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Women have reason to be cautious in their dealings with the UN. In the course of the Decade for Women, which began in 1975, governments have been turning the clock back not forward and the UN can only be as effective as its individual member states want it to be. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the UN is also an agent of discrimination against women.

This paper aims to extend some of the theoretical propositions of Michael Power’s (1997) audit society thesis by exploring the capacity of organisations to push back against external accountability pressures. The paper positions the literature on non-governmental organisation (NGO) accounting and accountability as a “case study” against which the notion of the audit society is put to the test.

A qualitative meta-synthesis of the accounting literature is used to analyse how NGOs have responded to audit society pressures – most notably funder pressures to adopt formalised accountability mechanisms. The different responses of NGOs to funder accountability demands are analysed using Christine Oliver’s (1991) typology of strategic responses to institutional processes.

This review of the accounting literature unveils that NGOs can adopt a range of strategic responses to funder accountability pressures that vary from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. The findings confirm that NGOs often perceive acquiescence to funder accountability demands as necessary to ensure organisational survival. Yet, the author also found that NGO resistance to funder accountability pressures is more common than previously assumed. Five dominant forms of “accountability resistances” emerged from the analysis: evading accountability, disguising accountability, shielding accountability, negotiating accountability and shaping accountability.

By conducting a qualitative meta-synthesis of the accounting literature, the author was able to integrate the findings of prior research on NGO resistance to funder accountability demands, guide future research and extend Michael Power’s (1997) work by developing a more nuanced understanding of how organisations respond to external accountability pressures.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields.

This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized.

The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox.

By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework.

The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

Explores the detail of methodologies employed in the management classroom and in change processes with organisational groups. Through this exploration, some of the dualisms which typify modernist theoretical stances were highlighted, examined and transcended. The claim made for the practices proposed here is that they can enhance management learning through informing reflexive decision making, creative use of authority and aesthetic definitions of account‐ability, thereby complementing and enriching a modernist position which, we suggest, is inadequate in isolation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Danish higher education institutions (HEIs) navigate the demands and expectations of accreditation procedures, and how the limited freedom posed by accreditation schemes is used by HEIs by way of translation.

Through document studies of policy documents and the institutional self-assessment reports, the paper follows the concept of quality from the international level to the Danish national level, and onwards into the individual HEIs, where the authors examine how notions of quality are constructed through the translation of national regulation, guidelines and procedures of accreditation into the self-narratives of the self-assessment reports.

The authors find that the national guidelines for accreditation represents a complex translation of supranational guidelines by minimizing certain aspects and enhancing others. This national translation is then analyzed as the frame for the institutional translations where the analysis reveals how HEIs exercise a great deal of agency, within a quite narrow frame constituted by regulations and guidelines.

By using the Olivers (1991) typology of organizational responses, the authors discuss how the HEIs not only imitate and abide to institutionalized norms and concepts of quality but also reformulate, edit, omit and enhance certain elements of quality. The authors demonstrate that when accreditation meets the HEIs, it is clearly the national agendas that are most pervasive and offer the most relevant vocabulary for the HEIs.

This study focuses on home country institutions as sources of variation in the level of foreign investment into India. Our findings support the idea that institutional voids found in India are less of a deterrent to investments from home countries with high levels of institutional development than from home countries with similar institutional voids. Overall, foreign investments in India are found to be significantly related to the strength of institutions within home countries. The levels of both approved and realized foreign direct investment (FDI) are strongly influenced by economic factors and home country regulative institutions, and weakly influenced by home country cognitive institutions. When considered separately, the cognitive institutions and regulative institutions within a given home country each significantly influence the level of approved/realized FDI into India. However, when considered jointly, only the strength of regulative institutions is predictive of FDI inflows.

This paper reports preliminary findings about how households organize street vending businesses in response to varying sources and degrees of uncertainty. The thesis is that households organize themselves in different ways in response to different types of uncertainty associated with 1) earning different types of income and 2) differences as well as changes in intra‐household relationships. The important findings are twofold: first, that household members earn income from both “formal” and “informal” sources BOTH sequentially and simultaneously. The second finding is that people coordinate the efforts of household members with respect to (un)certainty to keep income flowing from the income‐earning activities the members are practicing. I review some empirical work on the informal economy and follow this discussion with data from Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.

Conventional theories of market entry assume choice availability. This investment assumption is subject to challenges in the power generation market of an emerging economy where the host government controls most key resources and market entry choices. With such constraints, entrants become heavily dependent on their host country partners. This study investigates how the resource dependency frameworks explain better in respect of some US power generation firms that manage to operate electricity facilities in China whereas some have to abort. Using cross‐case analysis, patterns emerged illustrate how two groups of entrants manage key resources differently.

There has been a steady increase in the amount of research and theorising in the area of interorganisational research, especially with regard to buyer‐seller arrangements in marketing channels (Andersen and Narus 1990, Bergen et.al., 1992, Boyle et.al., 1992). Alternative interorganisational governance models, such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, and sole‐sourcing are the reality of modern business management (Borys and Jemison 1989, Buckley and Casson 1988), and so interfirm governance has become a strategic management issue. The much‐cited work of Porter (1985, 1991) has focused on the optimal linkage of interfirm activities, and regards the planning and governance of interfirm relations as an important competitive strategic issue, a point reiterated by Heide (1994). The issue of channel relationships has been one of concern for both practitioners and academics, and theories such as those of transaction cost analysis (TCA), agency theory, and relational norms have on the one hand shed much light on the problems, and on the other provided a fruitful backdrop to much empirical research. Less attention has been given to the effects of time on these notions, both in the literature and in empirical research. In this article we provide an overview of the theories, and attempt an integration. The purpose of this article is to focus on transaction cost economics (TCE) and relational exchange theory to provide an overview of the areas of interorganisational research where relationships play a role. A number of areas where the theories diverge and converge are outlined. More importantly, we endeavour to bring the effects of time into consideration, and to develop propositions for further research.