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This thesis examines public parks as New Common Pool Resources through a case study of the Dakota Nature Park in Brookings, South Dakota. I identify the formalization and bureaucratization processes experienced by the governing body of the park. These processes occurred as a capped landfill was repurposed and collaboratively managed to serve the community by providing native, natural space and affordable recreational opportunities. The governing structure is assessed using Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) Eight Principles of Common Pool Resource Management, Weber’s (1964) ideas of status and authority and Berger and Luckman's (1966) phenomenological theory. I use three major research strategies: (1) interviews with a variety of stakeholders, (2) observation at the physical park space, and (3) a review of documents regarding the park space. This thesis expands on the existing literature regarding classification and management of the Commons while introducing a phenomenological approach to a traditionally realist rational choice theory. This thesis also increases understanding of the development of park governance over time, emphasizing the significance of stakeholders’ construction in and by their environments.

Neo-institutional theory's concern with understanding the forces that promote structural isomorphism has led to a neglect of the heterogeneity of structures among organizations operating within the same institutional framework. To better understand such variation, we extend institutional theory by focusing on the link between institutional expectations and the interests and strategic choices of influential actors in an organization. Using a nationally representative sample of bureaucratic small and medium size British enterprises (SMEs), we find evidence that while SMEs' formal structures reflect the influence of the institutional environment, this influence is significantly moderated by the interests and concentration of owners' power. In particular, we argue that ownership structure affects owners' interpretations of the institutional environment conducive to either opportunities or constraints. Our results show that public firms with concentrated ownerships (OCOs) respond most strongly to institutional pressure to bureaucratize the HR function because complying with such pressure is in the owners' interests; therefore, they use their power to conform to the institutional expectations. In contrast, in private OCOs, owners use their power to resist institutional pressure; hence the HR function is less bureaucratized in such firms. We find that firms with dispersed ownership structure (ODOs) conform also to the institutional pressure but only up to a standard level. We discuss the implications of the findings for institutional theory, corporate governance, and SME research.

Over the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, Latin America has experienced massive institutional change. Democracy has become the dominant political regime. Change, however, has been restricted at the level of access to power. Patrimonial and hegemonic forms of exercise of power persist. Patrimonialism and hegemonic rule are birthmarks of most Latin American countries, but they have adapted to the new democratic context and gained strength from recent economic processes. This dissertation traces, from different angles, the sources of patrimonial persistence and hegemonic consolidation. State structures and coalitional dynamics, not culture or formal rules, have played a crucial role.The distinction between access to power and exercise of power is central to the analysis. It is used to reconceptualize the discussion of regimes and states in Latin America, with the goal of overcoming important analytic problems in the field. To explain the transformations of regimes and states, this study advances a model of "institutional refraction," which in turn is a synthesis of two major strands of macro-comparative analysis, neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism. These concepts and distinctions are explored in two case studies. An analysis of Colombia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries examines the interaction between regime and state in a context where a fundamental change in the electoral regime serves to stabilize the state's control of violence within the national territory. The second case study focuses on South American politics since the year 2000. Here the refraction model, along with the distinction between access and exercise, shed new light on how an unprecedented export boom has facilitated a move to the left throughout the region, and has also reinforced hegemonic forms of rule in some--but not all--countries.

The transformation from kinship to rational-legal bureaucracy as the organizational basis of economic enterprise is a major historical change that happens across social groups and across time. How does rational authority acquire meaning at the organizational level? How do the actors engaged in the process make sense of the transformation? The present study is a cultural case analysis of how a small, traditional firm managed to transform itself into a four billion dollar global bureaucracy from 1997 to 2007: an extreme case of fast forward transition under the impact of globalization. Following Weber, the organization’s growth is construed as a process of bureaucratizing, revolving around a shift from traditional to rational legal constructs as the basis of legitimate authority. While technological forces are acknowledged, the focus is on bureaucratizing as a social construction, built with inputs from multiple cultures which are themselves comprised of heterogeneous, fragmented, and often contradictory sets of ideas and practices. The research was conducted using a case study methodology. Data sources included the observations of the researcher, both structured and informal interviews with the leaders and other powerful members, and company documents such as executive committee minutes and decisions. A major conclusion is that organizations managed by traditional cultures have advantages and disadvantages when seeking to modernize. Kinship structure allows for rapid and efficient coordination among in-group members. However, in-group traditions and particularistic ties among those members make it difficult for them to legitimize influence from professional strangers when it is not couched in traditional terms, even when such influence is critical for success. Thus the challenge of going modern for these organizations is the challenge of mutual adaptation among traditional and modern actors. The study shows how innovative use of cultural repertoires reinforces the success of the adaptation process and the generation of organizational capacity for sustainable growth.

This paper examines when jobs are autonomous in the labor process and under what kinds of circumstances workers achieve more control of their work process. The degree of skill, technology, and bureaucratization are addressed in previous literatures and are analyzed in this paper as sources of variation in work autonomy. The data employed for this study is the 2002 Australian National Organizations Survey, and the research target is core jobs, defined as jobs directly related to the primary product or service of the organizations. Ordinal Logistic regression is employed for this study and result shows that information based technology increase job autonomy for jobs that require higher education. Also, formalized jobs are likely to have less job autonomy. More generally, findings suggest that job autonomy is contingent on relative power in the labor process and that formalization is primarily a control device at least relative to the labor process.