481 Policy & Politics vol 36 no 4 • 481-95 (2008) • 10.1332/030557308X307702 © The Policy Press, 2008 • ISSN 0305 5736 Key words: institutional isomorphism • EU ombudsman • policy transfer • citizenship Final submission July 2007 • Acceptance February 2008 Eurosceptics and Europhiles in accord: the creation of the European Ombudsman as an institutional isomorphism Weiqing Song and Vincent Della Sala The creation of the European Ombudsman (EO) in the Treaty on the European Union (EU) was largely an initiative of the Spanish and Danish governments. Concerned
democratic structure conducive to ensuring that services are legitimate, accountable and of a high effectiveness and quality. Successive governments in the United Kingdom have adopted strategies that have led to increasing levels of isomorphism, with hierarchical, bureaucratic and private sector governance structures becoming the organisational archetypal norm within the sector, intensifying and strengthening the significant barriers to democratic governance that already exist. An alternative ‘assisted self-reliant complimentarity’ state–non-profit sector
dissolve as new experimental structures are experimented with, sometimes abandoned, and sometimes improved ( Tilly and Goodin, 2006 : 11). We draw on case studies from women’s, environmental, and global justice SCOs and integrate different theoretical frameworks from subfields on varieties of SCO including intersectionality, organisational ecology, and institutional isomorphism to examine different relationships between SCOs. By using these concepts, we take heed of Bebbington’s (2004) warning against ignorance of the social structures within which SCOs exist and which
amounts of cash is not entirely attributable to their exceptional skills, and the associated allocation of rewards may not be entirely justified on these grounds. I will return to these points but in the next section offer one more explanation for why practices that are inefficient in relation to talent make sense in other ways. Imitation and isomorphism So far in this chapter I have suggested that during the 1990s and beyond, the City’s recruitment processes and associated narratives helped manufacture an artificial impression of scarcity in available talent
Returning to the argument of co-option outlined in Chapter Two this chapter examines the barriers to be overcome if time banking is to articulate non-neo-liberal values. This discussion is built around the concepts of resilience and resistance. The former is used to refer to the use of time banking within the neo-liberal paradigm as a means of fostering a particular form of community self-help which seeks to promote and sustain the status quo: locating the social problems and their solution at the community/individual level. This co-option is evidenced by drawing upon the analysis of third sector organisations and the isomorphism that has occurred. The latter, resistance, is used to discuss the potential alternative articulation outlined in Chapter 5 and the potential of time banking, built around the social theory of time analysis, to offer a theory and practice that can generate social change, and the wider welfare reforms needed to support this.
the SIPRI figures indicate ( US State Department, 2021a ). The chapter builds on and further develops theorizing on organizational fields to explain the effects of the competition over authority. Sociological neo-institutionalists have developed and used the concept of organizational fields to study how the interaction of organizations generates field dynamics that shape the form and practices of these organizations (for overviews, see Scott, 2008 : 181–209; Wooten and Hoffman, 2017 ). Isomorphism, for instance, denotes field dynamics that make the forms and
? Exploring the governance effects of the counterterrorism lists, that is, the human rights effects exemplified by the Kadi case, gives way to our theoretical aims and arguments. First, we argue that the concepts of organizational fields and isomorphism – as advocated in sociological neo-institutionalism – explain why the UN and EU have followed each other’s lead, adopting and adapting lists at different points in time. Second, we bring forward the argument that IGOs attempt to govern through discursive closure, a concept put forward from post-structuralist discourse theory
policy ideas across countries is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Conventional approaches to the study of this process hinge on concepts such as ‘policy transfer’, ‘policy diffusion’, ‘lesson-drawing’ and ‘institutional isomorphism’. These approaches are influential in understanding public policy; however, they assume perfect rationality of actors, the stability of governance scales and the immutability of policy ideas in their travel. I propose policy translation as a new approach to counter these shortcomings and study the travel of policy ideas in order to
that the voice of disadvantaged people is heard by government. The core contribution of the article is its use of a qualitative longitudinal research methodology to analyse how people experience, interpret and respond to change. The article supports neo-institutional and resource dependency theories, which argue that institutional incorporation, financial dependency and managerial isomorphism have a negative impact on the ability to express critical voice. Austerity accelerates this tendency, creating fear and layering additional pressures on previous
and methodological framework The conceptual-theoretical axis structuring this work is grounded in the neo-institutionalist paradigm, in the notion of change and institutional isomorphism as processes developed in the organizational fields. Diverse trends within neo-institutionalism show an interest in explaining the so-called “institutional change”. In some way, the ideas making up this notion are associated with organizational development. In fact, it is a trend within the field of organizational studies. Following Campbell’s (2009) conceptualization
