Review of Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States

McDonnell, Erin Metz

doi:10.1093/sf/soaa118

Cited by 21 publications

(30 citation statements)

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“…I have shown that we must not think of the state as a unitary actor, but as a heterogenous landscape of conflicting institutions with divergent logics of practice. I follow the work of scholars like McDonnell (2017McDonnell ( , 2020, who highlights the "fractious subunits" and "institutional bricolage" that define states, and Morgan and Orloff (2017), who ask us to consider "the many hands, functions and forms of power" of the state. Drawing together field analysis and neo-institutional theory to understand within-state variation, this article offers a multi-scalar field analysis that examines what happens when global and national fields intersect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a rare look at the heterogeneity within a West African governmental apparatus, McDonnell (2017McDonnell ( , 2020 asks how some public administration offices manage to function as efficient bureaucracies within a broader institutional context rife with corruption and where bureaucratic effectiveness is actively discouraged. She documents the work these offices engage in to cluster resources, draw symbolic boundaries, and form subcultures that support the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their bureaucratic ethos.…”

Section: Heterogeneity and Contestation Within The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

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“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

Ferguson

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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Drawing on data from Senegal, this article develops the concept of pockets of world society to explain how adherence to a liberal vision of gay rights emerges within an otherwise illiberal legal landscape. Pockets of world society appear at the site where the global field of human rights penetrates the national juridical field. Senegal’s Ministry of Justice sits at this juncture. It is a member of both fields but tends toward a logic of international imitation. The ministry accommodates world society’s stance on homosexuality, offering a moderate re-interpretation of its nation’s criminalization, and quietly circumventing local law to enact global scripts of sexual actorhood. In stark contrast, Senegalese courts, located solely within the national juridical field, adhere to a logic of popular representation, rejecting sexual self-determination, insisting on national sovereignty, and carrying out the nation’s criminalization of homosexuality in accordance with both law and collective will. These conflicting logics are driven by external pressures, field membership and position, professional trajectories, and sources of legal legitimacy and social accountability. Finally, I contend that the conflict in Senegal spotlights not only world society’s limits, but its persistent strength and its ability to disrupt the coherence of the law.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Heterogeneity and Contestation Within The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

Ferguson

2021

Am Sociol Rev

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“…8–22). Studies have also highlighted the “uneven” (Amengual & Dargent, 2020), “patchy” (McDonnell, 2020), or “selective” (O'Brien & Li, 1999) implementation of public policies and enforcement of rules. It is, therefore, not surprising that people's trust in state institutions in the Global South was and remains low, even if stark differences exist both between and within countries 4 .…”

Section: A Typology Of Low Trust Responses To Public Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acting out or playing along: A typology of citizens' low trust responses to public organizations

Peeters

Laguna

2021

Governance

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Working under the assumption that societal pockets of low trust in government are likely to proliferate, this introduction to the special issue on “governance in low‐trust settings” integrates insights from the Global South and Global North to analyze how citizens respond to formal rules and service arrangements of public organizations they perceive as untrustworthy. We develop a typology of low trust responses—submission, avoidance, gaming, and resistance—as a counterpart to the well‐established exit‐voice‐loyalty‐neglect framework. We argue that these responses follow from institutional incentives and most likely emerge where people feel the system is not fair or feel like their back is against the wall, and they have the resources to game or resist the system. This article seeks to advance theorizing on governance in low‐trust contexts and enable a better understanding of citizen responses that are inconsistent with the governance mechanisms and service provision in high trust contexts.

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“…It may well be left with passive substitute or wholesale reject responses only. However, a country‐based assessment overlooks the fact that “pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness” (McDonnell 2020) may exist in an otherwise weak or corrupt bureaucracy. Hence, it is important to assess the task‐specific capacity of government agencies in relation to TBG.…”

Section: Explaining Southern Government Responses To Tbgmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

Marques

Eberlein

2020

Regulation & Governance

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Recent scholarship on transnational business governance has begun to examine public-private interactions and the active role of governments. We make two key contributions that integrate and expand this literature. First, in juxtaposition to functionalist accounts, we foreground the fundamentally political and often contentious character of these interactions. As private transnational governance schemes and standards "hit the ground," private-public interactions, we argue, are embedded in national political arenas and tied to domestic distributional struggles among competing regulatory coalitions. Building upon multiple empirical streams of research, we develop a political-strategic framework that maps the diversity of Southern government responses (substitute, adopt, repurpose, replace, or reject) to transnational private governance. Our framework shows that government responses are a function of both strategic fit with domestic industrial capabilities and structures, and strength of developmental state capacity. Second, our proposed framework adopts the vantage point of Global South governments and industries, particularly how development challenges and strategic options within global value chains affect their understanding of, and responses to, transnational schemes and standards. This is an important corrective to a Northern bias in the private governance literature.

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Review of Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

Acting out or playing along: A typology of citizens' low trust responses to public organizations

Grounding transnational business governance: A political‐strategic perspective on government responses in the Global South

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