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This paper develops a new framework with which to analyze and understand institutional change. At the heart of the model is a clear distinction between organizations and institutions and a focus on the relationship between organizational and institutional change. In the second half of the paper, the framework is used to open a window on the process by which the institutions of economic governance have begun to change in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political economists typically depict informal institutions as idiosyncratic norms, ideas, and practices that affect the functioning of formal institutions ex ante. This paper proposes, however, that in many cases informal institutions originate from pre-existing formal institutions. Specifically, formal institutions present everyday actors with a myriad of restrictions and opportunities, which may yield novel operating arrangements that are not officially sanctioned. I argue that these informal institutions represent adaptive strategies in formal institutional environments that fail to reflect the implicit demands of both political and economic actors. This is often the case in non-democratic regimes where formal institutions are imposed top-down rather than subjected to popular suffrage. Over time, these adaptive informal institutions may amass sufficient causal power to change formal institutions. The paper presents four examples of this dynamic in China’s reform-era economy. Taken together, the cases show how institutional innovations originate from existing legal restrictions on various forms of economic activity, require official collaboration for their functioning, and ultimately, end up shaping formal institutions themselves. In this sense, formal institutions appear to provide the seeds of their own reform, if not destruction. But ultimately, the causal mechanism of institutional creation and change has a relational, interactive ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over 60 million Chinese citizens are disabled, suffering from visual impairments, hearing or speech impediments, physical disabilities, mental retardation, or mental illnesses. As China decentralizes and relegates greater responsibility for social services to the localities, the disabled find their interests increasingly threatened by financially stretched local governments. This paper offers a preliminary examination of the creation and primary work of the key organization mandated to represent and mobilize the disabled, the China Disabled Person?s Federation (CDPF) and is part of a larger project that will compare CDPF policy implementation in Guangdong Province and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The creation of the semi-governmental, semi-autonomous CDPF in 1988 represents a loosening of government control over social policy. By examining the nature of CDPF relations with the government, the interactions between central and provincial CDPF organizations, and the CDPF?s relations with the people it represents, much can be discovered about the nature of China?s burgeoning civil society, the increasing outlets for popular voice, and the shift from a socialist to a market-based social welfare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regime-based global governance is rapidly restructuring the logic of inter-state conflict and cooperation by accelerating the interconnections among the different territorial units through the mechanism of global markets, multilateral institutions, and non-governmental organizations. Nevertheless, different countries have responded varyingly to the impact and influence of regime-based global governance. Some states have strongly resisted, whereas others have eagerly sought to cooperate, and still others have attempted to limit or selectively engage with the global governance mechanisms. In this paper, I pose the question--why do states exhibit varying behavior towards the global human rights regime? I argue that the variations in state behavior towards the human rights regime stem from the differences in the domestic political structure and variations in the domestic social norms. The basic goal is to show how the mutually contingent relationship between regime-based global governance and domestic political structure-broadly understood as democracy and non-democracy-influences a country’s decision to cooperate or resist the influence of global governance institutions. Specifically, I contend that established democracies are more likely to resist cooperation with the global human rights regime not only because of cost-benefit calculations, but also because they believe that its domestic social norms, values, and laws trump global rules and norms. On the other hand, non-democratic states are likely to selectively engage with the human rights regime because it is worried that untrammeled sociopolitical openness might eventually lead to irrepressible domestic political demands. This proposition will be examined by conducting two types of tests: in-depth comparative case analysis. The comparative case studies will examine the political processes of resistance and cooperation of one democratic state (United States) and one non-democratic country (China) towards the global human rights regime. The focus will be at the level where the domestic (bottom-up) and top-down (global) demands collide and how the democratic and non-democratic countries mediate these conflicting social forces. Overall, this research project attempts to shift the theoretical logic from a narrow structural and unitary actor neorealist and neoliberalist interpretation of international relations and attempts to develop a rigorous theoretical framework that incorporates the central insights of the global governance theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]