Suchergebnisse

Within international relations one seldom finds discussion of how legitimacy affects 'state capacity'—a state's capacity to enact and adapt to domestic and international change. This is especially surprising for neo- Weberian approaches that have viewed state capacity as a major concern for over two decades. And although legitimacy was a key ingredient to Max Weber's approach to the state, the concept is eschewed or ignored in the three discernible neo Weberian approaches to state capacity. The first two of these approaches, 'isolated autonomy' and 'embedded autonomy', produce functionalist view of a state which responds to an anarchical international system. The third, 'social embeddedness', conceives of the state–society complex as a contested rather than functional space but does not produce a substantive conception of legitimacy. I argue that a reinvigorated conception of legitimacy provides us with a substantive neo-Weberian 'historicist' approach that provides a deeper understanding of how both norms and material interests shape the state. This approach is applied to a brief case study of financial reform in the United States and Japan to illustrate that bringing legitimacy back in provides a better means of understanding state capacity.

The world economy operates around the production of value and the creation and protection of wealth. Firms and other actors use global value chains to make the most for the least cost, ideally also contributing to economic development. Firms and professionals use global wealth chains to create and protect wealth, strategically planning across multiple legal jurisdictions to control how assets are governed. The outcome of such planning often contributes to global inequality. While we know a great deal about value chains, we know much less about wealth chains. This volume explores how global wealth chains are articulated, issues of regulatory liability, and how social relationships between clients and service providers are important for governance issues. It explores how assets are governed across a range of sectors such as public utilities, food and alcohol, art, and pharmaceuticals, as well as in legal instruments like advance pricing agreements, tax treaties, regulatory standards, intellectual property, family trusts, and legal opinion. The book integrates insights from a range of disciplines including International Political Economy, Economic Geography, Sociology, Accounting, Management Studies, Anthropology, and Law to reveal how global wealth chains are used to govern assets in the world economy.

The book offers a framework to investigate how countries reform and change their institutions to compete in the world economy. It examines how different actors in advanced industrialized countries engage in sensemaking processes to determine how to be competitive. Many cases are explored, covering different institutions linked to competitiveness.

Abstract
Generating momentum for activist campaigns on complicated economic issues is difficult, especially in a transnational context. So, how did activists get action on tax justice and create a movement that has changed global tax policy? Drawing on 20 years of para-ethnographic fieldwork with the Tax Justice Network, we suggest that activists initially engaged in 'identity switching' tactics to access professional or policy arenas from a footing in one identity, to then switch identities to activate policy shifts. A first-generation leveraged multiple professional identities to access forums, build credibility and introduce a tax lexicon to activists and policymakers. These tactics were not, however, replicable, leading a second generation to concentrate on 'identity fixing', including professionalization and a tightening of organizational strategy over access and activation points. Here we theorize identity switching and fixing as underappreciated micro-foundations of transnational activism and demonstrate their importance for global economic justice.

AbstractFinding direction in new policy areas requires a combination of mandate, expertise, and stakeholder engagement. Here we investigate the formation of the EU's sustainable finance agenda through activity in and around its High Level Expert Group and Technical Expert Group. Actors from different professional ecologies struggle to determine the treatment of sustainable finance and establish policy practices. Those who shape issue treatments can be supported by a capacity to influence from either official mandate, scientific esteem, or claims to experience. These are contending conjectures to locate action among the professionals engaged in the process. We adjudicate between mandate, esteem, and experience with an assessment of the network ties and career histories of those involved in sustainable finance. Our findings suggest that those with many ties and mixed careers win. Professionals identified as offering access to a potential network of investors exhibit greater control over how issues are treated, to the detriment of civil society actors. We demonstrate likely influence over issue treatment through a discussion of environmental and social disclosures and debt financing mechanisms in European sustainable finance expert groups.

Preparing for the possibility of a global pandemic presents a transnational organisational challenge: to assemble and coordinate knowledge over institutionally diverse countries with high fidelity. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid these problems bare. This article examines the construction of the three main cross-national indicators of pandemic preparedness: a database with self-reported data by governments, external evaluations organised by the WHO and a global ranking known as the Global Health Security Index. Each of these presents a different model of collecting evidence and organising knowledge: the collation of self-reports by national authorities; the coordination of evaluation by an epistemic community authorised by an intergovernmental organisation and on the basis of a strict template; and the cobbling together of different sources into a common indicator by a transnational multi-stakeholder initiative. We posit that these models represent different ways of creating knowledge to inform policy choices, and each has different forms of potential bias. In turn, this shapes how policymakers understand what is 'best practice' and appropriate policy in pandemic preparedness.

This review answers recent calls to consider the transformative role of transnational professionals in contemporary globalization. It departs from the dominant perspective, which views professions as constrained by states' geographical boundaries and by organizations such as nationally based professional associations. Transnational professionals have particular characteristics: they combine high-level abstract knowledge, high mobility across national and organizational settings, social and cultural capital, and distributed agency to shape global practices. Over the past two decades, a vibrant research stream has emerged on these professionals and their boundary-crossing work, raising new questions about agency, territoriality, and power. We examine transnational professionals across a range of occupations and sectors, as well as world regions, extracting the implications for sociological theory and methods. We outline a scholarly agenda highlighting the opportunity structures and likely trajectories for those who locate themselves in transnational professional spaces, suggesting how they can be investigated in future research.