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Principal-agency theory was adapted from business and economics to explain the behavior of various government actors. Yet the idea of an agent and a principal is only depicted in a limited fashion when discussed in light of the realm of business and economics. Legal studies has grappled with the idea of agency well before political science or economics. I lay out the basic principles of both agency law and Congressional principal-agent theory. I then establish the groundwork for drawing important connections between agency law and principal-agency theory. I also analyze and attempt to ameliorate differences between these two theoretical approaches.

Several explanations for the Royal African Company’s failure around the turn of the eighteenth century have been suggested. The paper argues that these reasons can be integrated into a more comprehensive account of the company’s failure through the introduction of a modified version of principal-agent theory. Instead of focusing on abstract, dyadic relationships, the paper proposes a model that accounts for the meaningful character of principal agent interactions and for the complex networks and multiple role identities of actors within those networks that comprised principal-agent relations within the company. On the basis of this model the failure of the company can be seen as a result of contradictions between its dual role as both agent and principal. The symbolic importance of inefficient trading practices helps to explain why the company was unable to pursue alternative strategies or otherwise benefit from its monopoly.

This chapter develops a theoretical account of higher education policy creation and the relationship between universities and the state. Through this process, it demonstrates the relevance of theories from political science – including policy analysis and parliamentary/legislative studies – to higher education policy analysis. The chapter outlines the enduring relevance of political factors in shaping higher education around the world and the different ways in which political and policy analysis can be positioned within higher education research. A series of theoretical frameworks are introduced including policy networks, neo-institutionalism and principal-agent theory. These theories account for how policy is made, the behaviour of universities and policy makers, and the dynamics within the relationship between universities and the state. The chapter explains how these approaches can be adapted and applied to higher education policy research, and how frameworks from political science can inform and enrich studies of higher education.

In this chapter, four different theorizations of corruption are presented. The first concerns the principal–agent understanding of corruption. The second explains how a person is socialized into corruption. The third builds on philosophy and posits that corruption is degeneration from an ideal, presenting a multifaceted view of different goods and their respective corruptions. The fourth is inspired by psychoanalysis and explains why corruption is often externalized and seen as a feature of other people, companies, sectors, and countries. The chapter claims that to understand corruption fully without running into simplistic analyses, one always needs to reflexively consider various perspectives, of which these four are important examples.

The opinion that the spiritual controls the physical gave rise to this chapter. The spiritual in this chapter was regarded as the philosophical and organisational theories controlling the practical aspect of construction supply chain management (CSCM). It was discovered that there is a significant omission in adopting theories to explain supply chain management's (SCM) adaptation and modelling in the construction industry. Therefore, this chapter reviews theories such as resource-based view theory (RBV), principal agency theory (PAT), resource dependency theory (RDT), transaction cost economics theory (TCE) and game theory. Each of the theories was analysed to uncover how they support the practice and variables for modelling the construction supply chain (CSC). The existing models of the CSC were also examined in this chapter. It was found that most models were developed drawing on the frameworks of the global supply chain forum (GSCF) and supply chain operations reference model (SCOR). Owing to the shortcoming of GSCF, this book adopted the framework and principles of SCOR for modelling the management of CSC in the era of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). Also, most of the existing CSC models, such as the seamless CSCM model, maturity model and others, were developed using the SCOR framework.

The purpose of the study is to examine whether superiors (i.e. principals), who evaluate the performance of their subordinates (i.e. agents), take information asymmetry into account by assuming that subordinates shirk when the accounting system does not provide information on subordinates’ effort levels. A decision making experiment was conducted to examine the effect of information asymmetry on effort attribution and the effect of effort attribution on performance evaluation. The results show that the presence of an agency problem significantly affected managers’ beliefs regarding the level of effort they attributed to the subordinate, which affected their evaluation of the subordinate.

Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

Most analyses of the relationship between the internal distribution of formal organizational power, generally manifested in ownership and governance rights, and innovation efforts apply a principal-agent framework. The key implication of this framework is that firms with distributed formal power are more likely to engage in labor-intensive innovation because external capital providers are unwilling to entrust their investments to a worker controlled firm. In this paper, we critique the principal-agent framework and propose an alternative institutionalist approach, where the type of innovation pursued by firms with distributed formal power is contingent on the norms advanced by the innovation and the alignment of external stakeholders with those norms. After presenting this alternative framework, we illustrate its application with positive and negative cases of capital and labor-intensive innovation at the MONDRAGON cooperatives, a network of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. We conclude with a set of propositions to guide future research.

The literature on post-completion reviews (PCRs) either does not deal with the tying of PCRs to extrinsic rewards or provides scant theoretical reasoning or empirical analysis to back up its recommendations.

Based on research from psychology and empirical studies, the present chapter proposes that several effects of a PCR, which must be deemed rather dysfunctional, will increase when extrinsic rewards are linked to such a review. At the same time some possibly functional effects, however, are likely to remain constant. The propositions, therefore, call the usefulness of tying PCRs to rewards into question and call for further investigation.