The authors show how the cultural values underlying the ideology of Western society have determined the structure and authority of the modern nation-state. This Western culture also suggests the form of various social institutions, legitimizes and limits the development of social movements, and provides for the place of the individual in society.

This text provides a comprehensive and succinct treatment of the history, structure, and behaviour of the various US institutions that enforce antitrust laws. It also draws comparisons with the structure of institutional enforcement outside the US, and it considers the possibility of creating international antitrust institutions.

An analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies is developed in this analysis of economic structures.

In light of on-going global financial crises, the institutional structure of financial regulation is currently a subject of significant academic and practical interest. The financial crisis has called into question the adequacy of financial regulation at the national and supranational levels, and has instigated financial regulatory reforms in major markets overseas. This has included the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in the US, and the programme to split the Financial Services Authority in the UK. This book examines the institutional structure reform of financial regulation from a comparative perspective, exploring both fundamental theories and international experiences. The book explores the three main institutional structures of financial regulation in the world; the sectors-based model, adopted in the US, Mainland China and Hong Kong; the twin-peaks model with Australia and the Netherlands as its pioneers; and the single-regulator model as represented by the former Financial Services Authority in the UK and the Financial Services Agency in Japan. The book contains contributions from renowned experts in the field of financial regulation including Douglas Arner, Jeffrey Carmichael, Robin Hui Huang, Dirk Schoenmaker, and Michael Taylor, and will be of interest to students and researchers of banking and finance law, and comparative economics.

Lance D. Fusarelli examines the relationship between the charter school and voucher issues: To what degree does political support for charter schools - from a coalition of teacher associations, school board groups, superintendents, and voucher advocates - slow or even stop the forces for vouchers? Or, do these coalitions, which successfully pushed charter school legislation through the legislature, actually fuel the fires of privatization? Charter schools legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support precisely because the threat of vouchers is so great. And, contrary to the strategy of voucher opponents, the spread of charter school increases, rather than alleviates, the push for vouchers.

This book takes up one of the key theoretical challenges in the English School’s conceptual framework, namely the nature of the institutions of international society. It theorizes their nature through an analysis of the relationship of primary and secondary levels of institutional formation, so far largely ignored in English School theorizing, and provides case studies to illuminate the theory. Hitherto, the School has largely failed to study secondary institutions such as international organizations and regimes as autonomous objects of analysis, seeing them as mere materializations of primary institutions. Building on legal and constructivist arguments about the constitutive character of institutions, it demonstrates how primary institutions frame secondary organizations and regimes, but also how secondary institutions construct agencies with capacities that impinge upon and can change primary institutions. Based on legal and constructivist ideas, it develops a theoretical model that sees primary and secondary institutions as shared understandings enmeshed in observable historical processes of constitution, reproduction and regulation.

Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis. In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory. Several chapters consolidate the theoretical advances of the past decade, identify and clarify the paradigm's key ambiguities, and push the theoretical agenda in novel ways by developing sophisticated arguments about the linkage between institutional patterns and forms of social structure. The empirical studies that follow—involving such diverse topics as mental health clinics, art museums, large corporations, civil-service systems, and national polities—illustrate the explanatory power of institutional theory in the analysis of organizational change. Required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of organizations, the volume should appeal to scholars concerned with culture, political institutions, and social change.