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How are we to make sense of the attitudes of Social Democratic parties towards decentralisation? What do they think about what is a legitimate territorial allocation of power? What factors shapes this view? And what makes Social Democratic parties change their minds? This article addresses these questions by way of competing ideological traditions, the external strategic incentives and internal constraints. Empirically, the article presents a comparative case-study analysis of Social Democratic parties in four countries (Belgium, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom). On the basis of this analysis, I argue that the positioning of Social Democratic parties on decentralisation is influenced by strategic incentives created by the structure of political competition, whereas the policy shifts are more often produced by factors that are internal to the party. A decentralist policy shift is always associated with the capacity of regionalist parties to set the agenda by exerting pressures on Social Democratic parties. In addition, Social Democratic parties tend to shift their policy while in opposition to distinguish themselves from their centralist mainstream rival in government. The dominant mechanism found across four countries was one in which regional branches persuade the central party leadership to adopt a pro-decentralist position. This chapter illustrates how Social Democratic parties have an instinct for ‘adaptation and control’ in the face of social-structural changes, and it demonstrates that the prevalence of different ideological traditions will vary according to external strategic incentives and, crucially, by the party's internal ability to follow those incentives.

This chapter focuses on the impact of national economic conditions and voters’ attitudes on the positioning of European national political parties with regard to the European Union (EU). We provide an empirical analysis based on data gathered through the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) covering parties from 14 European countries observed over the 1999–2010 time span. We perform a regression analysis where the dependent variable measures the position of political parties vis-à-vis EU integration and explanatory variables include a number of measures of national economic conditions, features of the national political and institutional framework and voters’ Euroscepticism. Fixed effect, ordered logit and fractional logit estimates provide the following main results. Compared with other parties, non-mainstream political parties and those acting in established economies are more prone to mirror citizens’ Eurosceptic sentiments. National economic conditions such as inflation as well as gross domestic product (GDP) growth affect mainstream party support for the EU. Smaller and ideologically extreme parties are, on average, less supportive of European integration.

This chapter theorizes a proposal for applying the study of Brexit as a pedagogical strategy in an European Studies (ES) bachelor program, as a means to activate theoretical knowledge for different disciplinary and thematic fields of study about the European Union. The proposal uses the problem-based learning (PBL) approach as a pedagogical methodology and the bachelor of ES at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra as a case study to rehearse teaching innovation. It is based on a theoretical part, conciliating PBL as a pedagogical tool in social sciences and humanities with the exceptionalism of Brexit within the European integration theories and the study of European policies to activate and question prior scientific knowledge, and on a survey to bachelor’s students and alumni on the pertinence of PBL and of Brexit as an empirical element for scientific knowledge in ES. As a result, specific proposals to use Brexit in PBL experiences in different disciplinary areas of ES are made, paving the way for a range of teaching and learning opportunities and challenges released by Brexit to make progress in the ES pedagogical framework.

The purpose of this study is to examine when perceived organizational support (POS) may be more likely to play a mediator versus moderator role in stressor and strain relationships by considering POS relative to challenge and hindrance stressors, cognitive/emotional and physical strains.

This cross‐sectional survey research was conducted in two samples (n=720, 829) of employees working for a large retail organization in the USA. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

As hypothesized, results indicate POS mediates relationships between hindrance stressors and cognitive/emotional strains, but does not mediate relationships between challenge stressors and physical strains. POS does not moderate any of the relationships examined.

This paper is one of few studies to examine challenge and hindrance stressors and to examine POS relative to physical strains.

Organizations from the same industry or field often tend to become more similar over time, despite being different in terms of for example strategies, goals, or performance. However, recently scholars pointed out that organizational fields are dynamic entities with permeable boundaries, thus indicating that prior literature may have oversimplified the phenomenon. Indeed, in this paper we draw attention to an organizational field that centers on text, and revolves around shared (or debated) meaning stemming from that text. The guiding research question is, “To what extent do organizations converge or diverge from meaning embedded in interconnected text?” We investigate party manifestos and press releases of organizations from the field of politics, focusing on the topic of immigration. We extract meaning from these texts, using document scaling and similarity analysis. Our results show that while most parties become more similar in their framing of immigration, the anti-immigrant PVV actually radicalizes further and as a result takes an isolated position in the policy space. Thus, Dutch political organizations became similar (converge) as well as different (diverge) over time through interaction, in terms of their shared meaning systems. This paper substantiates findings of isomorphic tendencies of organizations within a shared organizational field. At the same time, we find that Dutch politics constitute an issue field, where parties compete about meanings and framings on controversial issues. Our analysis shows that meaning embedded in texts changes over time; this indicates that change mechanisms in organizational fields may be brought about through changes in meaning systems.

With occupational stress representing just one example, different streams of research have emerged over the past several decades to explain the antecedents to and consequences of possessing a “healthy” workforce. A positive characteristic of these seemingly independent efforts is that a triangulation of results has emerged supporting the importance of attending to the health and well being of the individual worker. A drawback to these efforts, though, is that while utilizing at times the identical constructs, these constructs are configured differently depending on the conceptual premises of the focal framework. In an attempt to bring the different perspectives together, a model of the “healthy work organization” is presented and tested in this chapter. The model recognizes that there are higher-order constructs characterizing many of the component constructs of the previous efforts, and it is at this level that much of the unification of those efforts is achieved. Utilizing structural equation modeling procedures, the healthy work organization model was supported.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretically informed analysis of a struggle for power over the regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) within the European Union.

The paper combines insights from institutional theory (Lawrence and Buchanan, 2017) with Vaara et al.’s (2006) and Vaara and Tienar’s (2008) discursive strategies approach in order to interrogate the dynamics of the institutional “arena” that emerged in 2001, following the European Commission’s publication of a Green Paper (GP) on CSR policy and reporting. Drawing on multiple sources of data (including newspaper coverage, semi-structured interviews and written submissions by companies and NGOs), the authors analyse the institutional political strategies employed by companies and NGOs – two of the key stakeholder groupings who sought to influence the dynamics and outcome of the European initiative.

The results show that the 2001 GP was a “triggering event” (Hoffman, 1999) that led to the formation of the institutional arena that centred on whether CSR policy and reporting should be voluntary or mandatory. The findings highlight how two separate, but related forms of power (systemic and episodic power) were exercised much more effectively by companies compared to NGOs. The analysis of the power initiatives and discursive strategies deployed in the arena provides a theoretically informed understanding of the ways in which companies acted in concert to reach their objective of maintaining CSR and SEAR as a voluntary activity.

The theoretical framework outlined in the paper highlights how the analysis of CSR and SEAR regulation can be enriched by examining the deployment of episodic and systemic power by relevant actors.

The work of academics has intensified, but the focus for most remains on teaching, research and contribution to service. Institutional imperatives and positioning within universities impact significantly on how individual academics fashion themselves to fit with expectations and demands. There is, of course, no simple version of scholarly identity and Barnett (2000) called attention to the ‘super complexity’ of academic work some time ago. ‘Scholarly’ has been deliberately used in the title of this chapter, even though ‘academic’ is also used throughout. The purpose here is to draw attention to – and avoid – the binary that Stuart Hall notes: Academic work is inherently conservative in as much as it seeks, first, to fulfill the relatively narrow and policed goals and interests of a given discipline or profession and, second, to fulfill the increasingly corporatized mission of higher education; intellectual work, in contrast is relentlessly critical, self-critical, and potentially revolutionary for it aims to critique, change, and even destroy institutions, disciplines and professions that rationalize exploitation, inequality and injustice. (reported in Olsen & Worsham, 2003, p. 13)

This study examines how the effects of three predictors, namely left–right political orientation, generalized trust and political trust, on fossil fuel taxation attitudes vary between post-communist and other European countries.

By using European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 data and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, this paper studied the effects of the hypothesized predictors on fossil fuel taxation attitudes across post-communist and other European countries. The countries were analyzed both in group and individually.

The results showed that stronger left-wing orientation, higher generalized trust and higher political trust predict more support for fossil fuel taxation at the country group level in both post-communist and other Europe. However, the effects were generally speaking less consistent and significant in the countries of the post-communist Europe. By and large, the effect of political trust was the most significant and universal.

The findings contribute to the understanding how left–right political orientation and generalized trust have somewhat distinct effects on fossil fuel taxation attitudes in different European country contexts, while the effect of political trust is more universal across the continent.