one version of the theory is ineffective against another. In this paper I will argue that the theory as standardly conceived can be broken down into two logically independent parts. Once this is done, the objections current in the literature are not decisive. I will then attempt to evaluate what I take to be the improved version. (shrink)

Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris (Philosophy and Technology 32:195–214, 2019) have argued that “we are homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.” The emphasis falls on the idea that the things that we create, use, rely on—that is, those things with which we engage—have a recursive effect on human existence. We make things, but we also make arrangements, many of which are long-standing, material, social, normative, economic, institutional, and/or political, and (...) many of which are supported by various technologies, including AI, more and more. Critical theorists, such as Habermas, have argued that we need a “depth” or critical hermeneutics (one that combines hermeneutical understanding with scientific explanation) to provide a full account of this kind of recursivity. For Habermas, the explanatory aspect of critical hermeneutics has been modeled on neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian theories. We propose a new critical hermeneutical approach that uses the tools of embodied cognitive science, affordance theory, material engagement theory, and the concept of the socially extended mind. (shrink)

Can institutional objects be identified with physical objects that have been ascribed status functions, as advocated by John Searle in The Construction of Social Reality (1995)? The paper argues that the prospects of this identification hinge on how objects persist – i.e., whether they endure, perdure or exdure through time. This important connection between reductive identification and mode of persistence has been largely ignored in the literature on social ontology thus far.

Saying so can make it so, J. L. Austin taught us long ago. Famously, John Searle has developed this Austinian insight in an account of the construction of institutional reality. Searle maintains that so-called Status Function Declarations, allegedly having a “double direction of fit”, synchronically create worldly institutional facts, corresponding to the propositional content of the declarations. I argue that Searle’s account of the making of institutional reality is in tension with the special theory of relativity—irrespective (...) of whether the account is interpreted as involving causal generation or non-causal grounding of worldly institutional facts—and should be replaced by a more modest theory which interprets the results of Status Function Declarations in terms of mere Cambridge change and institutional truth. I end the paper by indicating the import of this more modest theory for theorizing about the causal potency of institutional phenomena generated by declarations. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the 'theory theory': theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory (...) change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) a rational reconstruction of a Superscientist, or (iii) the scientific community. We argue that (i) is false, (ii) is non-empirical (which is problematic since the theory theory is supposed to be a bold empirical hypothesis), and (iii) is either false or doesn't make enough sense to have a truth-value. We conclude that the theory theory is an interesting failure. Its failure points the way to a full, empirical picture of scientific development, one that marries a concern with the social dynamics of science to a psychological theory of scientific cognition. (shrink)

Les systèmes sociaux complexes étudiés par Elinor Ostrom et les chercheurs associés caractérisent souvent des réseaux de petite ou de moyenne échelle, tant pour des ressources matérielles qu’informationnelles. Mais d’un point de vue citoyen, les outils, institutions des collectifs sociopolitiques peuvent-ils être pensés sous l’angle des ressources communes et, à ce titre, donner lieu à l’émergence d’une gouvernance participative, en étant vus comme à préserver par les concernés? Pour favoriser une telle lecture, il nous faut clarifier quelques apports de l’école (...) d’Ostrom, amorcer une analyse sociale des composantes d’une gouvernance des communs fondée sur la participation et identifier certaines questions à creuser ultérieurement, notamment les problèmes posés dans le cadre d’une économie largement financiarisée et abstraite des besoins matériels les plus immédiats. (shrink)

This book uses game theory to analyse the creation, evolution and function of economic and social institutions. The author illustrates his analysis by describing the organic or unplanned evolution of institutions such as the conventions of war, the use of money, property rights and oligopolistic pricing conventions. Professor Schotter begins by linking his work with the ideas of the philosophers Rawls, Nozick and Lewis. Institutions are regarded as regularities in the behaviour of social agents, which the agents themselves tacitly (...) create to solve a wide variety of recurrent problems. The repetitive nature of the problems permits them to be described as a recurrent game or 'supergame.' The agents use these regularities as informational devices to supplement the information contained in competitive prices. The final chapter explores the applicability of this theory, first by relating it to previous work on the theory of teams, hierarchies, and non-maximizing decision theory, and then by using it to provide a new approach to a variety of questions both within and outside economics. (shrink)

Peter Morton provides in these pages a fundamental critique of the assumptions of positivist jurisprudence and also puts forth an attack on the foundationalism of contemporary legal philosophy. His prime concern is to distinguish between the different fields of law--penal, civil, and public--taking as his starting point a careful analysis of those institutions in a democracy wherein legal language and norms are in fact generated. Offering an original, coherent, and systematic exposition of law in today's society, Morton sheds new light (...) on legal practices and relations by way of a comparison with an ideal type of legal system. (shrink)

As debate continues around the nature and values of education, it is important to ask the question of what factors motivate a student to engage with the ends of an educational institution. In this paper, a broad, holistic view of learner motivation, derived from Aristotelian ethics, is used to provide a model to drive institutional change. Focussing on the approach of one Higher Education institution to the particular accommodations required for students with disabilities, the paper identifies three factors which (...) motivate students, a failure to engage with the aims and ends of the educational project, a failure to see that a particular learning aim is worth attaining, and a simple lack of will‐power to attain it. To each of these failures a social cause is identified, and a change in both the institutional culture and the individual learner's approach to their education is suggested. (shrink)