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In recent years, reflection on institutions has assumed great prominence in Italian Theory. Roberto Esposito especially, in his three most recent books, has provided a genealogy of institutions, aimed at challenging the prevailing way in which they have been thematized in Western thought. As he sees it, a repressive conception of institutions has dominated in philosophy as well as in sociology and legal studies, which views them as apparatuses that limit the free expansion of individual instincts and life itself. Following an original hermeneutic path, the Italian philosopher seeks to pull through strands of thought that understand the concepts of institution and life to be mutually implicated rather than opposed to each other. This article starts from Roberto Esposito's work on institutions, clarifying its meaning and perspective. It then draws connections between Esposito's instituent thought and a few focal points of contemporary sociological thought on institutions. Specifically, it analyzes how Esposito's post-normative perspective presents similarities with the 'cognitive turn' in the institutional thought of new institutionalism, among other sociological schools. The article concludes by showing that Esposito's work and its connections with sociological thought enable one to reflect critically on a number of practices spawned in the 'platform society' by new institutional actors such as Big Tech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pondok Pesantren is a religious-based educational institution that aims to cultivate a religious generation by teaching Islamic teachings in daily life. This institution often serves as the first choice for families wishing for their children to have a superior religious life. However, the experience of studying at a pesantren does not always ensure that students will lead a religious life, understand, and practice Islamic teachings after leaving the boarding school. One challenge faced by graduates is the societal assumption that they will become pious individuals upon completing their studies. This has prompted further sociological research into the shifts in religious commitment among alumni. This study employs qualitative methods, conducting interviews and observations with six alumni from pesantren who are now attending public universities. Informants were purposefully selected based on specific criteria. Data analysis utilized the religiosity commitment theory proposed. The findings indicate that alumni who studied for three years exhibit different characteristics compared to those who studied for six years. Alumni who attended for three years showed better religious commitment, while those who studied for six years experienced more significant changes in their religious practices and felt more burdened by the label of santri. The changes in religious commitment among these alumni were attributed to motivations for attending that did not stem from their own desires and the influence of their social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the topic of informal institutions that remain an unexplored part of the institutional system due to identification, operationalisation, and measurement problems. The author concludes that there is a dire need to develop an approach to analysing the rules that govern entities' behaviour that are difficult to comprehend, deeply ingrained, and long-lasting. Therefore, based on data from social surveys, the author has constructed ten indices of informal institutions comprising trust, happiness, bonds with relatives, social capital, interest in politics, tolerance, resourcefulness, religiousness, attitudes to work, and attitudes to traditional values. They present a comprehensible picture of countries' informal institutions and enable the making of comparisons. Later, the author uses the indices to investigate the links between formal and informal institutions in selected European countries and explore their role in providing a stable environment conducive to economic well-being. This is, however, only an example in which informal institutions are vital, and the research can support further studies in various fields. The findings indicate which investigated institutions seem central and worth supporting and which co-occur with lower levels of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions are often taken for granted, serving as backgrounded typifications that guide our interactions. Instead of considering this taken-for-grantedness as a natural, self-sustaining feature of institutions, I argue here that it is a fundamental, precarious, and ongoing accomplishment. Drawing on ethnomethodology, I theoretically elaborate the intricate interactional choreography through which taken-for-grantedness is achieved—as institutional typifications are skillfully drawn into, and enacted in, social interactions—and highlight how this choreography can itself generate oddities, or breaks in the typified expectations between interactants. These oddities, if not resolved by interactants' corrective sensemaking, generate substantive breaches in taken-for-grantedness, potentially with significant downstream consequences for institutional maintenance and change. I then expand upon this baseline interactional model by suggesting that local choreographies vary in their characteristics, in ways that affect the incidence of oddities and breaches across settings. I theorize four such characteristics: choreographical fluidity, ordinary accountability, directorial sensegiving, and material scene-setting. I then close by discussing implications for institutional theory and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of institution and its relationship to social philosophy. It discusses the idea of a social philosophy and the need to understand the distinctive features of human social life. It also draws parallels between social philosophy and other branches of practical philosophy, such as ethics and politics, emphasizing the importance of clarifying concepts related to social forms of life before engaging in debates in political philosophy.

When people do not approach a formal court of law to settle their disputes, and cannot enter into out-of-court settlements either, what do they do? I find that people install court-like processes which mimetically follow the court procedures, executing the settlement as if the decision were rendered officially. By examining such practices in the case of divorce-related disputes in India, I advance a theory of legal apparitions, a phenomenon in which cosmetic mimicry of legal processes creates a new form of extra-legal resolution. This is likely to prevail in societies where access to justice is hindered due to socio-institutional factors and customary forms of adjudication are not possible (sometimes because of state law's design). This idea can be used to explain a range of practices observed in South Asian societies, where people's imagination of, and interaction with, legal apparatuses creates new forms of institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's 40 million party and state cadres all matriculate through an elaborate system set of more than 7000 institutions for mid-career cadre training. These mid-career training institutions have long been an integral part of the Chinese party-state but have become even more important during Xi Jinping's tenure. Drawing on unique Chinese published sources and interviews, the article examines the history and current organization of the five separate institutional systems involved in civilian cadre training, the evolving reforms in them, and their role in sustaining CCP rule. These training school systems in China are becoming more rather than less important for these reasons. Thus, the entire training system nationwide needs to be better understood by scholars and analysts of the Chinese political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines conceptual issues of the emergence and effects of collective agency. Collective agency seems to challenge the methodological individualist assumption that only individuals can act, but treating group actors, such as parliamentary committees or court chambers, as mere shortcuts for complex interactions among group members raises important theoretical, empirical, and normative issues. First, the paper discusses some fundamental issues of collective agency. We argue that analyses of collective agency must provide generative mechanisms that demonstrate how it arises from the interaction of group members. Second, the paper introduces major approaches to collective agency from analytical philosophy and sociology. They locate the source of collective agency in the formation of collective intentions through the adjustment of group members' attitudes, in the organization of group decision processes, or in the transfer of resources to the group level, which empowers a collective actor to act in its own right. Against this backdrop, this paper offers an integrative concept of collective agency characterized in terms of the degree of autonomy and the level of resources controlled by a collective actor. Third, this paper introduces the contributions to this special issue, which tackle a broad variety of issues, including the formation and consequences of collective intentions in small and unorganized groups, collective agency issues of institutionalized groups and organizations, collective agency of large and unorganized groups without defined memberships, and normative issues of collective agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that time is an integral yet often overlooked part of life as it touches everything and everyone. Topics include examines in simultaneously micro and macro ways, time structures experiences, interactions, lives, institutions, communities and entire civilizations and considered the time accelerates, decelerates, expands, and contracts as time is individual and subjective.

In this article, we emphasize the political causes of the crisis in order to evaluate not only whether these have been the main factors behind the economic crisis (particularly over the last decade), but also whether these can be considered the main factors for the failure of Greek and European officials to overcome the economic crisis. Over the last ten years, there has been something of a deterioration of the political variables and we are now faced with a question of whether we can begin to talk about a way out of the crisis. As per our argument, despite the acceptance of new institutional rules for the efficient operation of the economy through the memoranda of understanding, Greece's performance has worsened in terms of its political and institutional governance indicators over the last decades. This fact is particularly worrying because it highlights an overall failure to change the political conditions that affect the overall quality of life and prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of economic peace is a "counterpoint" to a warlike view of the economy. Viewing things in terms of economic peace makes it possible to develop a different economic anthropology. The idea of economic peace is used to think about a fundamental revision of the relationships to self and between actors. It sits at the intersection of peace studies, social and cognitive psychology, institutional conventionalist approaches, postmodernist philosophy and sinology. By employing the inchoate concept of economic peace, this article explores the opportunity to extend and deepen the relationship between individual and collective responsibility. The article describes individual and collective practices or avenues which could be useful when reacting to complex situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay starts from a reformulation of the relationship between cultural framings of political actions and the nature of institutions beginning with the studies of Giovanni Tabacco, in particular, the concept of allodiality of power, the incorporation of power into things, clearly identified in the royal dispositions of the 10th century. An attempt is made to examine how the public nature of the things and rights granted to cities, their inhabitants and their bishops, does eventually provide a material, visible basis of res communes assigned to the civitas, unavailable to private individuals precisely because they belonged to all and for which all were responsible even if with different ownership configurations. This explains also the essentially patrimonial nature of the term common when it becomes a subject in 12th century deeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on contestation of the existing social systems and of criticism of the scientific paradigms. Topics include driven by a combination of multiple factors such as the loss of faith in political institutions; and elaborating a theoretical alternative to the opposition between private and public law, between patrimony, contract, and sovereignty.

This paper offers an account of institutional testimonial justice and describes one way that it breaks down, which we call institutional opacity. An institution is opaque when it becomes resistant to epistemic evaluation and understanding by its agents and users. When one cannot understand the inner workings of an institution, it becomes difficult to know how to comport oneself testimonially. We offer an account of an institutional ethos to explain what it means for an institution to be testimonially just; we then describe how an ethos of institutional testimonial justice can break down when the institution becomes opaque. An opaque institution is especially problematic for individuals and groups already rendered epistemically vulnerable during their interactions with that institution, which we call epistemically vulnerabilised individuals. We articulate the features of an encounter between an epistemically vulnerabilised individual and an opaque institution. We end by tracing ameliorative strategies that could help repair a deteriorated institutional ethos of testimonial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are institutional principles of justice subject to a minimal realism constraint to the effect that, to be valid, they must not make demands that are wildly unrealistic in the sense that there is no chance (or a vanishingly small chance) that they will ever be met because we are robustly disposed to fail to set out to do some of the things that meeting the demands would require? Many of us say "yes." David Estlund says "no." However, while Estlund holds that 1) institutional principles of justice are not subject to a minimal realism constraint, he accepts that 2) institutional principles of justice are subject to an attainability constraint to the effect that, to be valid, they must not make demands we are unable to meet; and 3) what he calls "institutional proposals" are subject to a minimal realism constraint. I argue that these three theses do not represent a plausible combination given Estlund's account of the principle/proposal distinction. Given this account, Estlund is either wrong to reject a minimal realism constraint on institutional principles of justice, or wrong to accept an attainability constraint on institutional principles of justice and/or a minimal realism constraint on institutional proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political constitutionalism understood in terms of autonomy of political judgement rather than allocation of powers – Irish case studies as example – Judicial doctrines recognise political discretion concerning rights – However, legalism or legal constitutionalism arises within the sphere of political judgement itself – Legal constitutionalism restricts political autonomy epistemically as well as institutionally [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agenda for widening participation in higher education has led to increasing numbers of students with a broader range of education and family backgrounds. However, transitioning to the university landscape remains a highly complex negotiation process, especially for first-in-family students, who cannot draw on previous experience from higher education in their families. Gaining access to informational capital-a combination of cultural and social capital- plays a crucial role in managing education transitions. We draw on rich empirical data obtained from 26 autobiographical narrative interviews with first-in-family university students in Austria to investigate how transitions to university are affected by informational capital. We also explore how access to informational capital was influenced by (1) institutional practices, such as initiatives to support students, especially first-year students; and (2) cultural fit-the extent to which a student's cultural capital corresponded with the dominant cultural capital in the field of their chosen discipline or higher education establishment. Our findings show that gaining access to informational capital was strongly affected by the institutional practices at universities within the different disciplines, thus highlighting the importance of higher education institutions in supporting their students during transition processes. We conclude with policy implications for how higher education institutions can assist first-in-family students to succeed at university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay illuminates the history of what David Foster Wallace dubbed the "conspicuously young" novelist (CYN), drawing on a series of brief case studies (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Radiguet, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin) that demonstrate how certain CYNs were marketed and represented in advertising and journalistic discourse. In the process, it traces the construction of a number of ostensibly meritocratic-but in practice highly inequitable-institutions that functioned to identify, sponsor, and promote young writers. Finally, this essay examines the pervasive critical rhetoric of "promise," which offers the key to understanding the dynamic of hype and disappointment immanent to each "younger generation" of CY writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With primary and secondary data on 658 firms from 17 countries across three continents, we examine the combined influence of country-level institutions on industry attributes and in turn their effects on the choice of a defensive advantage-based strategy and an entrepreneurial strategy. We find that strong and efficient institutions constrain both dynamism and munificence in industries. In turn, industry dynamism has a negative effect on both entrepreneurial and advantage-based strategies. However, firms having strong relational capital with important stakeholders can better navigate these uncertain environments to employ both strategies with increasing strength. Alternatively, in more munificent environments, firms are less likely to employ advantage-based strategies and more likely to employ entrepreneurial strategies. This study demonstrates the environmental conditions under which firms are more-or-less likely to employ entrepreneurial strategies and defensive advantage-based strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deserts, like any geographic setting, are not sites where geopolitical dramas simply unfold or "touch down"; rather, they actively constitute geopolitical orders. This article shows how taking deserts rather than states as an entry point can provide a unique lens on geopolitics, state making, and empire. Investigating the political lives of deserts requires asking how they are imagined, narrated, and connected across space and time, and with what effect. To do so, I consider one case of desert-to-desert connection: a long but little-known history of exchange between individuals and institutions in Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula. Taking one example from this history, I show how the "desert" as an environmental imaginary figured in the University of Arizona Environmental Research Laboratory's joint greenhouse and desalting plant, which was initiated in Abu Dhabi in the late 1960s. Primarily drawing from archival research in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Arizona, I also show how this project fit into shifting geopolitical relations in the Arabian Peninsula's colonial relations, the rise of the UAE as an independent state, and the role of experts working in the service of broader political agendas of the state and the academy, as well as their own self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benjamin Morgan Palmer (1818–1902) was one of the leading voices in the Southern Presbyterian Church between the 1850s and his death in 1902. Part of Palmer's "principal legacy" was his career-long commitment to interpreting Genesis 9–11 in a way that endorsed racial hierarchy and Black subordination. Nevertheless, it has been far from easy to repudiate Palmer's legacy in the institutions that honor him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognized importance of innovation for long-run economic growth has raised scholars' interest in the mechanisms explaining regional innovative performance. In particular, renewed attention has been paid to the role of institutions as a social filter that can foster innovation. By adopting a holistic theoretical approach, the paper adds to this literature by investigating the relationship between the institutional quality and innovation capacity of Italian provinces. The findings show a positive effect associated with the quality of institutions by means of three important channels: government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and voice and accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on Professor Stephen Gardbaum's article "Comparative Political Process Theory." He expresses his agreement with Gardbaum's project and his intuitions on the matter considering that the problem of democratic erosion is a serious matter and that the old problem of democratic erosion has been damaged by the institutionalism and needs to be addressed by contemporary constitutionalism. He explores the differences of his approach with Gardbaum's approach to democratic theory.

The article presents the important contribution in American style institutions such as the American University in Beirut showing the quality of education around the world. Topics include adopting American or Western approaches without drawing excessive attention to the excessive efforts; maintaining through close relationships with top liberal arts institutions in the U.S.; and defining common features in the curricula including general education distribution requirements.

A clay seal from the collection of the late professor Dan Barag bears an inscription The Boule of Baitolethepha. The village of Baitolethepha (Beit-Nattif/Pella) was the administrative center of a Toparchy in Judea. This seal seems to prove that central toparchy villages, at least in Roman period Judea, had local councils called boulai and that this type of institution was not exclusive to poleis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing prominence of comparative political theory has inspired extensive and fruitful methodological reflection, raising important questions about the procedures that political theorists should apply when they select texts for study, interpret their passages, and assess their arguments. But, notably, comparative political theorists have mainly rejected the comparative methods used in the subfield of comparative politics, because they argue that applying the comparative method would compromise both the interpretive and the critical projects that comparative political theory should pursue. In this article, I describe a comparative approach for the study of political ideas that offers unique insight into how the intellectual and institutional contexts that political thinkers occupy influence their ideas. By systematically describing how political thinking varies across time and over space in relation to the contexts within which political thinkers live and work, the comparative method can serve as the foundation for both deconstructive critiques, which reveal the partial interests that political ideas presented as universally advantageous actually serve, and reconstructive critiques, which identify particular thinkers or traditions of political thought that, because of the contexts in which they developed, offer compelling critical perspectives on existing political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The entrepreneurial process drives economic activities in the formal economy; however, little is known theoretically about how the entrepreneurial process works in the informal economy. To address this theoretical gap, we employ a multilevel perspective integrating entrepreneurship theory (microlevel) with institutional (macrolevel) and collective identity (mesolevel) theories to examine the role institutions and collective identity play in the recognition and exploitation of opportunities in the informal economy. Additionally, we explore factors that influence the transition to the formal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the changes made in the field of radio preservation over the past decade. Topics include focusing on activities pursuing by archiving institutions and preservation groups within the U.S.; radio preservation being used in workshops and panels at recent conferences for international professional organizations; and providing a vital source of information and important diverse communities at the local, regional, and transnational levels.

The article talks about federally funded and religiously exempt that explores title IX exemptions and their discriminatory effect on students. Topics include choices either institutions with discriminatory desires to refuse federal student aid or the exemptions allowing them to discriminate and receiving federal aid to end; and students get equal opportunity to learn in an environment where they are not subjected to pervasive discrimination based on sex supported by federal funds.

The article is devoted to the social and political activity of Anatol Osipovich Bonch-Osmolovsky, who was one of the best representatives of the neopopulist direction in the revolutionary movement of Belarus and Russia in 1905–1917. This political biography of one of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party leaders looks at the revolutionary process and the establishment of democratic institutions in a predominantly peasant country by following Bonch-Osmolovsky’s opinions. The attitudes of the “red landowner” to the farm program, to the Socialist- Revolutionary Party’s terror, to the Belarusian national movement, and to the idea of Belarus’ political independence are analysed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Michel Foucault's theoretical reservoir, this article conceptualizes restorative justice (RJ) as an 'apparatus', that is, a dynamic ensemble of elements whose emergence is related to the development of a distinctive political rationality (ethopolitics). This approach enables a multidimensional comprehension of RJ, since it targets both discursive and non-discursive elements, their power/knowledge relations and subjugating effects. Furthermore, the article explores possibilities for an emancipatory RJ, against the subjective entrapment that the apparatus produces, offering some practical examples. Overall, this work aims to offer a theoretically engaged and critical scrutiny of RJ by using an underexploited analytical device – the apparatus – apt to make visible unexpected dimensions of this 'new' frontier of western penalty. This could enhance our understanding of the emergence and possible trajectories of RJ, by identifying risks and opportunities as well as tools for disentanglement from its most problematic institutional developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have taken a look at the rules of games in order to acquire some knowledge concerning constitutive rules and, probably, institutional phenomena in general. In this paper we tried to elaborate a system account of constitutive rules. We claim that all accounts that put emphasis on the form of rules are vulnerable. It appears that constitutive rules are interconnected and always form a system that can be internally differentiated. Thanks to adopting certain qualitative criterion we were able to distinguish central and peripheral constitutive rules. Moreover, that very account makes it possible to distinguish between different types (rigid and flexible) of practices that are determined by types of systems of rules. Secondly, it appears there are three "layers" of games that should not be confused: deep conventions, constitutive rules that establish the game and determine games' identities, and "rules of efficiency" that are some sort of recommendations as to how to play well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a general review on how the public policy theory has developed, putting special emphasis on three aspects: 1) conceptualization of the study object; 2) development of the theory along the history and evolution of the study field of public policies; and 3) the roles of the public policy scholars. This review aims to contribute to the spreading of the public policy studies, especially in relation to the insights from the main theoretical debates. As a concluding remark, the development of the study field of public policies in Colombia and the reflections on both the theories and the roles by the public policy scholars all rely on a greater institutionalization and strengthening of the relationships between researchers, teachers, scholarly organizations and institutions interested in the study of the public policies to enhance their impact in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between district magnitude and turnout remains hotly debated, and previous studies suggest positive, negative, and nonlinear effects depending on other institutional characteristics. This article contributes to the empirical literature by conducting a quasi-experimental test on the effect of district magnitude in a context of a single nontransferable vote (SNTV) system with weak partisan ties: municipal council elections in Japan. Exploiting a credible source of exogenous variation in district magnitude and using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we reveal that a 5-seat increase in an average-magnitude district reduces turnout by 4 percentage points, which accounts for a 6.9% drop in the size of the electorate. We reason that, in the context of SNTV with weak parties, higher district magnitude leads to information overload, which may lower voters' incentives to turn out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]