Discursive institutionalism

證券交易所得稅在臺灣的賦稅史上共歷經了四次課徵與停徵的經驗，而上一次證所稅創建與廢除則是發生在前總統馬英九執政之2012至2015年間。對此，本文運用Vivien Schmidt論述制度主義的理論觀點進行分析，藉以探討最近一次證券交易所得稅制度變遷當中行動者、理念、論述三者之間互動的關係以及制度變遷的結果。透過檔案分析法與追蹤證所稅制度變遷過程中，不同政治行動者理念與論述的策略性運用。本文研究發現，證所稅在2012至2015年間從制度創設到廢除共經歷了三個階段的論述與制度變遷時期，分別為:（一）2012年「證所稅之理念、論述與制度建構期」、（二）2013－2014年底「證所稅之論述與制度修正期」與（三）2015年的「證所稅之制度廢止期」。在這三個論述與制度變遷時期當中，不同的政治行動者試圖運用不一樣的理念與論述策略試圖影響並引導制度的發展方向。而證所稅制度變遷的結果就如同Streeck & Thelen所言是一個制度耗盡（exhaustion）的過程，立法委員透過修法的一塊塊地將原本證所稅的制度內涵加以消耗和解構，使得原本的制度逐漸地失去功能，最終導致該制度被廢除與耗盡結果。而這樣的制度改革結果也使得部分民眾對於馬前政府追求稅制改革和社會正義以及證所稅所能帶來之量能課稅政策目標的期待也一併耗盡。然而，證所稅制度改革的結果亦在社會上產生了兩種不一樣的看法，對此研究者也將會在本文中進一步地針對兩種不同的觀點進行梳理，藉以一方面呈現不同觀點對於證所稅制度的看法、另一方面，也藉此展現制度改革過程與意義的多元性和複雜性。

This paper sets out to develop an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This a priori framework is a significant improvement over existing critical juncture frameworks that lack any predictive element. It is an advance for historical institutionalism in particular, and political science in general. After the new framework is set out in detail here, it is tested. The framework is used to examine a number of potential critical junctures in macroeconomic policy, drawn from Ireland, Sweden, Britain, and America in the latter half of the twentieth century.

L’ambiguïté constructive en Relations Internationales est définie par Henry Kissinger comme « l’emploi délibéré du langage ambigu dans une question délicate afin de faire avancer un but politique ». Tout au long de l'histoire, les Etats ont fait usage de ce genre d'ambiguïtés afin d’obtenir l'intérêt national maximum ou de résoudre les conflits entre Etats ou nations. Ce mémoire porte sur la question « Qu’est-ce que l'ambiguïté constructive? » et suscite des idées sur la création, les buts et le décodage de l’ambiguïté constructive. Dans le dernier chapitre de la thèse, le plan Annan préparé pour résoudre le conflit du Chypre est examiné à l'aide du cadre analytique de l'institutionnalisme discursif.

(Henry Kissinger defined constructive ambiguity as “the deliberate use of ambiguous language on a sensitive issue in order to advance some political purpose”. Throughout the whole history, states have made use of this kind of ambiguities in order to have the maximum national interest or to resolve the conflicts among states or nations. This thesis focuses on the question “What is constructive ambiguity?” and brings forward ideas about how this kind of ambiguities can be created, for what purposes they can be used and how states can decode these ambiguities. In the last chapter of the thesis, the Annan Plan prepared for resolving the conflict in Cyprus is examined within the scope of the analytical framework of discursive institutionalism.)

This essay investigates  the practice of French Grand Strategy under the First Republic and First Empire by adopting a discursive institutionalist approach adapted from strategic business management studies. First, it briefly outlines this new theoretical framework aiming to analyse Grand-Strategy-as-practice in France during the three decades from 1787 to 1817, then discusses how Grand Strategy was done primarily by meso-level institutions during the pre-Revolutionary era, resulting in strong pressures for strategic continuity and institutional resistance to radical changes of direction during the Revolution, from 1789 to 1799. This paper goes on to focus on French Grand Strategy during the Consulate (1799-1804), which constitutes both the consolidation of the Revolutionary period and the beginning of the First Empire. It then examines how and with what consequences transformative Grand Strategy changes were gradually imposed by the Disruptor-in-Chief of his Age  - Napoleon Bonaparte, from 1804 to 1814. This study concludes with a short assessment of its conclusions’ limitations as well as of their potential applicability to how Grand Strategy is done currently, in the first quarter of the 21. Century, by the world’s major powers.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2022.2038113

What are black swans? Why are mainstream economists so often caught off guard by financial crises? Furthermore, have mainstream responses merely deepened economic inequality and instability? Rather than simply comparing competing theories and methods— economics’ ‘ontological turn’ posits that what is foremostly required is an audit of a theory's metaphysical commitments. That is, to interrogate what economics presumes there is to observe and interact with. Seeking to garner greater analytical purchase over the ‘real-world,’ this reckoning with the ontological basis of divergent schools of thought has birthed several multidisciplinary syntheses— namely, Austrian-materialism (Lewis, 2005) and Keynesian-critical realism (Lawson, 2003). Alternatively, and in support of the constructivist claim that social relations ultimately drive economic policy and markets, this paper resituates and extends Wesley Widmaier’s (2004) vision of a Keynesian-constructivism within the broader ontological turn. Herein, this paper interrogates the concept of black swans vis-à-vis Post-Keynesian understandings of business cycles, demand-side logics, and the concept of Modern Money— en route to establishing its own innovative methodological framework. The paper provides a theoretical and analytical basis for further studies into whether economic conditions can be black-boxed (i.e., the now popular idea of a "silent depression" and/or silent crises).

The researcher employed several theoretical frameworks such as penal populism, discursive institutionalism (DI), bossism, securitisation theory, historical analysis, and legal framework in properly situating Pres. Duterte's self-incriminating remark, 'my only sin is the extrajudicial killings'. This review essay attempts to investigate the possible implications of such remarks both within the local and international political arenas.

What, if anything, is the correlation between the specialized or technical ideas of the philosopher and the rest of his existence? His everyday life outside his philosophical role.
In the specialized reality and reality constitution, when employing the discourse and discipline of philosophy, the philosopher subscribe to many things in an explicit manner and he employs a number of implicit things and assumptions that are not stated explicitly.
These things concern the different branches, areas and domains of the philosophical discourse, for example metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, ontology, cognition, consciousness, mind, perception, thinking, etc.
Is there a relation between these technical 'beliefs' of the philosopher and other, not philosophical areas of his existence? Does and can all of his non-philosophical existence reflect his philosophical beliefs, statements and expressions? Is it possible that the everyday existence or life world of the philosopher can resemble, confirm and express his philosophical ideas? If this is not the case, what are the factors that are involved in such discrepancies?

Do they imply a lack of integrity, of wholeness of integration on behalf of the philosopher? What are the causes of such an illogical or surprising lack of compatibility or similarity between these sets of two or more facts? What are the things that we can look for in such a lack of compatibility – things such as the following? -
inconsistency, difference, disparity, variance, variation, deviation, divergence,

disagreement, dissimilarity, dissimilitude, mismatch, lack of similarity, contrariety, contradictoriness, disaccord, discordance, incongruity,

lack of congruence, incompatibility, irreconcilability, conflict, opposition?

I illustrate the above by means of four examples.
1 Let us assume that the embodied human person consists of both voluntary and involuntary processes and activities. Do the philosophy of an individual reflect or express these activities or is it completely or partially unrelated to them? Do the voluntary processes and activities or the voluntary aspects of perception, cognition, brain processes and other activities resemble or express the philosophy of a thinker? 2 Some thinkers are seriously concerned about the importance of discourse and dialogue and the equality of all those involved. We find their concern about the ideal discourse and dialogue described in their written work and talks, but to what an extend do their own discursive and dialogical actions and behaviour reflect the ideal situation they preach?
3 Ethics and morality can be find in and are emphasized in all sorts of disciplines, of course they are major subjects in providing ways to live off for philosophers and we even find institutions devoted to their teaching and investigation. Do the lives, the lived morality and ethics of those individuals who preach the ideals of ethics or ethical ideals reflect the ideals they preach and that provides them with ways to earn a living? Or, is it the case that morality and ethics are merely faked by those individuals living off their preaching of ethics? And, that they merely employ the values, norms, customs and attitudes of a culture, sub-culture, community, group or another social grouping? In other words are the preachers of ethics really more ethical than the rest of the community and society?
4 When the philosopher expresses his ideas by means of all sorts of philosophical tools he is aware of the fact that he employs them, or at least aware of some of them being intentionally employed by him while he is unaware of others that he employs. Do the tools the philosopher employs to theorize (identify problems, the nature of the questions he asks, the nature of his ways of questioning, the assumptions he makes, the forming and testing of hypotheses, the making of generalizations, etc) or philosophize (perceive things, think, think about things, reason, argumentation etc) resemble what he beliefs, asserts and says about thinking, perception, cognition, understanding, subjects, objects, relationships between subjects and objects and other features and processes of epistemology?
In short – does the lived philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics etc of the philosopher resemble, represent, confirm, substantiate, back, endorse, support, authenticate and corroborate the ideas, assertions and speculations that are expressed by the statements his philosophy or philosophizing consist of? Does he walk the walk of his talk? Are they similar and identical, the same things and merely expressions of the same things in different mediums?

In this study, it is intended to perform an analysis on the public policy on gender equality in political representation in Turkey, using the perspective of new institutional approaches and feminist political science. For this public policy analysis, a qualitative research on Gender Equality National Action Plan in Turkey has been conducted. Having carried out a phenomenological case study, it is concluded that interpretation of “the gender inequality problem” determines the equality policies applied on this issue and the structure of formal institutions in that policy. That is, how the gender equality policy had been formulated and applied in both centralized public policy and sub-policy areas, such as political representation, has been taking shape depending upon the ontology of “gender inequality problem”. Besides, equality policies and formal institutional structure on that issue are being formed depending on how “the problem of gender inequality” is perceived by policy-makers. In this study, using the concept of gender as a process analysis, it is concluded that equality policies and formal institutional structures are shaped by the interpretation of the problem, re-determining and re-forming the interpretation of the gender inequality problem in the context of reciprocal relations between formal and informal institutions. In the sub-policy area of political representation, it has been come out that the problem of gender inequality had not been defined and understood depending upon the “patriarchal problem.” Therefore, gender inequality problem has been handled as a categorized issue ignoring the disproportional power distribution related with patriarchal norms.

Scholars of the European Union have analyzed the EU’s legitimacy mainly in terms of two normative criteria: output effectiveness for the people and input participation by the people. This article argues that missing from this theorization is what goes on in the ‘black box’ of governance between input and output, or ‘throughput.’ Throughput consists of governance processes with the people, analyzed in terms of their efficacy, accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and openness to interest consultation. This article defines and discusses this third normative criterion as well as the interaction effects of all three normative criteria.  It does so by considering EU scholars’ institutional and constructivist analyses of EU legitimacy as well as empirical cases of and proposed solutions to the EU’s democracy problems.  The article also suggests that unlike input and output, which affect public perceptions of legitimacy both when they are increased or decreased, throughput tends to be most salient when negative, because oppressive, incompetent, corrupt, or biased practices throw not just throughput but also input and output into question.

In this article, we present a perspective on the interaction between formal and informal institutions in spatial planning in which they transform each other continuously, in processes that can be described and analyzed as ongoing reinterpretations. The effects of configurations and dialectics are often ambiguous, only partially observable, different in different domains and at different times. By means of analyses of key concepts in planning theory and practice, this perspective is illustrated and developed. Finally, we analyze transformation options in planning systems, emphasizing the limits of formal institutions in transforming formal/informal configurations, and stressing the importance of judgment and conflict.

The Athenian ancestors were constantly made object of praise in Athenian public discourse, and the orators often exhorted their audience to imitate their deeds and follow their example. The ancestors’ ideological weight risked reducing the representation of Athens’ future policies to a perpetual reenactment of the city’s glorious past. Then how could Aeschines, in an address to the Assembly recalled in his speech On the Embassy, invite the Athenians to avoid the mistakes of their ancestors during the Peloponnesian War? According to a recent study, Aeschines challenged the prevalent image of the city’s past by relying on his family tradition as an alternative carrier of social memory. This chapter argues that an institutionalist approach offers a more convincing explanation. Far from challenging the Athenians’ shared image of their past, Aeschines adapted it to the discursive parameters of the Assembly, which compelled orators to construct their speeches around issues of advantage.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2021.1901662

Despite over twenty years of political resistance, globalization endures, both as a discourse and political project. While many works have established how discourses of globalization serve to constrain and/or guide macroeconomic policy, the dynamic nexus that exists between microeconomic decision-making processes vis-à-vis macroeconomic conditions is a less explored matter. Epistemologically, this paper offers a means of gaining analytical purchase over the logics, motivations, and thought processes of international bankers— and the financial press, which chronicle their actions. This is accomplished via a rigorous discursive-content analysis that gauges how said agents understood globalization, the role of finance, the state, and even how market sentiment was factored into their ontological worldview. Ultimately, the goal is to establish an historical and spatiotemporally heterogeneous analysis on if, how, and what ideas of globalization and neoliberalism influenced/rationalized the financialization of Argentine banks during the 1990s and how these evolved en route to Argentina’s 2001 collapse.

Colin Hay's constructivist institutionalism and Vivien A. Schmidt's discursive institutionalism are two recent attempts to theorize ideas as potential explanations of institutional change. This new attention to the causal role of ideas is welcome, but Hay and Schmidt do not take into consideration the constitutive and structural aspects of ideas. Instead they reduce ideas to properties of individual conscious minds, scanting the respects in which ideas are intersubjectively baked into the practices shared by individuals. This aspect of ideas—arguably, the institutional side of ideas—is developed in post-structuralist thought, which therefore demands a place in ideational research.

L’article étudie la réduction du nombre de parlementaires en France, au Portugal et au Royaume-Uni. Il vise à en comprendre le sens grâce à une approche discursive et argumentative comparée, réalisée à partir de l’étude d’un large corpus documentaire. Après avoir constaté les limites des approches rationnelles et mathématiques, l’étude des arguments pour et contre la réforme permet de construire deux référentiels, « décisionniste » et « représentativiste », du rôle du Parlement. La question électorale initiale (du nombre) est transfigurée pour devenir une réforme institutionnelle (du Parlement) dont les enjeux en concurrence sont l’utilité et les fonctions. En démontrant que la question du nombre importe moins que les fonctions et les conséquences que les acteurs politiques attribuent à sa baisse, l’article apporte une contribution à la place des idées dans l’analyse des politiques publiques.

Governance, 2020 | preprint version

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gove.12407

At the turn of the century, the consensus among scholars was that the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) policy preferences, which centered on deflation via austerity, privatization, and deregulation, were indicative of its neoliberal bias. However, a subsequent wave of literature has challenged this view by suggesting that the IMF has demonstrated flexibility. While these accounts arrive at their conclusion via different analytical and empirical focuses, this article posits that the flexibility or breath of ideas found within the discourse itself is key to gauging policy biases (previous study). Herein, this article contributes to the question of whether the IMF can be considered a “flexible” institution via its analysis on Argentina (1989–2006; 2016–2017). Extending a previous study's methods, this paper provides a “discursive content analysis,” on the IMF–Argentine Article IV consultations. Ultimately, the findings show that policy discourse remained neoliberal throughout.

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualization of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorizing stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has until recently not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as 'public philosophies', are theorized to impact on institution building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualize the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this paper seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may over time produce significant policy shifts. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state-guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make-work-pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarité active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.

EU member states and candidate countries are increasingly exposed to the domestic impact of EU regulations, policy instruments, and discourses in the fields of gender equality and antidiscrimination. This impact not only affects national or subnational legislations and equality machineries, but also the framing and the wording of these policies, providing domestic actors with new resources and opportunity structures. This book explores the divergent policy outputs in the member states as regards the making of gender and other equalities, bringing together the most recent insights from Europeanization and gender scholars from a discursive-sociological perspective. Using largely unpublished empirical data, the book addresses policy issues ranging from gender violence to reconciliation and antidiscrimination policies, through case studies and comparisons covering up to 29 European countries. The result is a book that provides us with a more realistic and complex picture of Europeanization processes.

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to Irish social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s.  Did these policy changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they simply a continuation of a previously established policy pathway?  The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture.  Our findings will help explain why Irish social partnership policy underwent a radical transformation at this time.

This article discusses the role of think tanks in the production of ideas guiding recent change in Brazil’s economic policy. It claims that think tanks are significant policy-making agents preparing the society for change – via their communicative discourse – but also attempting to influence the interaction between political elites – via their coordinative discourse. The polarization of think tanks’ communicative discourse in regard to austerity during two critical junctures for Brazil is analysed. Discursive institutionalism is applied in order to interpret data from four Brazilian think tanks: the Institute of Applied Economic Research, the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies, the Fernand Braudel Institute and the Brazilian Institute of Economy. These think tanks have very different organizational and ideological characteristics but a polarization of the discussion around austerity can be observed in the discourse of all four of them. The scale ranges fr...

This article investigates power relations in Intra-Party Democracy in the study of organizing political parties. Intra-Party Democracy refers to the notion of formal political institutions, whereas the political process more often occurs informally, personally, multi-vector which involves multi actors, multi political resources and power relations no longer come from formal institutional sources but any direction and beyond the reach of formal institutions. Using the literature review method, this article enhances the explanation of Intra-Party Democracy by presenting the perspective of Discursive Institu-tionalism as an analytical framework that bridges multi-vector power relations that occur in organizing political parties. Discursive Institutionalism explores the actors' discursive capabilities, namely coordinative discourse and communicative discourse in the discursive process in organizing political parties.

The article aims to explore to what extent and in what ways discourse
institutionalism can contribute to the understanding and analysis of
curriculum change in a globalized context. By focusing specifically on
curriculum change, this article proposes how discourse institutionalism
can contribute to the so-called ‘crisis of curriculum theory’ by addressing
(i) the non-linearity of change, (ii) the process of the translation of ideas
and (iii) actor agency. The text is structured in three sections. In the first
section, we elaborate on the notion of curriculum change as a vital
concept for the field of curriculum theory in a globalized context, focusing
on processes of recontextualization and the translation of curriculum
content. In the second, we elaborate on discourse institutionalism as a
contributing approach to the analysis of such processes of curriculum
change, constructing a conceptual framework. In the third and final
section, we give some examples of how the conceptual framework can
be used in analysing curriculum change, using the 2011 Swedish curriculum
reform (Lgr 11) as an empirical reference, and the result shows
that the conceptual framework offers a wide repertoire of possible
approaches to analysing curriculum change, both vertically and
horizontally.

Benarkah nasionalisme meluntur bersama arus deras globalisasi yang mengaburkan batas-batas satuan kebudayaan dalam sebuah Negara-bangsa? Benarkah sentimen nasionalisme tidak lagi relevan dengan konteks modernisasi yang meniscayakan kepentingan individu?Perubahan social telah terjadi, dan sebaiknya disikapi secara tepat. Pelestarian nasionalisme, memerlukan formula tepat pula. Banyak pihak pesimis dan mengkhawatirkan kelanjutan nasionalisme warga negeri Indonesia ini terutama di kalangan generasi muda. Memang perlu dibuktikan dengan parameter jelas, akan tetapi jika dianggap sebagai warning system bagi kelanjutan NKRI, ada baiknya kita menengok kembali kabar nasionalisme dan integritas yang kini agaknya telah menjadi topik yang kurang menarik untuk dibicarakan, kalah populer dengan isu-isu politik praktis, pemilukada, korupsi, kasus hukum, dsb. Topik nasionalisme sama redupnya dengan topik-topik integritas, juga Pancasila. Padahal, isu nasionalisme amat penting bagi kelangsungan hidup negara dan rakyat. Melestarikan ajaran nasionalisme dari masyarakat multikultur dengan sentimen etnisitas dan ikatan primordial yang masih cukup kuat memang tidak mudah. Ditambah isu kedaerahan yang makin menguat bersamaan derasnya gerakan desentralisasi berbalut jargon kemandirian daerah, pemilukada, makin mendekatkan pada isu kelokalan dan menjauhkan pada isu yang dipandang sebagai "urusan nasional". Nasionalisme, mau tidak mau dipandang sebagai isu berlevel nasional, berurusan dengan keutuhan dan ketahanan negara, dan itu domain pemerintah pusat. Orang semakin enggan bicara isu ini ketika mereka pada saat yang sama juga merasakan kekecewaan ketika menyaksikan kasus-kasus hukum yang melibatkan pejabat pemerintah. Dalam pengertian masyarakat umum, para pelaku korupsi, dipandang sebagai orang yang tidak cinta Negara, tidak punya jiwa nasionalisme! Lha kalau pejabat saja tidak berjiwa nasionalis, buat apa rakyat biasa harus berjiwa nasionalis? Asumsi di atas memang perlu dibuktikan, namun ada gejala alienasi (keterasingan) terhadap isu nasionalisme terutama di kalangan generasi muda. Saya tidak yakin jika jiwa nasionalisme telah luntur, hanya terasing dan kurang terstruktur saja, karena perubahan social dan budaya yang terbawa arus globalisasi dan modernisasi.

This article examines the evolution of our understanding of the critical junctures concept. The concept finds its origins in historical intuitionalism, being employed in the context of path dependence to account for sudden and jarring institutional or policy changes. We argue that the concept and the literature surrounding it—now incorporating ideas, discourse, and agency—have gradually become more comprehensive and nuanced as historical institutionalism was followed by ideational historical institutionalism and constructivist and discursive institutionalism. The prime position of contingency has been supplanted by the role of ideas and agency in explaining critical junctures and other instances of less than transformative change. Consequently, the concept is now capable of providing more comprehensive explanations for policy change.

This book aims to capture the complicated development of Korea from monoethnic to multicultural society, challenging the narrative of “ethnonational continuity” in Korea, through a discursive institutional approach. At a time when immigration is changing the face of South Korea and an increasingly diverse society becomes empirical fact, this doesn’t necessarily mean that multiculturalism has been embraced as a normative, policy-based response to that fact. The approach here diverges from existing academic analyses, which tend to conclude that core institutions defining Korea’s immigration and nationality regimes—and which, crucially, also reflect a basic and hitherto unyielding commitment to racial and ethnic homogeneity—will remain largely unaffected by increasing diversity. Here, this title underscores the critical importance of “discursive agency” as a necessary corrective to still dominant power and interestbased arguments. In addition, “discursive agents” are found to play a central role in communicating, promoting, and helping to instill the ideas that create a basis for change on the road to remaking Korean society. The Road to Multiculturalism in South Korea will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian studies, immigration and migration studies, race and ethnic studies, as well as comparative politics broadly.

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s.  Did these changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they a continuation of a previously established policy pathway?  The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture.  In this context, ideational change is very important, constituting the intermediating factor between a crisis and the subsequent nature of the policy change.  Our findings will help explain the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at this time.

This paper utilises a new critical juncture framework to help us determine whether changes to Mexican macroeconomic policy in the early 1980s, and Brazilian macroeconomic policy at the turn of the century, were clean breaks with the past, or continuations of previously established policy pathways.  The framework consists of three elements, which must be identified in sequence in order to declare, with some certainty, if an event was a critical juncture.  These are crisis, ideational change, and radical policy change.

How does a treaty-based organisation account for its shifts in policy and procedure? With the European Union's history in focus, the paper observes a pattern of evolution by which departures from existing practice are justified as moves to better honour commitments already held. This logic of change-as-fidelity has long been the usual way of doing transnational politics in postWar Europe. The concept of revisionism, borrowed from the study of innovation in purposive organisations more generally, elucidates its place in the early European Community. The paper goes on to examine how recent more developments, especially visible in the Euro crisis, challenge this logic of change and threaten to displace it. It concludes by discussing what this implies for the political nature of the EU, and whether the revival of the revisionist method is plausible or desirable.

The dissertation studies conditions for institutional change in political economy of Lithuania. Five institutional spheres covering industrial relations, vocational training and education, corporate governance, inter-company relations and relations inside companies were analysed. The dissertation assumes that the institutional arrangement of the political economy of Lithuania is not stable and its change will be based on three possible scenarios. According to the first and second scenarios, the political economy of Lithuania, as postulated in the varieties of capitalism approach, will get closer to the one of the ideal types thus acquiring more and more institutional characteristics typical of a pure liberal market economy or coordinated market economy. According to the third scenario the political economy of Lithuania will remain mixed and complementary institutions characteristic of ideal types will not form. To study these scenarios methodological approach based on discourse was applied. According to it discourse produced by actors of political economy should be considered as a causal factor and an indicator of institutional change, though conditions for the change articulated in the discourse are shaped by existing institutional complementarity and path dependance. An empirical qualitative research of discourse was implemented. The results show that a “discrepancy” between priorities for the change articulated in discourse and opportunities for implementing them in the existing institutional reality are the characteristic features of the conditions for institutional change in political economy of Lithuania.

Although scholars increasingly look to design culture for governance insights that might make m/innovation-and-organizations more ethical, they have not fully explored the language and interpretive boundary language.html processes involved with designing. For this qualitative study, we conducted a literature deconstruction, evaluation activity, and role simulation. We applied a metaphors framework to analyze results. Our paper contributes insights about the dominant discursive practices used by designers in multi-constituent situations. The results reveal that architectural designers predominantly use language that is most consistent with the metaphors of lens, voice and performance. In general, filtering and controlling dialogs are very important to Architects who may use language in a manner that limits voice and power sharing. Furthermore, our reconstructed problem statement suggests that multi-constituent team challenges arise from certain decisions that are co-constructed throu...

Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a discursive institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s.  Did these changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they a continuation of a previously established policy pathway?  The CJT consists of three elements – economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change – that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture.  In this context, ideational change is very important, constituting the intermediating factor between a crisis and the subsequent nature of the policy change.  Our findings will help explain the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at this time.

This paper sets out an improved framework for examining critical junctures. This framework, while rigorous and broadly applicable and an advance on the frameworks currently employed, primarily seeks to incorporate an a priori element. Until now the frameworks utilized in examining critical junctures were entirely postdictive. Adding a predictive element to the concept will constitute a significant advance. The new framework, and its predictive element, termed the “differentiating factor,” is tested here in examining macro-economic crises and subsequent changes in macro-economic policy, in America and Sweden.

The presented empirical study focuses on answering the question "How do social workers construct professionalism of social workers? " The question determines the qualitative research strategy. A combination of critical discourse psychology and poststructuralist discourse analysis became the research method which uses interpretative repertoires, subject positions and limit types as basic analytical tools. The presented study is based on data collected from interactions with 18 participants, all of whom are social workers. As a tool of data collecting it used in-depth interviews, double interviews and focus groups. In compliance with discourse analysis conventions, the gathered data were transcribed in accordance with the rules of conversational analysis, and the software Atlas.ti was utilized for data management. Interviewed social workers construct the professionalism of social workers as “the Quality Mark” and “the Procedural Crutch”. The conclusions of the study contribute to the discussion about the professionalization of social work in the Czech Republic by offering an understanding of why social workers strive for professionalism and why they may refuse it.

This paper utilises a new framework for examining critical junctures to help us understand whether the changes to Irish industrial policy at the end of the 1950s constituted a critical juncture, breaking cleanly with what came before, or were a continuation of policy pathways previously established. The framework is made up of three elements, which must be identified in sequence, for us to be able to declare a critical juncture. Irish industrial policy is examined here, as it constitutes a core tenet of wider economic policy.