Globalization and institutional competitiveness

Abstract

Only dead institutions do not change and only rarely do institutions change by themselves. To maintain performing institutions takes institutional entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and who possess the capacity and the talent to innovate. A regulation discourse, in contrast to a marketization discourse, would not picture the relationship between globalization and institutional change as a deterministic one. Rather, it would expect that all kinds of actors play a large number of different roles in the course of ongoing institutional change. The result of such complex institutional change, at the level of welfare states, multinational businesses, public administration, and training systems, to mention just a few of the empirical areas covered in this special issue, cannot be fully understood by applying an overly rigid, static, and dualistic approach to modern capitalist economies. The concept of institutional competitiveness, on the contrary, allows for institutional entrepreneurship and institutional hybrids constituting pulsating polities.

The political economy of passing climate change legislation: Evidence from a survey

“…Marcussen and Kaspersen (2007) describe how during such processes of institutional change, stakeholders adopt a variety of new roles. Hence the creation of new climate policies and legislation may represent not only the outcome of a stabilised climate policy field (Knox-Hayes, 2012), but also the creation of an innovated institutional space that may facilitate further legislative development.…”

Institutional competitiveness, social investment, and welfare regimes

“…While institutional competitiveness may signify different things to different researchers and to different analytical traditions, its core meaning concerns, as Marcussen and Kaspersen (2007) state in this issue of Regulation & Governance , how societies with different institutional arrangements manage in a globalized and increasingly competitive world. Douglass North argued, in his 1993 Nobel lecture, that economic development is largely determined by institutions; that is, by the sets of formal and informal constraints that define incentive structures, and thus shape human interaction.…”

Neoinstitutionalism: Still no intellectual hegemony?

“…What was novel about the principle was the entry of the market solution within a field (the regulation of externalities) where once it was thought to have little to contribute. Institutions that emerge to cope with market failures in this way frequently comprise mixes of the market and these other governance forms – an aspect of the institutional entrepreneurship of Marcussen and Kaspersen (2007).…”

“…The preceding articles in this issue all provide important examples of why and, perhaps more importantly, how the relationship between nonmarket institutions and the market can and needs to be conceptualized. The case for so doing can be found in the contribution of Marcussen and Kaspersen (2007) to this special issue of Regulation & Governance . Institutional innovation depends on entrepreneurial actors making new combinations.…”