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Papers for the SASE 2003 Conference
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Do you want your paper published here? Send your document as a Adobe Acrobat File (PDF),
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publish@sase.org.
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Sorry about these strict instructions, but with a hundred documents called
sase 2003 paper.doc with page-long abstracts it get's just a bit confusing.
Thank you very much!
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Christina L. Ahmadjian and Gregory E. Robbins: A Clash of Capitalisms: Foreign Shareholders and Corporate Restructuring in 1990s Japan
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This paper examines the conflict between stakeholder- and market-based business
systems that resulted from an increase in foreign portfolio investment in the Japanese economy
in the 1990's. As foreign institutions, which were more interested in investment returns than in
long-term relationships, replaced domestic shareholders, one of the fundamental pillars of
Japan's stakeholder capitalism began to crack, and Japanese firms began to adopt practices more
characteristic of Anglo-American market economies. In an analysis of 1626 listed Japanese firms
between 1990 and 1997, we found that foreign shareholders increased a firm's propensity to
downsize and divest assets. The effect of foreign shareholders was strongest among firms less
integrated into the existing Japanese system—those with lower levels of shareholding by
domestic corporations and financial institutions. There is little evidence that foreigners exerted
pressure directly through shareholder activism. Rather, as firms' resource dependencies shifted
from domestic to foreign capital, their behavior shifted accordingly.
ahmadjian-robbins.pdf (PDF, 362KB)
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Juha Antila and Pekka Ylöstalo: Unionisation in the Baltic Countries
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antila-ylostalo.pdf (PDF, 193KB)
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Emília Rodrigues Araújo: "It's logical and obvious that it must be, isn't it? But it depends": Women’s time and PhD completion
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concepts of citizenship and gender on the light of an ongoing
investigation about academic uses and representations of time that counts with 36 interviews in two Portuguese
universities. The main hypotheses in debate consists in advocating that the study on gender and specially of
women is somehow "clutched" considering the permanence of legitimating mechanisms that contribute for the
maintenance the social order. Despite the changes on universities temporal schemata's, the sociological question
underground, related to the existence of the university teachers as "intellectuals", marked by the idea of vocation
and celibate still permeated the quotidian of the "academic milieu" and, therefore, the academics own identity. It is
precisely regarding this assumption of ever availability that one of the most important questions emerges about
gender: the duality of being "academic" and being women in "our society" (expression from an interview). So, we
intend to discuss the nature of the distance between some of the social policies destined to help people to
synchronize their multiple times and its predominant quantitative orientation that, in conjugation with the temporal
imaginary of academic careers, still force people, especially women to "logically" abdicate of their time (in a daily
and biographical basis). Ideas of authors as Gunning, Bourdieu and Adam are taken into consideration.
araujo_emilia.pdf (PDF, 65.0KB)
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Sabina Avdagic: State-Labor Relations in East Central Europe: Explaining Variations in Union Effectiveness
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The paper seeks to offer an explanation for variations in effectiveness of trade unions
to obtain legislative and policy concessions in peak-level tripartite negotiations in
post-communist East Central Europe. I examine the usefulness of some standard
interpretations for such variations, namely economic-structural arguments; arguments
originating in democratization literature; political cycle arguments; and
neoinstitutionalist (in particular corporatist theory) arguments. I argue that none of
them offers a fully satisfactory explanation for the problem at hand, and that they
mostly provide static accounts which either neglect the importance of strategies
followed by the key actors or assume that they are predetermined. Instead, I argue that
the sources of these variations are to be attributed to distinct paths of state-labor
relations which are the product of continuous strategic interactions within the general
framework of tripartite institutions. To present a mechanism through which these
paths evolve, the paper sketches a model of government-union interactions that
combines institutional and behavioral variables, and proposes a set of hypotheses
regarding conditions that determine initial choice of strategies and factors that
influence continuation or modification of these strategies. The paper further illustrates
how these interactions shape tripartite institutions in such a way that they start
reflecting accentuated power disparities between the contending actors, and limiting
the scope of possible choices for weaker actors later on. I demonstrate how the
interplay of the proposed variables has shaped distinct paths of state-labor relations,
and influenced the effectiveness of unions, in the Czech Republic, Hungary and
Poland.
avdagic_sabina.pdf (PDF, 207KB)
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Guilherme Azevedo and Hélène Bertrand: Global workers and managerial ethnocentrism – A discussion on their origins and effects
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Based on some convergences identified on previous studies, the authors aim to discuss the
correlations between two phenomena: the advent of the so-called “global workers” and the
persistence of the “ethnocentrism” on the organizational vision.
As long as the cultural values of an organization are mainly shaped by the cultural values of the
involved social groups, the organization background stands for a historical record of its cultural
construction. For the period of an internationalization process some specific groups of workers
join the cultural melting: the entitled “global workers”, which are specific groups of workers as
for instance migrants, expatriates, “brains-abroad”, remote service providers, and remote
manufacture producers.
On the other hand, one of the most relevant dimensions involved in the construction of a global
company is the “type of organizational vision”, which is dependent on the cultural model. But,
regardless of the fact that many reasons explain why the global organization needs to develop a
so-called “geocentric vision”, evidence shows that the parochialism (lack of sensibility to
understand other cultural models) endures.
Discussing the convergences and contrasts of these two contemporary questions, the study
identifies their origins and infers about their future impacts on our societies.
azavedo-bertrand.pdf (PDF, 180KB)
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Bel Maïten: La Professionnalisation de l’enseignement superieur: Une Recherche d’Efficacite Conduite par de multiples logiques
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bel_maiten.pdf (PDF, 52.2KB)
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Pierre Béret, Jean-François Giret, Isabelle Recotillet:
Trajectories from public sector of research to private sector: an analysis using French data on young PhD graduates
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beret-giret-recotillet.pdf (PDF, 115KB)
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Giuliano Bonoli: Trade unions, veto points, and modernising compromises in pension reform
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bonoli_giuliano.pdf (PDF, 83.3KB)
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Reinoud Bosch: Exposing the Concept of Power
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In this paper, a contribution is made to exposing the concept of power - defined in general
terms as 'the ability to achieve'. Insights from different traditions of power research are brought
together in a single conceptual analysis. The concept is first analyzed in terms of capacities, structures,
and forms of power. This is followed by an analysis of personal agency, using insights from cognitive
and social psychology. Next, different ways of power exercise are discussed on the basis of literature
dealing with social control, legitimation, and social influence. After a brief discussion of power
effects, an analysis of situations, fields, strategies, and interaction follows, relating ideas from game
theory to other relevant analyses. Finally, the focus turns to collective agency (in organizations),
which is analyzed on the basis of insights and categories from the human resource management
literature.
bosch_reinoud.pdf (PDF, 297KB)
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Anne Branciard: La Génopole d'Evry, action publique nationale et ancrage territorial: une injonction paradoxale ?
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In France, new knowledges emerging in the area of genomics and biotechs have clustered around
private and public research institutions, universities and firms. The creation of Genopole Evry is the
beginning of this process. It has implemented a production system from existing and new resources,
creating local, national and international externalities (scientific park, national centers of biological
resources, establishment and creation of companies, transfer to industry of economically relevant
knowledge). But the widening of Genopole missions leads to a paradox. On the one hand, Genopole is
perceived as a "qualified operator" of an incentive national public policy (putting out lever effects to
redeploy local production systems). On the other hand, it is perceived as an "intermediate institution of
innovation" able to build a territorial anchorage of Genopole supporting a located space of innovation.
Thus, strategic options diverge. Some actors aim at consolidating localised dynamics of innovation by
internal co-ordination, which is a long term option to attract and perennialize companies. Some others
rather follow centripetal strategies pursuing national level objectives, such as the planning and the
implementation of a scientific and technological policy through a space division of activities.
branciard_anne.pdf (PDF, 204KB)
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Gabrielle A. Brenner, Teresa V. Menzies, et Louis Jacques Filion: Créations d'entreprises et promotion
sociale : entrepreneurs ethniques et chômage. Le cas du Canada
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This study compares 101 ethnic entrepreneurs in three Canadian cities who were
unemployed before starting their businesses with other ethnic entrepreneurs of these
cities. These entrepreneurs are more first generation immigrants and less integrated to
the Canadian job market. Their years of experience on the job market outside Canada
seem not to count in the Canadian job market. They are on average less educated than
the other entrepreneurs of our sample, have less knowledge of the official language of the
city where they settled. A higher proportion of unemployed women seems to be taking
the entrepreneurial road, maybe a sign of the greater difficulties faced by immigrant
women on the job market.
brenner-menzies-filion.pdf (PDF, 164KB)
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Gianluca Busilacchi: Freedom of choice and resource allocation mechanisms in scarcity conditions:
poorness of Mr. Well Being and need for external action
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To oppose the rational actor model who maximizes his utility based on well being, Sen built up
a mechanism where utility depends on freedom of agency.The aim of this paper comes from a
complication of this theory: is it possible to let Mr. Agency and Mr. Well Being live together
in a same model? When one gets the upper hand over the other, and which one is (if there is)
their causal relationship?This question is, as a matter of fact, the classical issue concerning
the relationship between resources and preferences: here the focus is on the possibility that
the freedom of agency influences the well-being when those resources are poor.The micro level
allows us to focus on the making of individual choice processes for the "poor" people. From
here it is also possible to extend the argument at the resource allocation level in a certain
community: poverty could be shown in this perspective as the failure of "natural" (or market)
mechanisms of social integration, therefore it is necessary a State intervention to re-balance
the level of freedom of agency for the disadvantaged people.
busilacchi_gianluca.pdf (PDF, 141KB)
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Olivier Butzbach: Varieties within capitalism?
A comparative study of French and Italian savings banks, 1980-2000
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This paper questions the neo-institutionalist account of the persistent varieties of
capitalism through a comparative study of the French and Italian savings banks sectors.
According to neo-institutionalism, national capitalisms resist convergence pressures because of
the interplay of economic and political institutions. Neo-institutionalists identify pathdependence
as the main dynamic behind this resilience of national capitalisms. Although this
theory has allowed to move beyond the simplistic, dichotomist views of globalization by
introducing institutions and embeddedness into the equation, it presents many flaws as well.
First, it fails to understand the mechanisms by which agents conform, resist or undermine the
existing institutional frameworks, thus overestimating the homogeneity of systems; secondly, it
overlooks the many ‘paths’ change may take. This paper highlights those weaknesses through the
empirical analysis of the French and Italian savings banks over the past three decades, relying on
quantitative (with longitudinal data on banks performance and balance sheet structure) as well as
qualitative data (with 40 interviews with savings bank staff in both countries). Findings show,
indeed, that the two cases under study are far from being homogenous and coherent. Moreover,
this internal incongruence seems to last over time. At the same time, however, there is some
degree of internal convergence towards similar business practice and organization.
butzbach_olivier.pdf (PDF, 297KB)
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Helen J. Callaghan: Battle of the systems or multi-level game? Domestic sources of Anglo-German quarrels over EU takeover law and worker consultation
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Why have British and German spent the past thirty years in disagreement over
European Commission proposals to harmonize legislation concerning worker consultation and
company takeovers? This paper shows that functionalist "battle of the systems" explanations
are unsatisfactory because they neglect the political dimension of institutional design. Instead
of relative preference homogeneity within countries based on a joint and stable vision of a
common good, government positions reflect the result of struggles at the domestic level
between and within competing groups. Moreover, different political dynamics are at work in
the two policy areas. British and German employer federations united in opposition against
the EU-wide spread of "German-style" worker consultation, while unions in both countries
were in favour. On the takeover directive, the German employer federations have joined
forces with German unions to lobby against the spread of "British style" takeover rules, while
the CBI has aligned with financial sector interests in order to promote it.
After presenting empirical evidence, I discuss its implications for theories on institutional
complementarity, path dependence and two-level games. The paper ends with some thoughts
on why German and British employer federations joined forces against extensive worker
consultation, but not against easy takeovers.
callaghan_helen.pdf (PDF, 200KB)
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Iain Campbell and Sara Charlesworth:
Family-Friendly Benefits in Australia: Towards an Assessment
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This paper aims to contribute to the assessment of family-friendly benefits, ie benefits
available to employees in their job for the purpose of helping them to balance work and
family responsibilities. It begins with a discussion of the conceptual framework needed
for such an assessment. The paper distinguishes ‘family-friendly’, ‘family-neutral’ and
‘family-hostile’ measures. It suggests that the adequacy of family-friendly measures can
be best measured in terms of ‘spread’ and ‘quality’. It outlines some of the pitfalls of
standard measures of spread and lists the factors that can limit the take-up of specific
benefits. The paper then moves on towards an assessment of the situation in Australia. It
suggests that, apart from a small number of benefits such as unpaid parental leave and
family/carers’ leave, most family-friendly benefits in Australia are inadequate – they are
available only in a patchy way to a minority of employees and they are often of doubtful
quality. The argument is illustrated by examining three broad categories of benefits that
are particularly important in resolving pressures around caring responsibilities – special
leave and career breaks, good quality part-time work, and employee-oriented flexible
working arrangements. The paper also points to the way in which family-friendly
measures can be swamped by the effect of family-hostile measures such as long hours
and high work demands.
campbell-charlesworth.pdf (PDF, 267KB)
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Luísa Margarida Cagica Carvalho: How can welfare be equalised? Rethinking the Welfare State in Western Societies
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The objective of this paper is to discuss what to equalise: opportunity resources or welfare. And, how can we equalise welfare in western societies.
In this work, we aim to define equality and study the contributions of the some distribution theories.
Equality is a fundamental right of western societies.
However, this fundamental principle has not been addressed equally around the world and the definition of the principle is subject to varying interpretations.
Economists, philosophers, politics, sociologists have tried to clarify questions such as:
- What do we mean by equality?
- Why equality?
- Equality of what?
In this work, we look at some of the perspectives of the distribution (Utilitarian equality, Sen's theory and William's equality of opportunity). And we will try to
understand the value of each one, in order to achieve a better comprehension of this multidimensional problem.
In addition, we examine the egalitarian theory. Egalitarians believe that we should try to equalise welfare. They believe in equality of outcome.
But how can we equalise welfare?
We have some difficulties in doing it. The trade-off between efficiency and equality being one of them.
It is essential for policy makers to be fully aware of the profound and far-reaching implications for society of each strategy to achieve equality.
carvalho_luisa.pdf (PDF, 349KB)
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Sun-Ki Chai: The Many Flavors of Rational Choice (and the Fate of Sociology)
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This paper argues that it is premature to judge the weaknesses and strengths of
the rational choice approach without more clearly defining what we mean by ”rational
choice”. In particular, it is important to go beyond the well-worn sociology vs.
economics controversy and examine other academic disciplines. One then finds that
there a contrasting ”flavors” of rational choice present in political science, anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, and even linguistics. In particular, these di.erent versions can be
contrasted along the following dimensions: (1) whether the purpose of rational choice
models is viewed as primarily normative, predictive, or interpretive; (2) whether the
approach is associated with formal, quantitative models or with informal, ”common
sense” models; (3) whether the approach is seen as depicting an optimizing or a heuristic
procedure; and (4) whether it is ”thick” in asserting certain preferences and beliefs or ”thin”
in leaving these unspecified. The disciplines embrace very di.erent and contradictory views
along these dimensions. Examining these di.erences in turn helps us to identify what, if
anything, is the essence of the rational choice approach, as well as which aspects of it are
worth retaining.
chai_sunki_1.pdf (PDF, 81.3KB)
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Sun-Ki Chai: Culture, Rationality and Economic Institutions in East Asia: The Chinese Family Firm
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Explanation of economic interactions within East Asia has long been split
between those who view action as an outcome of rational decision-making by an
autonomous state and those who view it as a result of cultural patterns ingrained in
Confucianism and other elements of traditional culture. This paper shows how these two
approaches can used in a complementary rather than conflicting manner to explain the
origins of the Chinese family firm. It does so by examining ways in which cultural norms
can provide points of convergence for rational actors in situations of strategic uncertainty
which would otherwise induce multiple equilibria. Cultural norms will be particularly
important at those points in history when new institutions are being formed, and can lead
to distinct institutional forms. Once created, however, the institutions themselves can
structure incentives in a way that leads to self-perpetuation.
chai_sunki_2.pdf (PDF, 149KB)
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Daniele Checchi: The Italian educational system: family background and social stratification
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The present paper presents evidence that Italy is characterised by low educational achievement when
compared to other European countries with similar levels of development; with a sizeable gap with
respect to tertiary education, while a reducing one in the case of upper secondary education. Even if
more recent cohorts face better prospects in terms of educational attainment, educational choice in
Italy is still strongly affected by parental education.
While wrong expectations about employment probabilities and/or relative returns to education do not
represent a convincing explanation (because low participation in education is systematic), the evidence
on returns to education indicates that the return structure (increasing returns for higher level of
schooling) provides the right incentives to proceed in education. On the contrary, public resources
invested in education (mainly through teachers hiring) are not appropriately distributed, since
comparison with other countries shows an excess of resources assigned to compulsory schooling and a
shortage for tertiary education. Despite this, our analysis shows that parental education is by far more
relevant than teacher in conditioning educational achievements.
Our main results show that university attendance is not constrained by family income, but by parental
education. Though when we take into account the secondary school attended, most of this effect
disappears, except for having a graduate mother. We interpret this result as evidence that social
stratification through the schooling process occurs in Italy in the following way. Educated parents
provide a more stimulating cultural environment for their children, and help them in their homework.
At the end of compulsory education (at the age of 13) their children obtain positive evaluations and are
advised to proceed further in academic oriented secondary schools. At the opposite side, children from
uneducated parents are more likely repeating some year, ending compulsory school with low
evaluations and following their teachers’ advice to enrol vocational or technical schools. Early tracking
determines future destinies of children: high schools are characterised by less repetitions, almost total
absence of track changes and high transition rates to university; at the opposite extreme, vocational
schools are populated by students unconvinced of their curricula, with repeated failed years, and they
exit with low intention to go on with tertiary education.
checchi_daniele.pdf (PDF, 562KB)
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Prof. Gordon L. Clark and Tessa Hebb: Understanding Pension Fund Corporate Engagement in a Global Arena
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Corporate engagement in its broadest definition is the use of one's ownership position to
influence company management's decision-making. It brings together four distinct
underlying currents in global pension fund and institutional investing. The first
undercurrent is growing use of passive index funds. The second is the corporate
governance movement growing since the 1980s. The third force is the growing impact of
socially responsible investing (SRI) by institutional investors with a focus on the social,
ethical and environmental standards of firm-level behavior. The fourth driver is the
emerging role of new global standards dictating firm behavior. It is hoped that this
strategy provides a long-term view of value both for firm-level managers and pension
fund investors, one that promotes higher labor and environmental standards within firms.
It is also hoped that such firm-level practices will add share value to investment, thus
providing long-term benefits to future pension beneficiaries.
clark-hebb.pdf (PDF, 207KB)
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Renata Buarque Goulart Coutinho and Helene Bertrand:
Global ... Business Ethics? Challenges and Paradoxes
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One of the major challenges faced by organizations at the present time is to balance the
search for competitivity with ethical and responsible business operations. The pressure
brought to bear in terms of ethical and socially responsible business practices has become
even stronger, as companies expand their operations to various parts of the world, thereby
demanding coherence relative to their activities at a global level, due to the speed with
which information is distributed throughout the market.
The objective of this article is to analyze the implications of the globalization process on
business management, in so far as it refers to ethical business conduct. This is an essay
developed from an extensive bibliographic research of literature related to business ethics,
globalization and the most recent research on ethics, from a globalization perspective. A
synthesis of the problem in question was prepared and the principal implications relative
to companies that operate globally were highlighted. The discussion indicates that global
businesses should seek a kind of ethics that is also global, whereby coherence among its
worldwide operations, within a perspective of sustainability, is made possible.
coutinho-bertrand.pdf (PDF, 192KB)
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Richard Croucher: Trade union education in agricultural unions in
Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus, or 'Without education there would be no
real union'.
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The educational activities of agricultural unions in Moldova,
Ukraine and Belarus since 1990 are described and analysed. These large
and important unions have allocated a major role to education as a tool in
institutional transformation from Soviet-style unions, to a more campaigning
and collective bargaining model. The relevant Global Union Federation,
the IUF, has assisted union leaderships in this effort. Participative
educational methods have been imported and cascaded down through
unions to stimulate activity close to the membership. Two different
approaches by trade union activists to educational work are identified, and
a contribution made to the theory of union education. This top-down and
externally-facilitated programme is perceived by union leaders as a way of
diminishing problems caused by inverted financial structures and acute
disarticulation. These problems have in fact been diminished. There have
also been unforeseen and negative consequences as well as limitations
which throw light on wider issues.
croucher_richard.pdf (PDF, 178KB)
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Thomas David and André Mach: The Specificity of Corporate Governance in small States:
Institutionalisation and Questioning of Ownership Restrictions in
Switzerland and Sweden
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david-mach.pdf (PDF, 234KB)
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Imene Debeche: Redefining Economic Democracy on the Risk of Economic Insecurity through Chnages in Employment Protection
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debeche_imene.pdf (PDF, 30.1KB)
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José del Pino Espejo and Estrella Gualda Caballero:
El Índice de desarrollo relativo de gÉnero en andalucÍa, ue y paÍses candidatos
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Text
delpino-gualda.pdf (PDF, 241KB)
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Alain d'Iribarne and Robert Tchobanian: PME et TIC : Processus de création de sites web et mobilisations de ressources
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An observation of several SMEs' Web sites reveals great differences according to structural
site features, publics targeted and SMEs' activities (as well B to B than to B to C). These
diversities can be linked to processes of creation and transformation of sites, focusing a set of
singular trajectories of SMEs' entrance in the " Information Society".
These trajectories can, themselves, be associated with differentiated mobilizations of cognitive
resources, depending of SME capacity to generate and collect specific competencies. Three
types of competencies are involved : technical skills of designing site, technical capacities of
updating site content, managerial competencies to connect the site and its use to the strategy
of the company. These competencies can be as well internal than external, depending of the
inscription of SME in its relational networks (geographical or organisational proximity).
diribarne-tchobanian.pdf (PDF, 189KB)
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Julio Cesar Donadone and Laerte Idal Sznelwar:
"The Huns have arrived":
Organizational Dynamics, dissemination of management concepts and consulting firm activity
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In viewing the organizational world of organizations during recent decades, we see a group of
organizations that appear in a prominent position. The organizational consulting firms stand
out as one of the most dynamic sectors during this period. Thus, the present study intends to
contribute to understanding the growth process of the consulting market, its forms of activity
and relationship to other organizations, starting with three reference points. First, focusing on
the international consulting market, seeking to identify its characteristics and major changes
over recent decades. In the second part, the focus is on changes in the business and
management over recent decades. Together, these function as a way of visualizing the activity
of managers in the face of the new organizational shapes and demands which occurred
beginning in the 1980s and as a counterpoint to the ideas coming from the consulting firms.
Another component in constructing this study was the attempt to discuss the forms and
mechanisms for disseminating management ideas and the diverse sectors involved in the
process, focusing on the activity of consulting firms and their connection to other sectors in the
field of selling organizational innovations, especially the business press. This choice intends to
contribute to an understanding of business-consulting firm relations, starting with the issue of
disseminating new managerial references.
donadone-sznelwar.pdf (PDF, 246KB)
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Nicola Düll: Is precarious employment shaping European labour markets? Assessing and accounting for precarious employment in five European countries
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duell_nicola.pdf (PDF, 141KB)
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Ann Dupuis and Anne de Bruin: Conceptualisations of the Work-Life Nexus of Non-Standard Workers
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A variety of concepts and models have been developed to explain the changing face
of work in contemporary society, especially the increasing significance and extent of
non-standard work. This paper initially points to the conceptual and definitional
inadequacies of both ‘non-standard work’ and the notion of the ‘work-life balance’.
Drawing on interview data from the non-standard work phase of the Labour Market
Dynamics Research Programme, a major New Zealand government funded
interdisciplinary research programme, we present our notion of the work-life mosaic
as an approach to understanding work-life experiences. The image of the mosaic
attempts to capture the combinations and permutations of individual workers’
employment, free-work and home life experiences and activities and also
encompasses ideas on open and closed portfolio work. We argue that despite the value
of the work-life mosaic concept, it neither effectively conveys the dynamic context in
which aspects of the mosaic are located, nor recognises sufficiently the importance of
the evolving nature of an individual’s relationships and networks. The paper
highlights the challenge of developing relevant conceptualisations to fit the work-life
nexus of the spectrum of workers in the twenty-first century.
dupuis_debruin.pdf (PDF, 142KB)
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Ewald Engelen: Pension Fund Engagement -- Chances and Limitations
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In this paper the growing salience of what is called 'pension fund engagement' is critically assessed
by means of a reconstruction of the failure of the Swedish Wage Earner Funds. The outcome of
this assessment is sobering. Even under optimal political conditions pension savings proved to be
too unwieldy to have any impact on the ownership structure of large publicly quoted corporations.
Apparently the logic of funded pension arrangements is such that the chances for active
engagement are minimal, largely explaining the marginal amount of pension savings actually
invested in socially responsible ways. The second part of the paper is an exercise in institutional
design. I propose a Fund for Economic Development, financed from the surpluses of regular
pension funds, and largely organized as a 'classic' venture capital provider, as an alternative form of
engagement. In this manner, so I argue, the fiduciary duties of regular pension funds can be taken
seriously, while at the same time there will be sufficient mass behind the construction of an
alternative investment infrastructure, including reconstructed concepts of 'risk' and 'return', that in
the long run the monopoly of the mainstream financial industry on the definition of economic
rationality stands a chance to be broken. As such, this attempt squarely stands within the tradition
of 'realist utopianism'.
engelen_ewald.pdf (PDF, 294KB)
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Bernard Enjolras: Collective action, self-interest and norms
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The conceptualization of social behavior based on norms constitutes a challenge for social
sciences. The rational choice understanding of normative behavior consists in including the
benefits of complying with a norm in the utility function of the individual. This formulation of
normative behavior does not allow to account for behaviors for which complying with a norm
dominates in any case the individual's interest.
This paper puts forward a model where both norms and self-interest enter into the proximate
explanations of action and discusses how such a behavioral model affects both the nature and
the outcomes of social dilemmas. I first propose a formulation of normative behavior based on
dissonance theory. Secondly I introduce a model of individual behavior that allows
individuals to be both self-interested and committed to a norm. I finally discuss the
consequences of such a behavioral model on the nature and outcomes of social dilemmas
using first the framework of a complete information two persons game and then that of an
incomplete information two persons game.
enjolras_bernard.pdf (PDF, 183KB)
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Julia Evetts: The Sociological Analysis of Professionalism: occupational change in the modern world
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The paper analyses and explains the appeal of the concepts of profession and
professionalism and the increased use of these concepts in different occupational
groups, work contexts and social systems. The paper begins with a brief preliminary
section on defining the field where it is suggested that a shift of focus is required from
a preoccupation with defining ‘profession’ to analysis of the appeal to
‘professionalism’ as a motivator for and facilitator of occupational change. Then the
paper examines two past, alternative and contrasting, sociological interpretations of
professionalism (as normative value system and as ideology of occupational powers).
In the third section the paper argues that, in the 1990s, a third interpretation has
developed which includes both normative and ideological elements. Sociologists
have returned to the concept of professionalism in attempts to understand
occupational and organizational change and the prominence of knowledge work in
different social systems and global economies. The fourth section returns to the
question of the appeal of the concept of professionalism in promoting and facilitating
occupational change, and considers how the balance between the normative and
ideological elements of professionalism is played out differently in occupational
groups in very different employment situations.
evetts_julia.pdf (PDF, 172KB)
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Maurizio Ferrera and Matteo Jessoula: Reconfiguring Italian pensions. From policy stalemate to comprehensive reforms
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Italy represents one of the most interesting cases in the field of pension reform, as
the generous, costly and extremely fragmented – along occupational lines –
bismarckian pension system was substantially remodelled during the 1990s. The
reconfiguration of the public pension system took place in different waves, which
led to two major successful reforms (1992 and 1995), a subsequent adjustment
(1997) and a failed attempt (1994). The magnitude of change is even more
relevant in the light of the stalemate that had characterized the Italian pension
policy since the emergence of the first signs of crisis in the mid-1970s. What can
explain such a shift from policy stalemate to comprehensive reforms? This paper
highlights how the reconfiguration of pensions in Italy should be interpreted in the
cadre of the multifaceted crisis that invested the Italian politico-institutional and
economic-financial system in the early 1990s, together with some external
challenges as the run towards EMU and markets liberalization. Against such
background, the bargains - involving crucial issues in terms of intergenerational
and intergenerational equity - between the government and the most influent
actors (trade unions) can be better understood. Consequently, the paper points out
how under specific conditions the seemingly immovable elephants – i.e.
bismarckian pension systems – can move significantly.
ferrera-jessoula.pdf (PDF, 94.7KB)
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Jêdrzej George Frynas, Geoffrey Wood and R.M.S. Soares de Oliveira:
Business and Politics in São Tomé e Príncipe: From Cocoa Monoculture to Petro-State
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At various historical moments, the islands of São Tomé e Príncipe (STP) have assumed
major importance in the global economic system. In the sixteenth century, the islands were
the world’s greatest sugar producer, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they
were a major source of cocoa and coffee. Cocoa production has become relatively
insignificant internationally. But STP could once again attain strategic and economic
importance as the country’s territorial waters are suspected to hold large quantities of
crude oil. In this paper we explore how STP’s political economy is being transformed as a
result of the country’s exposure to external economic and political developments. We
investigate STP’s unacknowledged transformation away from domination by cocoa
exports, narrating the decline and final collapse of the plantation economy on the islands
and the latter’s slide towards overwhelming dependence on external assistance in the form
of foreign aid and external debt. In this context, we call STP an unviable state as its
fledgling domestic economy fails to generate nearly enough revenue to sustain its highly
import-reliant consumption patterns. But we find that STP is on the verge of another major
transformation as the microstate is likely to become a crude oil producer within several
years. In the course of this research, we came across major irregularities in the conduct of
the country’s oil policy and some of our information appears for the first time in the public
domain. In this context, this research points to opportunities for rent-seeking and corrupt
behaviour, which stem from access to foreign aid and natural resources.
frynas-wood-deoliveira.pdf (PDF, 255KB)
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Bernard Fusulier, Lorna McKee & Natasha Mauthner:
Family-Friendly Policies in a Voluntary Organisation: between constraint, strategy and culture
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Since the mid-nineties, the “work-family challenge” has become a particularly prominent
issue in the UK. Some of the most important issues which require to be investigated in the
field of research focus not only on the ‘individual jugglers’ and public policies, but also on
organisations. Previous authors have pointed out the importance of the organisational context
and the relative autonomy of organisations as far as translating policies into practice is
concerned. Some studies have been carried out recently on work-family issues in business
companies and public sector. However, untill today research has neglected voluntary sector.
In this contribution, we draw on our case study of The Good Life, a voluntary organisation.
The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations takes this case as an example of good
practices. The Good Life gives their employees a large range of policies and initiatives
considered to be favourable to the work/life balance. The question addressed in our research is
how such an apparently innovative development can be understood and explained. We
examine the different organisational dynamics that surround the question. As well as
documentary analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews with staff including senior
managers, trade union delegates, team leaders and support workers.
fusulier-mckee-mauthner.pdf (PDF, 206KB)
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Garnier Jacques:
Accumulation de Ressources, Accumulation de Contraintes: comment faire évoluer un complexe d’industries lourdes ?
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The paper deals with the trajectory of a big agglomeration of heavy industries (refinery, chemical
industry, steel industry) located in the south of France. It points out 1. how this industrial
agglomeration on one hand and the area in which it is located on the other hand have been
building and specifying each other through out the XXth century, 2. how this reciprocal building
and specifying have led to the capitalization of a whole set of knowledge and know how based
resources in this area so that it is a potential wealthy industrial place, 3. how, reversely, this
capitalization of resources is also, indissociably a capitalization of constraints so that the scope
of possible affectation of resources is restricted. Since resources tend to became constraints, the
capacity of local collective forces to make productive activities evolve in a new innovative way
are bounded. The paper questions : how to overpass the constraints appeared ?
garnier_jacques.pdf (PDF, 183KB)
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Garnier, Lamanthe, Lanciano, Mercier, Rychen: Mobilisation d’acteurs et Enjeux de qualification et de formation
dans le renouvellement du tissu productif regional
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(Local Collective Actions, Specification of Skills and Training in the Renewal of Local Productive Fabric)
This paper deals with the renewal process of four local productive fabrics in the south of France.
These areas are marked by a productive tradition that have been capitalized into a resource based
knowledge and know-how (characterized by individual skills, professional capabilities, training
supply, technical specificities, entrepreneurship) and now facing a competitiveness problem. These
studies show that the building and the capacity of specification of individual skills and training are
central forces that allow the local renewal of the local economic resources. The local investigations
allow us to study how the local collective forces can modify the affectation of resources in the
economy and what are the determinants of the public development process that turn traditional fabric
into a new one. This collective dynamic process tries to concentrate, to attract and to keep economic
development forces in the local economy, but it is over determined by global matters or by historical
lock-in that constraint the possible development paths.
garnier-lamanthe-lanciano-mercier-rychen.pdf (PDF, 137KB)
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Jérôme Gautié and Bernard Gazier:
Equipping Markets for People: Transitional Labour Markets as the Central Part of a New Social Model
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Formulated in the middle of the nineties Transitional Labour Markets theory (TLM) was first
conceived as a labour market policy reform proposal, aiming to reintegrate excluded groups
into gainful employment, and, further, to rethink the very notion of full employment. The
paper intends to flesh out the argument that TLM can be presented in a more ambitious way,
and tries to connect the core concepts of this approach to the global debate on social models
and Welfare Regimes. Section 1 surveys the new challenges the Welfare Regimes have to cope
with, arising from the “recommodification” of labour and the reconfiguration of social and
demographic risks. Section 2 presents the main features of the TLM analytical framework.
Section 3 contrasts the TLM social model with the “Asset Based Welfare” model promoted by
followers of the social liberal “Third Way”.
gautie-gazier.pdf (PDF, 219KB)
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Nathalie Greenan and Jacques Mairesse: How do new organizational practices shape production jobs? Results from a matched employer-employee survey for French manufacturing
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In this paper, we use a French matched employer-employee survey, the C.O.I. survey, conducted in
1997, to describe the general features of organizational change in manufacturing firms with more than
50 employees. We work with a sample of 3286 firms and two samples of “core” employees (with at
least a year of seniority): 2612 blue collars and 1162 technicians and supervisors. We have two main
aims: discuss new ways of measuring organizational change, allowing for diversity in its orientation
and analyze empirically how new organizational practices have been shaping production jobs in
French manufacturing firms throughout the nineties.
In a first section, we describe the statistical anatomy of organizational change, using the point of view
given by management in the business section of the C.O.I survey. We then turn to the labor force
section of the survey where we analyze the patterns of work organization in our samples of blue
collars and of technicians and supervisors. We finally confront the information gathered on these two
different levels.
We find that a common ingredient to new organizational practices is the production of a collective
knowledge on the shop floor allowing continuous improvement of the production process. In other
words, organizational changes would drive a new way of rationalizing knowledge making where
production workers are asked to explicitly contribute to technological progress. The structure of
blue-collar effort becomes more complex as they are required to participate intensively both in
information and production flows. However, some results suggest that the core of organizational
changes in the nineties has changed direction after the 1993 recession, switching from product and
quality strategies to low cost strategies and implying more pressure on the work of technicians and
supervisors and a slowdown in the “enrichment” of blue collar jobs.
greenan-mairesse.pdf (PDF, 201KB)
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Hanchane S. and Recotillet I.:
Academic careers: the effect of participation to post-doctoral program
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This paper is devoted to assessment of post-doctoral programs for young PhD awarded in
French Universities. Using longitudinal from the French Ministry of Education, our question
lead to the econometric evaluation of post-doctoral participation on the probability to obtain a
job as researcher in the public sector of research. Based on the estimation of a conditional
bivariate Probit model and computation of marginal effects, we demonstrate that going
through a post-doctoral program increases of around 10% then chances to get an academic
job. This result is reinforced by the effect of financial support, especially standard academic
grant, which rises of more than 20% the probability to be recruited as researcher in the French
public sector.
hanchane-recotillet.pdf (PDF, 86.4KB)
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Tetsu Harayama: Construction of Nurses' professional identities in France and Japan
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We present a comparative study of the identity dynamics of nurses in France and Japan.
This study relies upon the paradigm of four identity formsFcategorical occupation identity,
professional network identity, company identity and not-work related identity.
With this theoretical framework, we examine the results of three surveys conducted in
French and Japanese hospitals. The first deals with the consciousness of professional alignment
and the structured relation of gender. The second investigates the integration in hospital
organization. The third explores the three elements of professional identity, namely trajectory,
work relations and professional education.
We observe that the gendered division of labor comes into question in the identity
dynamics of French nurses. They construct a categorical occupation identity, dissociating
qualified tasks from nonqualified tasks (attached with female stereotypes), and a professional
network identity, depending on their capacity to distance themselves from a gendered division of
labor.
On the other hand, the identity dynamics of Japanese nurses is characterized by the
conservation of a gendered division of labor. Japanese nurses do not have any enduring
commitment to professional life and are inclined to construct an identity outside of work.
However, some succeed to construct an identity through their worlplace, based on traditional
male stereotypes.
harayama_tetsu.pdf (PDF, 265KB)
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Roberto Herranz: From Pragmatism to Economic Sociology through the Thought of Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929)
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Our essay seeks to explore some of Charles Horton Cooley’s theoretical insights
to socioeconomic theory through the study of the market as a social process. His main
contribution to sociological theory is related to his idea about the “Looking Glass Self”.
Even so, this seminal idea was displaced by George Mead’s more sophisticated
psychosocial theory of internalization. However, unlike Mead’s psychosocial approach,
Cooley offers a more sociological flavor. Indeed, he was concerned with the social
organization and evolutionary process of the economy and society, relating the idea of
the actor and social interaction to the complex institutional environment of modern
society. In his essays, in line with evolutionary and pragmatic thought, we discover
criticism of the static, formalist and Cartesian approach to neoclassical economy, as
well as the essay of a new and tentative conception about the relationship between
social action and its context. At first, we analyze the role that, in his opinion, the market
and other social institutions carry out to explain innovation as part of an evolutionary
and tentative process, secondly we deal with how he presents us to the necessary
conditions for the constitution of the market as a social institution, as a place for
learning and as a game of cooperation and power. In his different contributions to
competition and the market, we are able to find new sociological and psychological
vocabulary to analyze the meaning of social action in economic situations.
herranz_roberto.pdf (PDF, 168KB)
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Warner Woodworth and Shon Hiatt:
Local Development through Microfinance Tools in Central America
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This paper introduces the economic development strategy in Central America of training
poor microentrepreneurs in small business skills, enabling them to start microenterprises, and
providing microloans to grow their income-generating projects in the informal economy. The
focus is on the work of a large, global NGO and its programs in the Central American countries
of El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Four types of clientele totaling 887
microentrepreneurs are studied from field research conducted during summer 2002. The
methodology for this approach is described, and several results are analyzed in demonstrating the
impacts of microcredit within poor families.
hiatt-woodworth.pdf (PDF, 195KB)
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Martin Höpner: European Corporate Governance Reform and the German Party Paradox
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This paper addresses the current discussion on links between party politics and production
regimes. Why do German Social Democrats opt for more corporate governance liberalization
than the CDU although, in terms of the distributional outcomes of such reforms,
one would expect the situation to be reversed? I divide my analysis into three
stages. First, I use the European Parliament’s crucial vote on the European takeover directive
in July 2001 as a test case to show that the left-right dimension does indeed matter
in corporate governance reform, beside cross-class and cross-party nation-based interests.
In a second step, by analyzing the party positions in the main German corporate
governance reforms in the 1990s, I show that the SPD and the CDU behave “paradoxically”
in the sense that the SPD favored more corporate governance liberalization than
the CDU, which protected the institutions of “Rhenish,” “organized” capitalism. This
constellation occurred in the discussions on company disclosure, management accountability,
the power of banks, network dissolution, and takeover regulation. Third, I offer
two explanations for the paradoxical party behavior. The first explanation concerns the
historical conversion of ideas. I show that trade unions and Social Democrats favored a
high degree of capital organization in the Weimar Republic, but this ideological position
was driven in new directions at two watersheds: one in the late 1940s, the other in the
late 1950s. My second explanation lies in the importance of conflicts over managerial
control, in which both employees and minority shareholders oppose managers, and in
which increased shareholder power strengthens the position of works councils.
hoepner_martin.pdf (PDF, 512KB)
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Alfredo Hualde: Labor and Professional Skills in a Globalized Region:
A Job Market Analysis in Mexico's Northern Border
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hualde_alfredo.pdf (PDF, 116KB)
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Jooyeon Jeong: A Socio-Economic Analysis of Union Densities and Bargaining Structures:
The Korean Case from a Cross-National Comparative Perspective
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On the basis of original data on union activities in five Korean industries (auto assembly,
shipbuilding, machinery or auto supply, auto transport, and banking) heavily organized, this
study characterizes the industrial diversities in levels of union densities, their recent changes and
prevailing bargaining levels. They are analyzed by numerous industry-specific socioeconomic
environmental contexts in interaction with the roles of employers and unions. Those findings
reveal the limits of the macro political economic perspective exclusively focusing on union
activities at national levels in recent comparative studies of Asian nations including Korea. In
addition, several theoretical reasonings on union densities and bargaining structures in
comparative studies of advanced nations turn out to be useful in dealing with the Korean case. A
significant shift in the previous research focus, methodology, and analytical perspective on
Korean unions is called for.
jeong_jooyeon.pdf (PDF, 215KB)
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Michele Lamont: Culture and Inequality: A Research Agenda
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This paper provides a general description of my research past agenda while pointing to
the ways in which it intersects with the issues that are of interest to participants in this
conference, themes such as inequality, work, and exclusion. At the end of my talk, I’ll
provide some detail on two ongoing projects that deal respectively with African-
American anti-racism and with criteria of evaluation of knowledge in the social sciences
and the humanities. These will connect with the theme of the conference, “Knowledge,
Education, and Future Societies.”
lamont_michele.pdf (PDF, 131KB)
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Christian Bessy and Guillemette de Larquier: Hiring and market Intermediaries: A comparative approach to IT labour market in France and Great Britain
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The British labour market is distinguished by a stronger presence of job placement agencies
than the French market. We analyse this difference by pointing out the diverse roles played
by labour market intermediaries in each country. Theoretically, we elaborate a framework in
order to point out that the role played by intermediaries is linked to the nature of job
matching processes. Empirically, we compare two Samples of advertisements for job offers
found in the IT sector. In Great Britain the considerable involvement of specialised
recruitment agencies, which contribute to making information transparent, facilitates
standard job matching processes. "n the contrary, the asymmetry of information, to the
applicant's detriment, noticed in French job offers and the role of pre-selection played
by the intermediaries are consistent with more specific matches.
larquier-bessy.pdf (PDF, 215KB)
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Sangheon Lee: Political Economy of Working Time in Korea: Tensions in the reduction of working hours
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Working hours in Korea are the highest among OECD countries, higher by almost
1,000 hours per year than Scandinavian countries. To reduce working hours, the Korea
Tripartite Commission had discussed the reduction of legal normal working hours
from the current 44 hours to 40 hours in line with the international standards on
weekly working hours. However, the three-year long discussion did not lead to any
agreements, whereas around 80 per cent of Korean people still support the reduction
of working hours. This paper will investigate the structural as well as behavioral
factors underlying this failure. In doing this, the paper will first examine why legal
changes are preferred to other methods in Korea, although there are considerable gaps
between legal and actual working hours (the author estimates that about 25 per cent of
employees in Korea are potentially violating the legal provisions on weekly working
hours). It will be argued that, in addition to the advantages of legal approaches in
coordinating interests among workers and among employers (i.e., classical economic
discussion regarding how to address negative externalities related to working hours),
they are more effective than other methods such as individual reductions (e.g., parttime
work) and collective-bargaining-based reductions. In a sense, the legal approach
was preferred “by default”. This paper will then analyze why the broad-agreed
direction towards shorter legal working hours did not materialize. It will be suggested
that the reasons include (1) the heavy reliance of total wage income (or labour costs) on
overtime and unpaid annual leave; (2) complicated wage structure, which has strong
components of seniority; (3) different interests among workers, particularly between
white- and blue-collar workers, and between regular and non-regular workers; (4)
different interests among individual companies with different sizes. All of these factors
resulted in coordination failures among workers and among employers. In light of the
discussions, the paper will try to draw some policy implications regarding the
conditions under which the reduction of legal working hours can be successfully
implemented.
lee_sangheon.pdf (PDF, 254KB)
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Edward W. Lehman: Culture, Social Structure, and Agency: A Strong Approach
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This paper addresses the similarities between the new communitarianism and the “cultural turn”
in the social sciences. It argues that the addition of sociological hylomorphism – i.e., the view
that all social reality is a synthesis of ideal and material dimensions – to a strong theory of
culture assists cultural sociologists in their scientific studies of the complex issue of “cultural and
agency” while helping new communitarians in their search for most suitable symbolic levers for
societal transformation. It does so especially by enhancing a strong theory’s ability to locate
specific attributes and social sites of symbolic bundles that foster agency. The more robust
approach furthers the search for both by postulating that: (1) symbols have ideal and material
dimensions as do cultural and social structures; (2) cultural and social structures are analytical
properties of the same concrete social formations; (3) symbols have sites in both cultural and
social structures; (4) symbolic bundles move back-and-forth across cultural and social boundaries
which means that these two structures interpenetrate; (5) symbols and cultural structures are not
synonymous and neither are “objects” and social structures; and (6) only when symbolic bundles
are accessed by social-structural actors do they possess the capacity to become agentic; and (7)
agency is defined in terms of actors’ consciousness, knowledgeability, commitment, and power.
These assumptions permit us to argue that a symbol’s agentic profile rests on balancing four
properties: being energizing, contributing to reality-testing, producing ethical gain, and being
malleable. They also assist in understanding how “cultural” symbols are interpreted and
institutionalized by prospective agents in social structures and in locating the main agentic sites of
symbols in the latter. As a consequence, we are able generate a series of hypotheses about social
structures’ key symbolic bundles and their distinctive agentic profiles. The significant agentic
potentials of scientific knowledge and ideologically linked discourses are discussed and
compared.
lehman_edward.pdf (PDF, 104KB)
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Grégoire Mallard: Bridging Culture and Rationality: Four Modes of Explanation in Economic Sociology.
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How do culture and rationality matter in economic life? I identify four different traditions, bridging
culture and rationality in explanations of economic life. On one side, two models define rationality as
an independent variable and, one of them, culture as a dependent variable. On the other side, two
models define culture as an independent variable and rationality as a dependent variable. Such
circularity leads to a question: how do these theories dialogue?
mallard_gregoire.pdf (PDF, nKB)
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Sandrina Berthault Moreira: Evaluating the Impact of Foreign Aid on Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Study (1970-1998).
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Many studies have tried to assess the effectiveness of foreign aid at the micro and macro level.
One branch of the literature attempts to measure the contribution of foreign aid to the growth of
developing countries. The micro results are clear and encouraging: foreign aid is beneficial to
economic growth. However, the macro results are inconclusive: the impact of foreign aid on
growth may be positive, negative, or even non-existent, in statistical terms. This contradiction is
known as the ‘micro-macro paradox’. As the findings in this paper will demonstrate, certain
methodological and econometric flaws inherent in the assessments being carried out may
provide an explanation for the misleading macro results. I have proposed a solution for the
shortcomings I have found, using a different set of common econometric tools and the
generalised method of moments (GMM) estimator on simple augmentations of cross-country
growth specifications. Examining a large sample of developing countries covering a 29-year
period, I have found that foreign aid has had a positive impact on economic growth. In light of
these findings, I conclude that less importance should be attributed to the ‘micro-macro
paradox’ as an overall appraisal of the effectiveness of foreign aid. In terms of magnitude, I
have also found that foreign aid has less effect on growth in the short term than in the long term.
I also conclude that the time lags in the aid-growth relationship should not be ignored.
moreira_sandrina.pdf (PDF, 187KB)
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David Muhlmann and Erhard Friedberg:
The Difficulty of Formalizing the Implicit: Limits and Problems of the Management of Knowledge
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Recent trends in the management of firms can be understood as a growing proceduralization,
which is an attempt to frame and align the social processes by which the members of an
organization have structured and ordered their cooperation, an attempt in short to align formal
structure and informal processes. Certification and total quality management which have
developed from the late eighties on, and more generally the attempt to codify and « legalize »
the social relations within an organization, are all part of this secular trend to frame and tame
the functioning of organizations by way of formal procedures and devices.
The present fashion of « Knowledge Management » is an integral part of this dynamic. For
several years now, many KM projects have been launched in firms, trying to bring the
individual actors to explicit and formalize their know-how and knowledge, so as to free them
from the constraints of interpersonal exchange and to transform them into a knowledgecapital
freely available to all participants.
Examples drawn from a series of field-studies in firms of the industrial and service sector
clearly show the many obstacles for this endeavor of making existing know-how and
knowledge more explicit and thus to activate and facilitate its circulation and use. In practice,
the promises to capitalize existing expertise and thus to render organizational operations more
fluid often prove very disappointing : they are defeated by the intrinsic limits of transforming
tacit into explicit knowledge, as well as by the actual practice of actors who most often have
very good reasons to « resist » this attempt to make their know-how and their knowledge
fungible and to decontextualize its exchange. Our empirical investigations also show that in
order to be successful, a KM project has to meet very stringent organizational and
professional conditions.
muhlmann-friedberg.pdf (PDF, 221KB)
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David Natali and Martin Rhodes: The 'New Politics' of the Bismarckian Welfare State:
Pension Reforms in Continental Europe
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How do veto-heavy European welfare systems engage in reform? In this paper we
analyse the pensions policy reform process in four Bismarckian welfare states against
the background of recent theorizing about the scope and nature of welfare reform. We
develop the notion of a 'double trade off' – involving both politics and policy - to
illustrate how governments manage to push reforms forward despite the opposition of
strong vested interests. In the process we also reach a number of conclusions about
recent theoretical understandings of reform in continental Europe, including both the
process of reform and the nature of reform outcomes.
natali-rhodes.pdf (PDF, 279KB)
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Lars Niklasson: "Rotary Capitalism", Third Way or Networking Bureaucracy? Swedish Partnerships for Growth
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Since 1998, Sweden has pursued a policy of regional partnerships for growth. All relevant
public and private actors (agencies, companies, universities, unions, business organizations
etc) have cooperated on a regional basis to support local economic development. The policy is
based on a cluster-model, where increased cooperation is thought to bring about stronger economic
growth. A central aspect of this policy is to get various national agencies more coordinated
and more open to the needs of business. It forces policy segments to cooperate geographically
and adds economic growth to the aims of the welfare state.
The paper describes the new policy and identifies the issues of the debate. Official and other
motives are discussed. Actual and potential objections are raised. The policy is put within two
contexts, the economic context of supporting economic growth and the public administration
context of designing efficient governance.
The paper sketches how an evaluation of the policy could be carried out. It would track processes,
outputs and outcomes. Comparisons can be made among the 21 different regions and
with various national and EU policies, most important of which is the comparison with the
EU Structural Funds. Tentative conclusions are given and possible alternative policy measures
are discussed.
niklasson_lars_paper.pdf (PDF, 117KB)
niklasson_lars_presentation.pdf (PDF, 61.7KB)
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Hans Nuebel: Give World Religions a Chance to Justify Communitarian Relations?
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With many communitarian thinkers we view religious communities as embedded in
culture. Out of the desire to be disrobed from isolation religions are acted out as
community actions (Max Weber). Their encounter of the great religions shows
exclusive competition. On the other hand the World Council of Churches as an
ecumenical body promotes a “Decade to Overcome Violence seeking Reconciliation
and Peace”. A “communitarian” encounter is like an embrace: opening of arms, trying
understand each other, exchange of ideas and feelings, and let each other go in his/her
alterity. Irritation is imminent from the conflation of nationalism and religious
expressions a Civil Religion of the present administration.
It becomes dangerous, if in World religions fundamentalist groups make themselves
instrumental for global players in politics as well as in economics. They should be
more are on guard of the “danger of a conflation of biblical religion and patriotism”;
otherwise they will not bring forth the moral tradition of balancing and exploring in
the communitarian way a dynamic equilibrium between ethical rationality and the
powers of nationalism and economism.
nuebel_hans.pdf (PDF, 129KB)
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Birgitta Olsson: Understanding the cultural dimension of career development
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Does culture set boundaries which restrain the occupational growth among members
of an organization? A career is according to general theory a set of occupational
experiences and roles that makes up a persons' working life. The aim of the paper is to
discuss how the cultural dimension could be used to understand the low mobility in
many organizations which means that people getting “locked in” during decades even
if they do not view it that way by themselves.
Cultures are anchored in the organizational collective and exercise influence without
the direct involvement of particular key actors. Here the culture-as-root-metaphor
according to Smircich (1983) has been applied. The cultural dimension is viewed as a
guide to interpret what goes on in organizations. Culture is not seen as a variable but
more as a fundamental dimension which permeates the system of occupational
positions in an organization.
The focus in the paper is on understanding the cultural dimension in a person's
occupational position. New innovative measures or cultivating activities have to be
tested and evaluated to break the old boundaries of careers. The paper is based on
empirical material from a project for career development program in a Swedish
agency.
olsson_birgitta.pdf (PDF, 157KB)
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Gerd Paul: Firms of The New Economy and Their Workers Revisited: Back to Normality?
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Our contribution tries to draw an elaborate picture of the work reality in the core
sectors of the German new economy: multimedia, internet, software. We argue that optimistic
visions of a completely new way of working and living in the rise of the internet and the
current “it was all fake” backlash miss the reality of start-up firms in these sectors.
paul_gerd.pdf (PDF, 122KB)
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Gábor Péli: Differ from thy Neighbour: Product positioning in Multidimensional Markets
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The presentation extends the model of spatial competition proposed by Hotelling (1929) to n
dimensional commodity spaces, with the assumption of equal product prices. Shops seek to
position their product catchment areas to minimize competition, i.e., overlap with neighboring
supply areas. I address two types of n-dimensional filling up of the commodity space with
supply areas around shops. Cubic cell arrangements are easy to build up in any n. Sphere-like
catchment areas cells allow for more shops per space unit, but the building up of such an
arrangement is more problematic.
peli_gabor.pdf (PDF, 169KB)
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Alary Pierre and Culas Christian:
Inequitable integration of rural pluri-ethnic society into a market exchange system. The northern Lao case.
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pierre-christian.pdf (PDF, 260KB)
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Domagoj Raèiæ1: Economic institutions and the reproduction of capital
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The reproduction of capitalism as a socio-economic system entails production and
utilisation of various forms of capital - including physical, financial, human,
organisational and social capital. Although all these forms have economic value,
there is a fundamental difference between the appropriable forms of capital that
can be owned, traded and thus disembedded from their social context, and those that
are predominantly relational and context-dependent, and can be ‘owned’ and ‘traded’
only partially and conditionally. The reproduction of the forms of capital occurs in
the context of economic institutions, among which property rights, contracts, firms,
markets, as well as forms of inter-firm cooperation are particularly analysed. Rather
than being purely instrumental, economic institutions are pervaded by the duality
between rights and obligations or constraints. Consequently, sustainable reproduction
and enhancement of various forms of capital depend upon the social context that enables
the existence and interpretation of such processes. Although this claim particularly
pertains to the relational forms of capital, it is also applicable to the appropriable
forms as well – especially given the shift towards postindustrial society. By providing
conducive social relations, institutions facilitate the ongoing balancing process between
production and utilisation of various forms of capital.
racic_domagoj.pdf (PDF, 420KB)
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Bénédicte Reynaud: Operating Rules in an Organisation: A Challenge to the Incentive Theory
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reynaud_benedicte.pdf (PDF, 177KB)
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Nadine Richez-Battesti and Patrick Gianfaldoni:
L’Accompagnement a la creation d’activites:
Organisation en reseaux et industrialisation du service
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richez-gianfaldoni.pdf (PDF, 60.3KB)
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Jose Ripoll: Rogoff’s central banker CUM Stability and Growth Pact: Mutually reinforcing institutions or a cursed overdose?
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Two different institutions, meant to provide each other's support, underpin economic
policymaking in Euroland. First, a shared central bank whose objectives and operational
procedures imply inflation stabilization weighting more heavily (relative to employment
stabilization) than that the social loss functions of selected individual countries would
yield. Rogoff's icon, for all practical purposes, would be in monetary control for the
whole area.
Second, the Stability and Growth Pact, aimed at ensuring national budgetary policies
supporting such inflation stabilization-oriented monetary policies. This objective calls
for national fiscal deficits being kept below 3 percent of the GDP reference value. This
narrow margin may not permit to offset the most damaging effects that would inflict a
Rogoff's like central banker to the most vulnerable countries.
While this paper is not particularly aimed at reviewing the various opinions and objections
that either institutional pillar have raised, it focuses on the slippery recession path that
the combination of the two institutional arrangements may entail with resulting political
and social turbulences. The underlying question is whether less dogmatic, time-consistent
coordination between monetary and fiscal policymaking, between Frankfurt and Brussels, is
the iniquity that conventional economic analysis purports to be.
ripoll_jose.pdf (PDF, 286KB)
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Karen Robson and Gillian Anderson: Language and Capital in Multi-Lingual Switzerland
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This paper uses the 1999 wave of the Swiss Household Panel study to examine the
impact of first language on social, cultural, and human capital. Drawing upon previous research
which has identified a "language penalty" for minority language speakers in multilingual
countries, we aim to examine whether this relationship holds true in Switzerland, and more
importantly, to examine the mechanism through which stratification operates. We look at
language as a determinant of social and cultural capital for Switzerland as a whole, as well as by
language dominant regions. We find evidence of differential investment in social and cultural
capital by language group. We then examine the impact of language on human capital, which we
conceptualise as earnings potential. The effects for both Switzerland as a whole and by language
region suggest that first language, independent of social and cultural capital investments, still has
a direct impact on human capital. The effect, however, is non-existent in the more heterogeneous
region, suggesting that heterogeneity reduces barriers to the acquisition of human capital.
robson-anderson.pdf (PDF, 168KB)
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Boguslawa Maria Barszczak Sardinha: To be a volunteer – application of the utility function
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The objective of this work is to show that choosing to be a volunteer depends on individual
choice based on utility.
The objective of each person is to be happy. There are many ways of achieving that
objective. One of them is to make the right choices. In economics there are always choices
to be made.
The choice problem is one of the most fundamental in economics. We must assume that
individuals make rational choices. In consumer theory, choices are made based on
preferences. We may order those preferences in order to construct a utility function for
everyone. By analysing that individual utility function we may deduct what that individual
prefers most. We may analyse their utility in choosing things. We assume that a greater
utility gives us more pleasure and makes us happier. And this is the objective of our life.
And what about volunteering?
To be a volunteer an individual must spend part of his time doing that! Is he irrational, or
is it that he has some advantages in being a volunteer.
An individual spends his time in two ways: work or leisure, so when they choose to be a
volunteer they sacrifice work time or leisure time. As we said before, the individual makes
choices based on his/her utility function. When someone chooses to be a volunteer we
affirm that his or her utility function directs. So we deduct that in volunteering a person
might get more pleasure than working or resting. Do they always prefer volunteering? I
don't think so!
The individual doesn't always choose to be a volunteer. He must eat, and with other
necessities must also work and rest to recuperate their strength.
When does someone choose to be a volunteer? Many studies show that, when an
individual doesn't need to work many hours, because s/he has a high income, he might
spend some of his time doing volunteer work instead of paid work. We may assume that
the individual has a greater willingness to volunteer when he has satisfied his other more
basic necessities.
What happens when he chooses volunteering as an alternative to resting? In that situation
he must appreciate more being a volunteer. When might it happen? In this case we also
may assume that individuals need some rest but after that s/he measures volunteering as
higher in his preference scale or utility function, than resting.
In those cases his utility function graph doesn't have the same inclination all the time, it
changes from more utility for work/leisure to more utility for volunteering, passing
through an indifferent point (45º inclination curve passing through point zero on the
graph). So the utility function has approximately an "S" shape.
Making decisions based on utility function has the objective of increasing our utility,
meaning that we get pleasure from the things we do. When we increase our pleasure we
definitely increase our happiness.
sardinha_boguslawa.pdf (PDF, 179KB)
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Mai-Brith Schartau: New Identity via Cooperative Movements
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Different social trends can be seen in the changing labor market. One is that some groups are
searching for a new and better identity via their working life. In the Swedish social democratic
welfare state, with its huge public sector, large groups are now tired of the many bureaucratic
rules and the low status of the work. In the purchaser-provider system they start a cooperative
company of their own and start bidding for contracts. The aim is not primarily to make money
but to be able to influence and control their working situation in a more democratic
organization.
scharatu_maibrith.pdf (PDF, 138KB)
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Maria Smirnova and Natalia Dzagourova:
Inefficiency of the Basic Contract in the Russian Economic Universities
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In this paper we discuss the actual problems of economic education in Russia related to the substantial
deficit of high skilled teaching personnel and the poor teaching quality. We believe that the basic cause
of existing situation lies in the imperfections of standard contractual system usually framing the
relations between public universities and their teaching staff. Speaking about contractual imperfections
we mean the inefficiency of the contracts structure as well as the inefficiency of their parameters. The
accumulations of human capital as well as its quality are core production factors for the university
activity. This fact allows us to argue that a well-balanced structure of the university contracts presents
a gage of high quality education that the university provides. Meanwhile the existing university
contracts are based rather on the reasons of the common sense than on the arguments of some
scientific approach, whereas a range of problems really typical for the principal-agent models
characterizes the relations between universities and their professors. The theoretical framework we use
to analyze contractual problems and to give some predictions concerning possible ways to resolve
them consists in combining multitasking and common agency approaches.
smirnova-dzagourova.pdf (PDF, 155KB)
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Dick Stanley: The Three Faces of Culture: Why culture is a strategic good requiring government policy attention
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Culture can be understood as a set of symbolic resources which human beings
must have to navigate the world around them. The world is, however, always in flux and culture
must adapt to enable individuals to cope with the flux. This paper examines the how the creative
arts act as agent of cultural change and argues that a society must possess a domestic source of
creative artists if it is to be sustainable in the face of that change. The interpretation of the
creative arts as mere entertainment goods can leave the viability of the creative arts sector in
doubt if it is not strong enough to resist cheap cultural imports from abroad . A society which
cannot challenge its own thinking and interpretations, but must rely on other cultures for creative
ideas risks losing its identity and independence, just as a nation which does not control its own
oil supplies or defence industries is more vulnerable to attack. Therefore, a strong creative
sector is a strategic resource in the same way that oil reserves or a domestic defence industry are.
stanley_dick_culture.pdf (PDF, 42.2KB)
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Dick Stanley: It Takes Two to Bowl: Untangling the concepts of social cohesion and social capital
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Paul Bernard has characterised social capital as a "quasi-concept", useful, but
used as an excuse by governments to escape social policy responsibilites. Margaret Somers has
accused it of being a sop thrown by neo-classical economists to their critics in the other social
sciences, and others have claimed it is a concept with too many definitions. This paper argues
that if the concept of social capital is unpacked, it becomes clear that social capital bears the
same relationship to social cohesion as physical capital does to economic production. Examining
the economic indicators used to measure the latter can lead to sorting out the various indicators
(trust, participation, adherence to norms, crime rates, etc.) hitherto associated confusingly with
the concept of social capital. If the concepts of economic production and physical capital
underpin the neo-classical economic model, the concepts of social cohesion and social capital
can be used to begin to develop a coherent model of social sustainability and development which
might provide social policy with a more fertile underpinning than the economic efficiency model
it is now tied to in most developed countries.
stanley_dick_socialcapital.pdf (PDF, 40.6KB)
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Daniel Beunza and David Stark:
Tools of the Trade: The Socio-Technology of Arbitrage in a Wall Street Trading Room
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Our task in this paper is to analyze the organization of trading in the era of quantitative
finance. To do so, we conduct an ethnography of arbitrage, the trading strategy that best
exemplifies finance in the wake of the quantitative revolution. In contrast to value and
momentum investing, we argue, arbitrage involves an art of association - the construction
of equivalence (comparability) of properties across different assets. In place of essential or
relational characteristics, the peculiar valuation that takes place in arbitrage is based on an
operation that makes something the measure of something else - associating securities to
each other. The process of recognizing opportunities and the practices of making novel
associations are shaped by the specific socio-spatial and socio-technical configurations of
the trading room. Calculation is distributed across persons and instruments as the trading
room organizes interaction among diverse principles of valuation.
stark-beunza.pdf (PDF, 957KB)
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Fredrik Strålind: Unemployment and Identity in Eastern Parts of Germany
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This study focuses on the search for identity in the Eastern parts of Germany. Since the
Reunification 1990 many Easterners have lost their Identity when trying to adapt to the
western models of life. A large number of employees have lost their identity based upon
their working life when new working models were introduced in the former GDR. The gap
between easterners and westerners is still growing, although thirteen years have past
since the reunification.
Although large sums have been pumped in from the west, the unemployment in the eastern
part is high and still increasing. Many easterners have been encouraged to start a
company of their own, but many have failed because of lack of traditions. Other
explanations can be found in lack of support from western entrepreneurs, in question of
introducing easterners in the western way of developing companies, and the lack of
interest from multinational companies. Westerners with west European “know-how” run
the majority of successful companies in the eastern parts and they seem to be unwilling to
let easterners take over and run these companies as entrepreneurs.
In the eastern parts the situation is now slowly changing away from seeing the western
models as ideals. There is a renewed interest in smaller organizations and co-operatives,
where the members can make their voices heard.
stralind_fredrik.pdf (PDF, 241KB)
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Patrick Ternaux: Reshaping of local production systems and the building of knowledgebodies
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This paper deals with the issues of the reshaping of local productive systems and of the
setting-up of blocks of knowledge. The approach relies on the analysis of the main
mutations in the labour and employment in our developed societies during the last
fifteen years. The conclusion is that the impact on employment of the new information
and communication technologies is not uniform. The main changes are the step by step
shift from the qualification of a job to the competency of a person, from a technical to a
cognitive division of labour and from a localisation based on proximity to a global
approach of localisation of productive activities. This makes the interpretation of the
current changes in the local labour markets quite controversial. It does not make sense
to oppose the local and global economies. The point is the complex complementarity of
the roles and the competencies of local actors and their networking with the global
economy.
ternaux_patrick.pdf (PDF, 93.1KB)
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Olivier Thevenon: Welfare State Regimes and Female Labout Supply in a European Perspective
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thevenon_olivier.pdf (PDF, 645KB)
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Adam Tickell and Jamie Peck: Making global rules: globalisation or neoliberalisation?
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tickell_peck.pdf (PDF, 233KB)
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Shann Turnbull: Grounding Sociology in System Science
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This paper uses Transaction Byte Analysis (TBA) to ground sociology in system science. No
relationship or organisation can exist without some sort of communication that can be
measured in bytes. The transmission or storage of bytes involves physical changes in
materials or in energy states subject to scientific laws. Information overload and bounded
rationality can be explained by the physiological and neurological limits on the ability of
individuals to receive, store, process or communicate bytes and so information, knowledge
and wisdom. The laws of requisite variety in communications, control and decision-making
provide additional criteria for evaluating and/or designing social systems and organisations
with unreliable components.
The power of TBA is illustrated by showing how the nested network of firms around the town
of Mondragón in Spain follows the strategies used in nature to create and manage complexity
through simple components. Unlike many other organisational theories, TBA accepts that
individuals can be either, or both, trusting/suspicious, cooperative/competitive and/or
altruistic/selfish. TBA is compared with Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) which it
subsumes when costs represent a proxy for information. Unlike TCE, TBA can be applied to
any type of social institution to provide the foundations for a “science of organisation”.
turnbull_shann_gsiss.pdf (PDF, 251KB)
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Adriaan van Liempt and Martijn van Velzen:
Industrial Relations in the Dutch and U.S. IT Industries: Two Systems Moving Apart Together?
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Since the mid-1990s, the Dutch industrial relations system has caught the attention of
international scholars and politicians for its crucial role in realizing job creation and
economic growth. While this system of close ties between employers and organized labor
(the so-called ‘polder model’) has been in place for most industries, it is largely absent
in the Dutch information technology (IT) industry. This is best illustrated by the lack of
an industry-wide collective agreement and a preference for individually negotiated
conditions and terms of employment. Given this, and the fact that the corporate culture in
many Dutch IT companies is strongly influenced by American companies, the IT industry in the
Netherlands may be typified as the least ‘Dutch’ of all industries. Trends and developments
in the realm of work and employment in the Dutch IT industry are often considered as signs
of an ‘Americanization’ of industrial relations. In this paper, we contrast these features
with recent developments in the industrial relations domain in the U.S. IT industry. We
conclude that, as with its Dutch counterpart, the industrial relations system in the U.S.
IT industry appears to deviate from national industrial relations trends. We examine the
principal factors underlying these developments. We conclude this paper with a tentative
answer to the question whether the divergence of the industrial relations system of the
U.S. IT industry can eventually lead to a convergence of this system and that of the Dutch
IT industry.
vanliempt-vanvelzen.pdf (PDF, 350KB)
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Carmen D. Wehbe Herrera: Current Situation of the Process of European Integration: Unfinished Tasks, Standstills and Fissures in this Ongoing Process
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The process of European integration has been constructed upon two main concepts and objectives: that
of carrying out common policies and that of increasing the number of member states. It is during the
nineties when the process of European integration undergoes important transformations, which will
eventually provoke several problems and instability, due also to the fact that the very process of
integration is strongly market-oriented.
In fact, the process of European integration has been forcedly accelerated in the last decade by
the European Union in an attempt to underpin it and to adjust it to the globalisation process. However,
in doing so, the European Union is actually disregarding and ignoring certain issues, which are of vital
importance for the very process of integration. Therefore, these shortcomings are becoming
increasingly prominent.
Precisely, this is the point we are going to focus on, analysing the deficiencies of this process of
integration, both from internal and external perspectives.
wehbe_carmen.pdf (PDF, 290KB)
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Thomas Zwick: The Impact of Training Intensity on Establishment Productivity
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This paper measures the impact of training intensity on establishment productivity in a
production function using the representative German IAB establishment panel set. The share
of trained employees in 1997 has a significant productivity impact on productivity in 1998
(but not in 1999) and on average productivity in the period 1997 - 2000. The paper
simultaneously corrects for unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity of establishments by
using a fixed effects panel regression and for selectivity of training by instrumenting the
training intensity variable. In addition, it includes a broad variety of control variables for
establishment and employee characteristics as well as several personnel management
methods in order to reduce omitted variable bias. This innovative estimation approach
demonstrates that the estimation results are sensitive to the three sources of estimation bias.
Unobserved heterogeneity and selectivity both lead to an underestimation while omitted
variable bias leads to an overestimation of the productivity effect.
zwick_thomas.pdf (PDF, 198KB)
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