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The prestigious policy advisor, World Economic Forum (WEF), underlines that “governments, businesses and civil society organisations” must find “new ways of tackling the systemic risks that affect us all”. Paradoxically, policy’s and politicians’ great trust in the basic forces of the business world is accompanied with a disinterest in how they are captured in analytical approaches. The purpose of this paper is to discuss what consequences different approaches to interaction present for policy attempts to use business forces to achieve change.

The discussion of theoretical approaches available for policy aiming to use the basic forces of business exchange for efficiency, innovation and industrial/societal renewal in specific directions is designed as follows: The authors identify two main choices of dimensions in the conceptualisation of business exchange, based on the acknowledgement of thin or thick interactions. The authors discuss how these are related to how interaction patterns appear in empirical studies of exchange. Based on the identification of conceptualisations and empirical findings, the authors discuss the ability for the public sphere to use the basic characteristics of business exchange to cope with societal challenges.

Research experiences on thick interaction and its consequences, that businesses and their input and output are interdependent, systemic and promote certain development paths, are largely ignored in approaches used in policy circles. Instead, policy advisors’ and policy commissioners’ understanding of business interaction patterns is coloured by mainstream economies assumption of thin interaction. The content and function of the market as depicted in this tradition are within EU, the basic foundation for legal regulations and limitations of businesses interaction patterns. Simply put, actors as well as the activities and resources that they are related to are approached as independent.

This paper is focussed on the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary policy advices and commissions. This paper does not investigate deviations from these advices and commission made by policy practitioners on a local level

The message given by theoretical approaches recognising thick interaction is that the thicker it is, the more intervening, broader and more differentiated the policy tools and measures have to be. But that also puts high demands on policy actors on all levels to have both general and specific knowledge about thick interaction patterns. However, given the big challenges the society is facing, increased speed of change and, above all, increased influence over the direction of change are needed.

WEF recognises the systemic features of the contemporary challenges to society with climate change in the foreground, and it stresses the need for finding new ways for public bodies and private businesses to cooperate to solve this. This implies the need to consider what theoretical approaches that should guide policy advice and measures. Hence, there is a need for the use of more sophisticated analytical approaches to the collective level, instead of those relying on that the interaction pattern of the business world is thin, straightforward and easy manageable.

This paper takes a novel approach to policy advice and policy commissions through focussing on what kind of theoretical concepts and approaches that actually are available for policy advisors and policy commissioners interested in using the basic forces of business exchange to increase efficiency and innovation in the public setting in general and furthermore to solve specific problems and to create new, specific development paths. Hence, both approaches adopted and neglected by policy are considered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the politicisation of age discrimination in relation to the enactment of anti-discrimination legislation in Finland and Sweden in the early-2000s. By showing how politicians constructed the meaning of age discrimination, it seeks to highlight the drivers of country variation in terms of the implementation of directives from the European Union (EU).

The paper uses a comparative design based on content analyses of parliamentary documents. Theoretically, it uses discursive institutionalism as a starting point but it also builds on previous research/theories on age discrimination.

The findings show that although age was seen as a ground for discrimination in both countries, there was surprisingly little debate about discrimination as societal problem. There was however considerable differences between the countries suggesting that age discrimination was a much more heated subject in Sweden.

Although the analysis focuses on a small part of the policy-making process it highlights drivers (such as political culture) that may cause variation in the ways age discrimination is politicised, even within similar welfare state regimes. It also suggests that more research is needed to fully understand such drivers.

The paper presents examples that can help analysts and the public to deconstruct institutionalised practices of age discrimination and thereby to understand how age discrimination practices may prevail in society.

By analysing the ways in which age discrimination was constructed as a problem within national policy-making frameworks, the paper presents valuable insights as to the sources of country variation in relation to the implementation of EU directives.

This chapter reviews the recent polarisation of debates in agrofood and rural studies, in particular the opposition between network (social relations, actor-network) and political economy analyses. It explores the contributions of different network approaches and draws on the French convention and regulation traditions, which provide alternative guidelines for confronting micro–macro tensions. Networks have similarly assumed analytical centrality in the new institutional economics and subsequent elaborations of the Williamsonian transaction costs paradigm have involved an approximation to some of the central tenets of social network analysis. Alternative traditions of political economy analysis (Global Value Chains (GVC), Global Production Networks) are now making an important contribution to agrofood studies. A distinctive feature of these analysts is their overture to social networks, actor-network, transaction costs and convention theory in the effort to capture the multiple dimensions of economic power and coordination. The possibilities for a fruitful convergence between these apparently conflicting approaches are best captured in the emergence of the concept of the “netchain”. At the same time, the intractability of values to absorption within economic transactions suggests the need to move forward to a focus on the tensions between netchains and social movements and a different type of network, the global policy network.

The purpose of this paper is to document the influence of policy transfer on integrated care development, its global occurrence and shifts towards integrated care. It highlights the influence of supranational forces, and the roles and relevance of policy transfer and policy translation in the development of integrated care.

This paper presents the findings of an international review of the policy transfer of integrated care, and the relevance of policy translation in integrated care development.

The global occurrence in integrated care, as evinced in this paper, can be seen in the global shift towards integrated care in various countries. However, studies exploring the actual mechanism of policy transfer and policy translation in relation to integrated care across countries are limited. The study of integrated care through the lens of policy transfer is important, as it for example, explores the structural elements, including environmental and cognitive obstacles in the policy transfer process. Policy translation offers a social constructivist approach to explore the travel of ideas, and considers the multiple spatial and scalar contexts in which integrated care policy is implemented.

This paper aims to advance policy transfer and policy translation as complementary frameworks to explain integrated care development. Second, it seeks to make novel and useful contributions to the debate about the development of integrated care, and to the wider arguments on policy transfer and policy translation and integrated care in other parts of the world.

This chapter explores the potential of transnational history for researching global higher education policy. It begins with an overview of transnational history as a perspective, demonstrating how it is, in part, a response to processes of globalization that have also transformed contemporary higher education. Second, it reviews key features of transnational history as a perspective that can enhance global higher education policy research. The third part takes dimensions of contemporary global higher education and discusses how these can be approached through a transnational historical perspective drawing on the features outlined. The chapter concludes by highlighting how a transnational historical approach can enable new insights and research questions as well as some challenges presented by this perspective. The spatial focus of the chapter is predominantly European higher education, though the implications are more general.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Drawing on evidence of major Western governments’ concerns with the wider economic, social and environmental impact and performance of transnational firms, we argue that recent emphasis on deregulating industrial development, such as in the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment and ongoing discussions over a multilateral framework on investment, necessitates a fuller and regulated, rather than voluntaristic, corporate accountability, covering further details of the impact and performance of transnationals.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of Global Electronic Commerce (GEC) on transnational regulatory governance and to suggest a novel way of understanding its implications for national and transnational governance structures.

The paper has two components. The first part endeavours to establish a basis from which to observe regulatory governance of GEC and, in doing so, suggests a framework that draws together the relevant elements of transnational GEC governance. The second part examines the central determinants in shaping a functioning framework for GEC, namely, copyrights, data privacy protection and jurisdiction.

The findings are twofold. Owing to limitations deriving from institutional structural divergences; variations in cultural, political and commercial interests; and the relative power of non‐state actors, the cases first indicate how GEC has made multilateral negotiations between states more complex. Second, given the complexity of cross‐border governance and the variation in interests across its regulatory subsectors, GEC calls for an increasing degree of cultural harmonization across all regulatory subsectors.

In the absence of major views or paradigms, a novel approach to understanding the regulatory governance of GEC between states is a welcome addition to the study of transnational governance. Such an approach seeks to elucidate the impact of GEC on the development of transnational regulatory mechanisms, on the one hand, and the transformations that the governance of GEC imposes on transnational negotiation processes, on the other hand. It also seeks to understand how these underpinnings affect formation of holistic governance structures for GEC.

The USA has been suffering from international/transnational terrorism for decades. There is no consensus on whether this situation is a result of the international status of the USA and the principles it upholds or the policies it embraces in its interaction with the outside world.

This study adopts both the “American Primacy” theory and the “anti-Americanism” theory in its effort to reach a conclusion concerning this issue. This study aims to examine previous research that linked international terrorism to the US hegemony and the principles it abides by and showed the relevance of this perception to the “American Primacy” theory. It also examines the research that considered international/transnational terrorism as a result of the American foreign policy in its various aspects (economic, military, assistance or a whole combination of policies).

This literature on the American foreign policy and international/transnational terrorism was extensive and manifested the explanatory power of the “anti-Americanism” theory, especially in its three variants: issue-oriented, ideological and instrumental. While examining the foreign policy terrorism studies, the relevance of the “American Primacy” theory appeared at very few instances.

The study was able to prove that explaining the international/transnational terrorism is related to the foreign policy decisions taken by the American policymakers and cause harm to the outside world. The envy of “American Primacy” is of secondary importance.