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In this chapter, the interest is directed towards how transnational policy messages (supra-level) can be tracked down through analyses of curriculum policy discourses at the national (macro-level) and municipal level (meso-level) in the Swedish school system. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, and organizational and institutional theory, we analyse central policy messages in the introduction of the national Swedish standards-based curriculum reform for compulsory school from 2011, focusing on discourses of communication between local authorities (meso-level) and schools (micro-level) within their area of responsibility for curriculum making. Two main features emerge. The local curriculum reform agenda is significantly shaped by the argument that explicit standards together with systematic governance through evaluation and accountability will increase students' performance. The second feature underlines strong accountability as a prerequisite for equity and equivalence and the importance of the local school authority for the organization of schooling, structural support and interventions for curriculum making in schools. Equity and equivalence are a challenge for the local authorities. They have problems to support curriculum making which tends to create considerable variations in how the curriculum reform is enacted in the different schools of the municipality.

Purpose – The chapter explores transnational influences, global and local networks and organizations (governmental and nongovernmental), in the development of domestic violence policy in China and England.

Approach – The frameworks of traveling theory (Said, 1984; Min, 2005) and global social policy and international relations approaches to policy transfer such as policy entrepreneurs (Stone, 2001) are used to discuss the different domestic violence policy trajectories in the two countries.

Social implications – It is shown that in China, where activism and policy development concerning domestic violence is relatively recent, global social policy and transnational alliances created via international and global meetings have enabled activists to draw on ideas and policy frameworks from outside the nation-state to develop a specifically Chinese policy agenda. In England, where there is a longer history of debate and policy development regarding domestic violence, global social policy and transnational links have more recently become important to activists and academics wanting to shift policy developments further and to place them within a framework of gendered inequality and human rights.

Findings – The chapter considers action and policy development related to domestic violence, comparing these across the very different contexts of England and China by using the ideas of traveling theory and policy networks. It is shown that use by Chinese of pressure from “within” and “at the margins” of the state has proven effective in challenging and developing domestic violence policy, while in England a combination of pressure from “outside” the state and mainstreaming has enabled activists to develop the policy agenda in positive, if fragile, ways.

Originality/values of chapter – In both China and England, there is evidence of policy entrepreneurs traveling policy ideas into the countries, where they are contested and incorporated. The particular sociopolitical contexts of women's movements and networks influence policy development across the different localities. Within the Chinese context, activists have used pressure from “within” and “at the margins” of the state to effectively challenge and develop domestic violence policy. English activists have instead used pressure from “outside” the state to develop and shape domestic violence policy in England.

While going through a revival in sociology and business studies, the concept of communities, as used in those disciplines, appears to confront, in an unresolved tension, the development of differentiated and transnationally interconnected modern societies. We argue that there is a need not only to “rediscover” but in fact also to “renew” the notion of community. Building on insights from classical sociology, we propose a definition of transnational communities as social groups emerging from mutual interaction across national boundaries, oriented around a common project or “imagined” identity. Transnational communities are not static structures but fluid and dynamic processes. They are constructed through symbolic or “imagined” proximity rather than through physical propinquity. More often than not, they are “communities of limited liability” rather than the expression of permanent ascriptive markers. Finally, transnational communities go well beyond the provision of local protection and solidarities as they engage in different kinds of transnational activism. This chapter compares bottom-up and top-down patterns of transnational community development, exploring in both cases the role of those communities in the dynamics of transnational governance. We propose that transnational communities impact cross-border governance in at least six different ways. They contribute to the framing of a governance problem space. They allow the mobilization of collective action while also serving as public arenas. They foster preference transformation. They directly participate in rule-setting while also playing a key role when it comes to monitoring and control. In conclusion, we identify key directions for further research.

Introduces a special issue on globalization and the welfare state. Asserts that economic globalization constrains national economic and social policy far more now than ever before, although the level of international trade has not increased that much compared to levels at the beginning of this century. Talks about the political consequences of economic globalization, particularly welfare state retrenchment in the advanced capitalist world. Outlines the papers included in this issue – comparing welfare system changes in Sweden, the UK and the USA; urban bias in state policy‐making in Mexico; and the developing of the Israeli welfare state. Concludes that economic globalization has a limited effect in shaping social welfare policy in advanced capitalist countries; nevertheless, recommends further research into which aspects of economic globalization shape social welfare policy.

The paper aims to reveal how the Chinese government has tried to regulate transnational cultural flows by applying cultural policies.

The paper compares the dissemination of different foreign television programmes in China since the 1980s. The documents of cultural policy released since 1990s, news reports and the statistics of imported dramas since 2000s will be analyzed.

The research finds that the Chinese government has treated cultural products from different countries in unequal ways. Political-diplomatic relationships and the need for ideological control, influence the making of cultural policy. Restricting the quota of imported dramas, censorship and propaganda are measures taken by the Chinese government to regulate transnational cultural flows.

The paper mainly focuses on platforms such as state-owned television stations and internet. The role of pay-cable channel in disseminating imported dramas should be taken into consideration in the future research.

The paper provides a systematic understanding on the development of Chinese cultural policy.

The paper offers an alternative approach to explore the policy-oriented dissemination of transnational cultural flows other than market-oriented dissemination.

The purpose of this paper is to examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in the context of the hospitality industry and offer some avenues for future research.

The paper reviews several domains of CSR and takes stock of some exemplar research from hospitality management pertaining to each domain. Particular note is taken of research that explores CSR issues outside the Western world. Several unanswered questions are then noted along with suggestions for future research.

Based on prior literature, four CSR domains were identified as instrumental, social/legal/political, ethical and environmental. CSR issues in hospitality research have predominantly focused on the instrumental domain while there is scant research on other domains. CSR adoption in the multinational context was identified as due from stakeholder pressures, competitive environment and cultural environment.

The paper identifies some unanswered questions in transnational operations of hospitality firms and suggests avenues for future research.

The paper recommends that due attention must be given to contextual issues in the conceptualization, focus and practice of CSR by multinational hospitality firms.

The paper offers a review of hospitality research on various CSR domains. It offers some unanswered research questions that may spur future research, discussion and debates among academics, students and executives.

Education and education policy have been set up and run under the control of the nation-state since the origins of modern education systems. Thus, national education systems have been exposed to strong political and normative control from the very beginning. The analytical perspective on issues concerning political regulation and governance of education systems was for a long time state centered and norm oriented. Even if this is still true to a varying extent in many countries, we recently witness a shift in the examination of issues concerning educational governance. This chapter examines educational governance with respect to the topical discourse in Germany and identifies significant actors, governance instruments, and governance practices. It points out that the appearance of new instruments of educational governance coincides with and supports an emerging governance model in the educational field: evidence-based education policy. Drawing on empirical findings from an international comparative project at the University of Tuebingen,11The international comparative project was partly funded by the Hans-Böckler Foundation. The project goals were to reconstruct the concept of lifelong learning with respect to its political and empirical aspects and to examine its implementation into national and international monitoring and reporting systems on education and training. The project was based on the theoretical approaches of path-dependent development and actor-centred institutionalism both emanating from political science. Using this theoretical framework, OECD's and EU's educational policies and activities with respect to monitoring lifelong learning have been analyzed and compared to demonstrate their adoption among differently structured national systems (Germany, Finland, and Greece) and to comment on their influence upon the evaluation, design, and governance of national education systems. The methods applied were document analysis, expert interviews, and meta-analysis of educational monitoring and reporting systems. Germany, the chapter focuses on educational monitoring and reporting as new instruments of educational governance, reveals their impact, and claims that the new governance instruments are based on knowledge and expertise.

With a particular focus on cultural understandings and the concepts behind welfare policies, the purpose of this paper is to analyse commonalities and dissimilarities in the patterns of social policy, and more precisely youth unemployment policies, in Sweden and Germany.

A document analysis of Swedish and German youth unemployment policies was conducted with regard to how the two welfare regimes’ policies define the underlying problem, the instruments through which this problem is tackled, and the aim of youth activation policies.

The findings show congruency concerning the definitions of the problem of youth unemployment, in which the unemployed are regarded as lacking in discipline, as well as in the policies through which the problem is tackled: through conditionality and pastoral power as policy tools. The solution of the problem on the other hand, found in the notion of the ideal worker to be produced, diverges between active entrepreneurs in one country, and blue-collar workers in the other. The authors conclude that the introduction of supranational policy concepts is not a matter of mere implementation, and that concepts like activation are reinterpreted according to differing cultural ideologies and accommodated into the context of particular welfare states.

This paper provides an innovative framework for the understanding of the influence of cultural understandings on policy making, but also on challenges facing activation governance on the one hand and European Union policy initiatives and transnational policy diffusion on the other.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative case study of national innovation system in Canada and Sweden from the perspective of gender equality. The case study focuses on public policy to illuminate the formal aspects of innovation systems as they are conceived by the state in relation to gender, diversity and social inclusion. Formal policy measures are contrasted with interview data to provide a holistic picture of innovation policy as it relates to gender equality in both countries.

This paper relies on data from 44 qualitative interviews with innovation leaders in the public sector, private sector and academia in Canada and Sweden, as well as a sample of innovation and gender experts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris, France, between 2012 and 2014. The theoretical framework draws on feminist institutionalism to explain the gendered interactions of institutions in innovation spaces.

This study finds that Sweden is a global policy leader in the development of gender-conscious innovation policy, while Canada has yet to consider a gender-conscious approach to innovation policy. Gender-conscious innovation policy norms have not traveled across the OECD because of administrative solos and political opportunity structures.

Each of the people contacted to sit for an interview was chosen primarily on their professional title and their ability to speak from a place of knowledge about innovation in their country and or industry, and this creates a success bias within the study focusing on the knowledge of elites in the field.

This study explores how policy might be reimagined to support gender equality and diversity, thus changing the institutional landscape to support a wider range of innovations and distributing the benefits of innovation in a more equitable way.

This paper challenges assumptions about the social and economic power dynamics reflected in current innovation systems in Canada and Sweden.

This is the first study of its kind in comparative public policy to explore differences in gender equality and innovation policy in Canada and Sweden. This research also contributes more widely to the existing body of gender, public policy and innovation literatures in Canada and Sweden, respectively.

This chapter presents the development of Comparative Education in the most representative countries for this discipline in Western Europe, taking into account the diachronic evolution (since the first texts of Jullien de Paris in 1718 or the written work of Sadler in 1900) and the synchronicity of the discipline from which our patterns of committed intellectual activism have been perceived and have consequently allowed the regulation of its current mapping.

Special reference will be given to some of the classic and renewed dilemmas that have prevailed over the decades as cross-cutting themes of interest for specialists in Comparative Education with issues related to denomination, its purposes of ideographic or nomothetic nature, its sometimes problematic entailment with International Education, the significance of the lending and transferring policies in the current scenarios or the present increasing globalization phenomenon in our educational reality, among others.

The chapter also aims at recognizing the possibilities and, at the same time, the limitations currently faced by “Comparative Educations” in Cowen´s words, through working effectively with the most idiosyncratic signs of identity in the discourse and its most immediate future projection in the coming years.

We focus our article on the reasons that support the importance of the discipline: the global evolution of the current supranational scenarios from a social, economic or cultural perspective; the state of education since the contribution of educational policies or the situation of higher education in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) that, among other aspects, mark the good stage through which the analyzed discipline is experiencing.

Finally, the ratification of this statement is complemented by the firm consolidation of Comparative Education in the European context, giving reference not only to the articulation of its own associations or societies created but also to the journals emerged from them, with a notable impact on the rest of the world and their special contribution to the dissemination of the purposes of the discipline related to the generation and diffusion of policies and practices from a comparative view.