While classic theories suggest that growing inequality will generate mass support for redistribution, recent research suggests the opposite: increases in inequality in the United States are ...associated with decreases in support for redistribution among both low and high income citizens. We reconsider this conclusion. First, we examine the methods of this research, and find that the claims made are not robust to important corrections in model specification. We then utilize a distinct methodological approach, leveraging spatial variation in local inequality, and examine average differences in preferences across geographic context. Here we find a small, but positive relationship of inequality to support for redistribution. In both our reexamination of previous work and our extensions, we find little support for the claim that inequality reduces the demand for redistribution.
Analytical approaches from emergent paradigms in economic geography - namely, evolutionary economic geography (EEG) and relational economic geography (REG) - can help to advance and integrate extant ...research in tourism geography on destinations' dynamics and organisation. Taking into account concepts such as human agency, contextuality and path dependence, the paper conceptualises local tourism destinations' evolution as a complex, path- and place-dependent process that is determined by the action and interaction of stakeholders and their ability to adapt or create new paths, as well as to survive in response to local and global changes. Hence, it discusses the bidirectional effects between stakeholder practices and local tourism destinations' evolutionary performance. Furthermore, it attempts to increase the understanding of how and why destinations change over time, which is valuable for policy formation and to improve local tourism destinations' competitiveness and sustainability. All in all, the paper presents theoretical insights from EEG and REG to facilitate understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the evolution of destinations and examines the advantages of building an integrated evolutionary and relational approach. This also means an opportunity to integrate the geographical analysis of tourism destinations into mainstream thinking on economic geography.
Relational Contracting and Network Management Bertelli, Anthony M.; Smith, Craig R.
Journal of public administration research and theory,
01/2010, Letnik:
20, Številka:
suppl-1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Our argument connects the management of relational contracts with the management of policy networks. Thinking about bilateral, horizontal extensions of governmental authority in a state of agents can ...be enhanced, we claim, because of the rich offerings of relational contracting theory. We review key results from economic theories of relational contracting, provide public sector examples, and present a set of testable propositions that suggest a rationale for the creation and expansion of policy networks through relational contracting and its management. Although adding theoretical leverage to research on public sector contracting, our approach provides one means of explaining the emergence of policy networks and implications for managing within them.One of the greatest barriers to improving the administration of public programs in an era of extensive contracted operations is the failure to understand the nature of the relationships that emerge in that process. Cooper (2003)
▪ Abstract Prospect theory is the most influential behavioral theory of choice in the social sciences. Its creators won a Nobel Prize in economics, and it is largely responsible for the booming ...field of behavioral economics. Although international relations theorists who study security have used prospect theory extensively, Americanists, comparativists, and political economists have shown little interest in it. The dominant explanation for political scientists' tepid response focuses on the theoretical problems with extending a theory devised in the lab to explain political decisions in the field. This essay focuses on these problems and reviews suggested solutions. It suggests that prospect theory's failure to ignite the imagination of more political scientists probably results from their aversion to behavioral assumptions and not from problems unique to prospect theory.
Many parliamentary systems are marked by regular periods of higher and lower legislative activity. This legislation cycle is characterized by an increase in the legislative output shortly ahead of ...elections and a decrease in legislative initiatives in the second half of the legislative term. This article shows that legislative cycles at the European level are different. First, it shows that the initiation of legislation peaks at the end of parliamentary terms rather than at the beginning. Second, the article shows that the adoption of legislation is only partially connected to the electoral cycle. Instead, the reallocation of agenda powers within the European Parliament twice during a legislature better explains the timing of the adoption of bills than the end of Parliament's term. This finding is especially relevant for legislation adopted under the co-decision procedure. The 'procedural cartel theory' of Cox and McCubbins (2005) combined with the 'economic theory of legislation' provide the theoretical basis that may explain this finding.
The recent considerable body of research designed to explain variations in nonprofit development among countries tends to gloss over regional disparities that may pose challenges to, or distort, ...national conclusions. This article therefore takes such analysis down to the regional level in the “hard case” of post–Soviet Russia. What it finds is that, despite its reputation as a uniformly hostile environment for nonprofit organizations, Russia exhibits considerable regional variations in the scale and characteristics of its nonprofit sector. To determine what lies behind these variations, the article then tests four of the most prevalent theories, focusing, respectively, on variations in levels of prosperity, cultural sentiments, popular preferences for collective goods, and underlying power relations among key social actors. The results not only shed important light on the factors responsible for regional variations in Russia’s nonprofit development, but also demonstrate the general importance of bringing the subnational level into analyses of nonprofit development.
Whether advocating creativity as a means to place competition or critiquing the social dislocations that stem from creativity-led urban regeneration, research about the creative economy has tended to ...assume that large cities are the cores of creativity. That many workers in 'creative' industries choose to live and work in small urban centres is often overlooked. In this context, this article aims to recover within debates the importance of size, geographical position and class legacies in theories of creativity, economic development and urban regeneration. Using empirical materials from a case study of one Australian city—Wollongong, in New South Wales—it is argued that what might at first appear a rather parochial example illustrates the importance of rethinking the creative economy in place. Crucially, it is shown that, regardless of the numerical population size of a city, creativity is embedded in various complex, competing and intersecting place narratives fashioned by discourses of size, proximity and inherited class legacies. Only when the creative economy is conceptualised qualitatively in place is it possible to reveal how urban regeneration can operate in uncertain and sometimes surprising ways, simultaneously to estrange and involve civic leaders and residents.
How has neoliberalism achieved its sway? We address this question by tracing an alternative history of the economic theorization of ‘entrepreneurship’ that reveals the extent to which sociological ...transformation is attendant upon the construction, dissemination and change of the concepts of economy. Surveying the theoretical works of luminaries such as Kirzner, Mises and Simmel and reading them alongside ethnographies of the practices that instantiate a neo-liberal world we see the ways in which entrepreneurship is fashioned, realized and ramified and, in so doing, reveal new fault lines for exploitation by those who would rather seek to escape its pernicious embrace. For it is the notion of entrepreneurship that enables both the functioning of an apparently objective market to best deploy societal resources and the continuing capture of the benefits of such by a privileged elite who seemingly bear its mark in the most vivid of terms. By unpacking entrepreneurship we unpack the market, which is a vital first step in any attempt to trammel its seemingly inevitable and unstoppable march through an otherwise undefended social.
The governance of global value chains Gereffi, Gary; Humphrey, John; Sturgeon, Timothy
Review of international political economy : RIPE,
02/2005, Letnik:
12, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article builds a theoretical framework to help explain governance patterns in global value chains. It draws on three streams of literature - transaction costs economics, production networks, and ...technological capability and firm-level learning - to identify three variables that play a large role in determining how global value chains are governed and change. These are: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) the ability to codify transactions, and (3) the capabilities in the supply-base. The theory generates five types of global value chain governance - hierarchy, captive, relational, modular, and market - which range from high to low levels of explicit coordination and power asymmetry. The article highlights the dynamic and overlapping nature of global value chain governance through four brief industry case studies: bicycles, apparel, horticulture and electronics.
Economic theories of uncertainty are unpopular with financial experts. As sociologists, we rightly refuse predictions, but the uncertainties of money are constantly sifted and turned into semi‐denial ...by a financial economics set on somehow beating the future. Picking out ‘bits’ of the future as ‘risk’ and ‘parts’ as ‘information’ is attractive but socially dangerous, I argue, because money's promises are always uncertain. New studies of uncertainty are reversing sociology's neglect of the unavoidable inability to know the forces that will shape the financial future.
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