Sigrid Quack

Globalization and Institutions

This volume investigates the relationship between economic globalization and institutions, or global governance, challenging the common assumption that globalization and institutionalization are essentially processes which exclude each other. Instead, the contributors to this book show that globalization is better perceived as a dual process of institutional change at the national level, and institution building at the transnational level. Rich, supporting empirical evidence is provided along with a theoretical conceptualization of the main actors, mechanisms and conditions involved in trickle-up and trickle-down trajectories through which national institutional systems are being transformed and transnational rules emerge.

Institutional Legacies and Firm Dynamics: The Growth and Internationalization of UK and German Law Firms

This article addresses the question of how economic actors (re)shape their organizational and institutional contexts as their activities internationalize. By focusing on law firms, we choose a professional activity that has been regarded as highly determined by the national distinctiveness of professional and legal systems and would lead us to expect strong institutional legacies on firm dynamics. The comparative study of the growth and internationalization of corporate law firms in the UK and Germany presented in this article, however, refutes this view. The results reveal that in both settings ‘institutional pockets’ of corporate lawyers existed whose entrepreneurial orientations and international reach were much stronger than among other subgroups of the profession. From the 1970s onwards, these lawyers and law firms engaged in redefining their organizational and institutional contexts with the aim of positioning themselves in ways that would allow them to seize upon the emerging international markets for legal services. They did so in different ways and at different times in each country. We conclude that internationalization of UK and German law firms bears traces of institutional legacies as well as signs of path-modification, and that international markets for legal services may be more differentiated and less dominated by Anglo-Saxon law firms and conceptions of law than has been so far recognized.

Legal Professionals and Transnational Law-Making: A Case of Distributed Agency

In institutional theory, it is a challenge to explain how rule-setting occurs in transnational contexts with high rule ambiguity and distributed agency. In this article, we address this problem by arguing that emergent and deliberate institutional strategies, though often treated as exclusive opposites, need to be considered in concert. This is demonstrated by analysing transnational law-making in the context of commercial and corporate law. Transnational law-making is thereby conceived as a process driven by the practical problem-solving and sense-making efforts of legal practitioners in large international law firms and international legal associations. Focal actors can exploit the results of this process to deliberately influence the development of law. A concept of two nested cycles of incidental and strategic law-making is employed to explain how dominant influences of common law become interwoven with influences from multiple other legal traditions that eventually trickle up. This article highlights the role of professionals as practice-based experts engaging in practical and political actions, the effects of which shape transnational rule-setting.

Theoretical Building Blocks for a Research Agenda Linking Globalization and Institutions

This volume investigates the relationship between economic globalization and institutions, or global governance, challenging the common assumption that globalization and institutionalization are essentially processes which exclude each other. Instead, the contributors to this book show that globalization is better perceived as a dual process of institutional change at the national level, and institution building at the transnational level. Rich, supporting empirical evidence is provided along with a theoretical conceptualization of the main actors, mechanisms and conditions involved in trickle-up and trickle-down trajectories through which national institutional systems are being transformed and transnational rules emerge.

Capitalism in crisis: organizational perspectives

She quotes the head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operation as stating that ‘Our world is broken— and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it’. What a difference a few years make! The crisis of finance capitalism has turned into the fiscal crisis of the state. Having rescued the banks through the provision of millions of dollars worth of state funding, governments have found themselves facing a crisis in their budgets that comes directly from the crisis, the rescues and their impact on revenues and expenditures. The result, Organization 18(2) 147–152

Framing Standards, Mobilizing Users: Copyright Versus Fair Use in Transnational Regulation

ABSTRACT Following the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) intellectual property rights, and more specifically copyright, have become the subject of highly politicized conflicts. In this paper we analyze how these conflicts shifted from the political arena to private standard-setting sites, where two opposing coalitions of actors pursued competing initiatives – an industry coalition which aimed at enforcing copyright protection through Digital Rights Management and an emerging coalition of civil society actors which sought to develop a digital commons based on copyleft licenses. Paradoxically, the industry coalition, which had very successfully lobbied international organizations, ran into trouble developing and enforcing private regulation in the market place, while the civil society coalition proved to be more effective in the market than in the political sphere. The findings of our analysis indicate that the strategic use of organizational forms and collective action frames can be more decisive for the mobilization of users than material resources, and that the success of collective action frames depends on their compatibility with user practices. Based on the argument that regime shifting from intergovernmental to private governance can open up new and favorable spaces for weak actors to experiment with alternative forms of regulation, the paper contributes to the literature on the politics of regime complexity. The paper furthermore highlights the importance of studying non-elite actors and their day-to-day practices to gain a better understanding of changes within the international political economy.

Epistemic Communities and Social Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons

While the existence of transnational communities is increasingly recognized in globalization studies, very little is yet known about their impact on global governance. Studies investigating the role of transnational communities in international rule setting tend to specialize in specific types, such as epistemic communities, social movements, or policy networks, and narrow down their effects to agenda setting or issue framing. In this paper, we choose a broader view. We examine the regulatory effects which arise when different types of transnational communities with a common goal operate in concurrence through all phases of the rule-setting process. The empirical research of this papers focuses on the transnational governance field of copyright. More specifically, we study transnational communities aiming to overcome limitations to the prevalent transnational copyright regime in the face of new information technology. On the basis of a longitudinal case study, we show how an epistemic community and a social movement came to interact around the non-profit organization Creative Commons in ways which provided unforeseen momentum for their rule-setting project. This impetus generated both functional and latent effects. While the rapid growth of the social movement enabled Creative Commons to successfully disseminate its private licenses among producers of digital intellectual goods, bypassing classical regulators and policy makers, it also threatened the goals and internal decision making of Creative Commons itself. Following the division of Creative Commons into two separate, but still connected, organizations, it remains to be seen how the interaction of the epistemic community and social movement will evolve in the future.

Conclusion: Globalization as a Double Process of Institutional Change and Institution Building

Globalization is a word that suffers from overuse. Still, behind the overstretched concept lies the reality of an economic world that is not fully contained nor constrained by national boundaries. Economic organization and coordination increasingly reach across national borders and the impact is being felt both within the transnational sphere and, through rebound and indirect impact, at the national level as well. We started this book by acknowledging the need to take into account this transnational reality and its potentially quite significant impact. We now want to point, however, to its full complexity. [First paragraph]

The Social Dimensions of Risk: Bank Financing of SMEs in Britain and Germany:

This paper develops a sociological perspective on the comparative study of risk in the bank financing of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in Britain and Germany. It combines an institutionalist analysis with Luhmanns (1993) and Douglas and Wildavskys (1982) sociological theories of risk. Drawing on these theories, it is suggested that the decision-making process is a social process in which regulative, normative and cognitive institutional effects influence the perception and management of risk. Aspects of the institutional environment which relate to the bank financing of SMEs in general and risk management in particular are examined. The paper then reviews the evidence in this field presented in the existing secondary literature in the light of the theoretical approach developed and explores how various kinds of institutional mechanisms and other environmental factors influence aspects of decision making in relation to risk. The overall conclusions relate our findings to the literature on business systems.

Structuring change: training and recruitment in retail banking in Germany, Britain and France

This paper compares recent developments in the recruitment and training practices of retail banks in Germany, Britain and France. It examines how common competitive pressures have resulted in companies adopting significantly different solutions to these challenges. This is largely due to the constraints and opportunities created by national as well as particular sectoral institutional arrangements in each country. As a result of the behaviour of individual banks, sectoral training providers and state-guided training institutions, the creation of a pool of highly skilled labour with higher levels of individual motivation varies between the countries. This research shows how by cooperating at both the sectoral and the national level companies can reduce the problem of free riders and benefit from a general improvement in the quality of available labour. However, this problem has been more successfully managed in France and Germany than in the UK