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The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists been focusing on violence against women, and within this framework, domestic violence. Global feminist activism found common ground in protecting women from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. This framework traveled to Eastern Europe with the advent of regime changes there. In post-communist Europe, it took only a decade and a half for the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments to react to domestic and global pressures and establish new definitions and policies regarding domestic violence. However, the feminist NGOs’ definitions and policy recommendations met with limited success. Feminist-inspired norms, such as specific domestic violence courts and distancing ordinances, diffused to a mediocre level of half-hearted official responses in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This middle-of-the-road approach attempted to de-gender and thus to de-politicize feminists’ fundamental gender-sensitive claims. A norm diffusion to reach the middle ground took place through a complex set of interactions that involved various types of political actors ranging from international governmental organizations, such as the UN and the EU, governments, international and local NGOs. Analyzing the process of these multiple-level and manifold interactions sheds light on the partially deterritorialized nature of globalization. The development of norms and their difffnousion regarding domestic violence policy also inform us about how democratic processes, efforts to achieve gender equality, and the global context interact in CEE.

Purpose – Using sexual harassment in Japan as a case, this research illustrates how local gender culture, particularly sexual harassment consciousness, has changed since initial local legal reform.

Design/methodology/approach – The historical analysis draws on national newspaper reporting of a fairly new concept of sexual harassment into a local society.

Findings – My findings suggest that Japanese actively engaged in, rather than rejected, the new social issue; their active response gave rise to social consciousness toward sekuhara especially and sex discrimination more generally. Broader and more inclusive definitions of sexual harassment appeared in Japan than the original international legal definitions. Local–international interactions effectively shaped such outcomes.

Originality/value – This is the first qualitative and quantitative analysis of the media's portrayals of sexual harassment in Japan.

Measuring the diffusion of protests, or more generally, the diffusion of events, is an ongoing task in social sciences. This paper proposes an inter-event approach to study what types of protests tend to diffuse or decline. We develop a standardized, five-step procedure to measure what we define as “event diffusion momentum” (EDM): (1) employ event-based data containing information on the time, location, and features of each protest; (2) define the temporal and spatial ranges of interest; (3) for each observation, count the number of events before and after it within the defined ranges; (4) predict the numbers of post-event and pre-event protests with appropriate count models; (5) calculate the ratios of predicted values for each predictor and confidence intervals using the delta method. The ratio is the EDM. Applying this method to Dynamics of Collective Action (DoCA) data, we identify several micro- and macro-level factors associated with protest diffusion in the United States, 1960–1995. We conclude with the implications and generalizability of the proposed method.

Drawing on managerial innovation model proposed by Abrahamson (1991), this chapter tries to gain a better understanding of how the UN SDGs have impacted the practice of sustainability reporting of Spanish public universities. Data were collected from a variety of sources, such as: several email structured interviews with university managers, an examination of the Chancellor letters of sustainability reports of Spanish public universities, a detailed reading of some sustainability reports and a consultation of the website of each Spanish public university. The findings reveal that there has been an increasing number of Spanish public universities that have started to publish stand-alone sustainability reporting since the appearance of the UN SDGs. According to Abrahamson's framework, our findings reveal that governmental-policy forces have shaped the sustainability reporting landscape in the Spanish public university setting, and their behaviour is mostly explained by the forced-selection and fad/fashion perspectives.

The chapter explores the stages of development of an outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) institutional field during periods of major system change in big emerging economies. The state and its agencies appear to be the principal institutional entrepreneurs in developing the OFDI organizational field. Consequently, the development of OFDI institutions depends heavily on the extent to which state policy is consistent in supporting the regulative, normative and cognitive pillars enabling and promoting but also monitoring and controlling OFDI. The chapter concludes by advancing theoretical propositions positing the relationship between continuity, the maturity of the OFDI organizational field and the level of institutional entrepreneurship stemming from governmental and business sources.

Qatar’s higher education system is growing rapidly, as science in the Islamic world witnesses a contemporary renaissance. Steering a course toward becoming a “knowledge society,” Qatar and other countries in the Arabian Gulf region are now home to dozens of universities. The establishment of many international offshore, satellite, or branch campuses further emphasizes the international dynamism of higher education development there. The remarkable expansion of higher education in Qatar builds upon unifying two distinct strategies, both prevalent in capacity-building attempts worldwide. First, Qatar seeks to cultivate human capital domestically through massive infrastructure investment and development of educational structures, including Qatar University. Second, Qatar seeks to match the strongest global universities through direct importation of existing organizational capacity, faculty and staff, and accumulated reputation. Local capacity in higher education and scientific productivity is built simultaneously with the ongoing borrowing of ideas and talent from different regions of the world. The relative youth of the higher education system and the state’s small geographic and demographic size are being compensated by considerable investments in the standard-bearing university – a national university taking root – simultaneously with hosting branches of eminent foreign higher education institutions, mainly on the Education City campus. Exemplifying extreme glocalization and mondialisation, Qatar has become a regional hub, bridging the traditional university strongholds in the West and the rising powerhouses in the East.

Project ventures are an increasingly prevalent organizational form in many industries. The management literature has stressed their flexibility and adaptability advantages. This chapter focuses on the learning implications of the source of flexibility most essential to project ventures: the ability to switch partners during project formation and execution. This partnering flexibility creates opportunities to respond to new knowledge about characteristics of project tasks and project partners. Partnering flexibility, however, also creates learning challenges. The short-term nature of relationships between project partners and the disintegration of the project team after project completion challenges the accumulation and transfer of knowledge to future projects. Beyond the introduction of related learning opportunities and challenges, we identify potential contingency factors in the project context that shape when partner flexibility will have beneficial versus harmful effects. On the organizational level, we propose that project-governing permanent organizations can support project-venture learning. On the industry level, we highlight potential learning benefits of standardized partner roles and coordination practices. Thus, our chapter introduces a multilevel contingency framework for the evaluation of both learning opportunities and challenges of partnering flexibility in project-venture settings. We formulate testable propositions focused on partner-project fit and project performance.

Organizational fields are shaped by both the relations that organizations forge and the language they express. The structure and discourse of organizational fields have been studied before, but seldom in combination. We offer a methodological approach that integrates relations and expressions into a comprehensive visualization.

By mapping networks and discourse as co-constitutive, the method illuminates the mechanisms active in organizational fields. We utilize social impact evaluation as an issue field shaped by the presence of an interstitial community, and compare this structure with simulated alternative field configurations.

The simulations reveal that variation in organizations’ openness to adopting concepts from adjacent meaning systems alters field configurations: differentiation manifests under conditions of low overall openness, whereas moderate receptivity produces hybridizations of discourses and sometimes the emergence of an interstitial community that bridges domains. If certain organizations are open while others remain focused on their original discourse, then we observe integration in the discursive domain of the invariant organizations.

The observations from the simulations are represented by visualizing organizational fields as topographies of meaning, onto which interorganizational relations are layered. This representation localizes organizations and their interactions in a cultural space while emphasizing how meanings of relationships and organizational expressions vary with different field configurations. By adding meaning to network data, the resulting maps open new perspectives for institutional research on the adaptation, translation, and diffusion of concepts.

The empirical literature that attempts to study rights is at an impasse. It can demonstrate that big claims about how some rights structure politics are overblown, but it has struggled to go beyond this step. This is in large part because studying rights is much more difficult than is commonly appreciated. A study of rights promises implicitly to be a study of how rights politics differs from other kinds of politics. But rights are so ubiquitous and so diverse in form that it is often unclear what the excluded other is. We examine three books on rights that we admire: two by political scientists, Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope and Michael McCann's Rights at Work, and one by an anthropologist, Sally Merry's Human Rights and Gender Violence. These books conceptualize rights in diverse ways, in diverse settings, using diverse methodologies; yet they run up against similar difficulties in trying to think beyond the cases they study. At the conclusion, we make some humble suggestions for how researchers might try to overcome these problems.

Digital transformations represent an increasingly salient empirical phenomena for institutionalists studying the processes by which institutions evolve, erode, or otherwise change. Yet, there have been few meaningful attempts to engage with insights from the information systems (IS) literature, despite digital innovation and diffusion falling squarely within its domain. This essay makes an initial attempt at integration by offering a two-by-two framework which crosses salient theoretical categories within the IS and institutional literatures. From the former, we draw on concepts of system acceptance and resistance, and from the latter, we draw on concepts of institutional maintenance and change. Each quadrant in our framework represents user responses happening because of, in reaction to, or toward various institutional dynamics. We illustrate each quadrant with data collected as part of a study of digital transformation in the field of public healthcare in Australia. We use our illustrative case to open up research questions which researchers might use to frame their own studies of digital transformations as a form of institutional change. We conclude with a discussion of what other theoretical advances or insights might be yielded from greater collaboration between institutionalists and IS scholars. This essay contributes to the nascent study of digital transformations as a form of institutional change through examining how complementary concepts of the IS and institutional literatures might be used simultaneously to understand the intersection of digital innovation and diffusion and the institutional arrangements governing the fields which they change.