This article defends and extends the concept of workplace regimes, understood as the existence of identifiable systematic patterns of managerial control. In doing so a conceptual framework is developed for explaining both patterns in control and the dynamics of workplace politics. Specifically, this article elaborates on the approach of Michael Burawoy and extends it through an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (also known as Science, Technology and Society Studies) (STS) and Economic Sociology. The core of Burawoy’s framework is identified as the use of ideal-typical ‘workplace regimes’ to represent historically distinct positions upon a continuum between legitimation and coercion. This core is defended and it is argued that granular firm-level variations in the use of legitimation and coercion would only invalidate the theory if they were to make the identification of shifts in historical tendencies at the macro level of world systems impossible. In fact, it is claimed that once fully elaborated the resultant framework is able to explain commonalities and regularities across seemingly divergent contexts as well as variations within regimes. In the course of making this argument, an important distinction, that has not previously been fully recognised, between workplace regimes and workplace politics is highlighted. Finally, the potential explanatory power of this workplace regime approach is illustrated by drawing on recent qualitative research in the retail sectors of the UK and the US.
Many governments, both state and local, attempt to promote tourism as a way of raising revenue and encouraging economic development. This is especially prevalent in Florida, where tourism revenue constitutes a major source of revenue through the sales tax. However, some areas in Florida are considerably more popular as tourist destinations than others. In this article, I use central place theory to provide a theoretical framework for dividing metropolitan areas into categories with similar characteristics and similar levels of tourism in order to provide policy recommendations specific to each category. I conclude that a uniform approach to tourism promotion will have far less meaningful overall effects compared to policies targeted based on this division of tourism destinations.
It is common for scholars to describe institutions as ‘rules of the game’. This description entails a separation between a society and its rules. Social change thus results as societies amend their framing rules. This article compares the common treatment of institutions as rules against an alternative treatment wherein societies and institutions are images of one another. If there were no rules governing interactions among some set of people, you would have a mass of people but that mass would not constitute what we recognise as society. This simple distinction between institutions as rules by which a society is governed and institutions as society itself creates divergent paths for institutional theory, which this article explores.
We investigate a heterogeneous Ising model in the context of tax evasion dynamics, where different types of agents are parameterised via local temperatures and magnetic fields. Our work focuses on the dynamic behavioural change of agents after an audit, which either corresponds to a temporal reduction or enhancement of compliance, also known under the terms of ‘bomb crater effect’ and ‘target effect’, respectively. We analyse this effect for different types of agents: endogenously non-compliant types; agents that have a tendency to copy (non-)compliant behaviour from their social environment; ethical agents with strong endogenous moral attitudes; and random types that show large fluctuations between compliant and non-compliant behaviour. Each type influences overall tax evasion differently and our model predicts that, interestingly, increasing the audit probability can have the counter-intuitive effect of increasing tax evasion under certain circumstances. We analyse audit strategies that can suppress this effect, and thus contribute to the burgeoning literature on the actual impact of tax audits.
Colorado was one of the first states in the US to legalise the personal use and possession of marijuana on 6 November 2012. Using various estimation techniques, the purpose of this study is to examine the possible demographic and spatial factors influencing the voting behaviour of Coloradans on the issue of recreational marijuana legalisation. After the inclusion of many variables of interest, spatial spillovers from neighbouring counties do not appear to have been responsible for the vote outcome, despite visual evidence suggesting otherwise. Party affiliation and the native Coloradan population composition of counties appear to be the driving forces on the margin behind the voting results of Amendment 64.
In 2018, the Irish people voted in favour of the passage of the Thirty-Sixth Amendment. This vote abolished the Eighth Amendment, which had previously outlawed abortion by establishing the equal rights of the woman and the unborn child. To uncover potential driving forces behind the vote share in support of the Thirty-Sixth Amendment, this article uses regional data on religious identification, age and a measure of traditional identity. The results of this article show that variation by region in religious identification was significantly correlated with voting behaviour in the 2018 referendum. Furthermore, evidence for the validity of the median voter theorem is developed by analysing data on the reported support of Irish elected representatives for the legislation before the vote. The results of this analysis on the referendum vote suggest a societal shift has taken place in the preferences of Irish citizens, which is complimented by the views of their elected representatives.
In 2012, Vermont became the first state in the US to ban hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil production despite having zero known natural gas reserves. We evaluate the role of legislator and median voter characteristics on Vermont General Assembly voting outcomes on Act 152, which essentially bans fracking in the state. Using a double-selection post-Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator approach, we find evidence that campaign donations and being a member of the Democratic Party are positively related to voting to ban fracking. Median voter characteristics appear not to play an essential role in shaping legislator voting behaviour, corroborating the theory of expressive voting on the decision to ban fracking in Vermont.
Based on Bill Freund’s latest book, this review essay critically reviews the author’s discussion of: the institutional and network fibres underlying the mid-20th-century South African developmental model; how and why it developed; how and why it transformed through the course of that century; and how it was dismantled by the end of that century. The essay also tries to assess the significance of that model for South African development in the post-1994 democratic era, as well as the economic and public policy choices exercised by the African National Congress (ANC)-led government under conditions of fiscal constraint.
Over the years, libraries have accumulated an enormous number of books concerning the work of Adam Smith. Yet, research covering the methodology adopted by the great Scot occupies very little space. This is probably due to the fact that, while Smith was an all-round scholar, specialisation in research activity has progressively reduced the scope of knowledge of each of us. It is therefore rare to find one researcher covering Smith’s entire opus. If, however, we manage to overcome the barriers of specialisation, it is possible to perceive a common denominator that holds the various phases of Smith’s activity together. This denominator is methodological in nature. From his History of astronomy, Smith set himself the problem of the unintended consequences of intentional human actions. He understood that looking at everything that happens as a direct outcome of human will or divine will prevents us from seeing that there is a ‘third person’ that we must take into account: social interaction – that is to say, the process of co-adaptation of individual plans from which, without any design on our part, our rules and institutions are born. Attention to unintended consequences is present in every one of Smith’s works, and it touches on topics ranging from the origin of moral rules to the formation of the self, and from social cooperation to the delimitation of the sphere of intervention of public power.
