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The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of centralization and formalization on the frequency of political tactics (FPT) used by employees. It also examines political will as the underlying variable that mediates the relationship between the focal variables.

The study uses data (n = 234) collected from a large public sector organization in India. The interrelationships are tested empirically using structural equation modeling.

The findings suggest that both centralization and formalization significantly influence the FPT used by employees. Also, political will partially mediate the relationship between centralization, formalization and FPT.

The study provides evidence of the influence of centralization and formalization as two organizational realities that lead to employee engagement in political tactics. It also elucidates the importance of political will and the need to develop social astuteness to maneuver through the maze of organizational politics. The study is conducted in a public sector organization in India and uses cross-sectional data. Therefore, generalizations must be made with caution.

The study establishes political will as an important mediator between centralization, formalization and political behavior, fostering in-depth research into the structural aspects of public sector organizations. It also establishes political will as an important individual disposition of employees that augments the engagement of employees in political behavior in highly centralized and formalized organizations.

Relationships between long-distance exchange, especially of luxury goods, and the centralization of political power represent a fundamental dimension of political and economic organization. Precolumbian American societies, outside familiar European contexts that have shaped analytical perspectives, provide a broadened comparative field with the potential for more nuanced analysis.

Analysis focuses on four cases that vary in political centralization, institutional complexity, and geographic scale: Ulúa societies without political centralization; small Maya states; Aztec; and Inka empires. Emphasis on relationships between principals and agents highlights the potential of social practices to perform the functions often associated with state institutions

In the Ulúa region, commerce flourished in the absence of states and their concomitants. The very wealth of Ulúa societies and the unusually broad dispersion of prosperity across social segments impeded the development of states by limiting the ability of local lords to intensify their status and convert it to political power. Intensity of market activity and long-distance exchange does not correlate well with the florescence of states. Less centralized and non-centralized political systems may in fact facilitate mercantile activity (or impede it less) in comparison with states.

These cases frame a useful perspective on the organizational configuration of long-distance trade. Informal social mechanisms and practices can be an alternative to state institutions in structuring complex economic relations. The implications for understanding trajectories of societal change are clear: the development of states and centralized political organization is not a prerequisite for robust long-distance commerce.

This paper aims to examine three sets of antecedents of organizational politics perceptions: organizational antecedents, job work context antecedents, and personal antecedents.

Survey data were collected from 206 full‐time Arab employees of seven Kuwaiti companies and four industries (financial services, investment, real estate, and communication).

Results of multiple regression analysis showed job/work context factors and hierarchical level to be significant predictors of perceptions of organizational politics. However, contrary to the findings of previous research, formalization and centralization did not have a significant effect on organizational politics perceptions.

The potential for common method variance that may be associated with the use of a single source, self‐report methodology of data collection represents a limitation.

The study is very useful in raising the level of awareness of managers, at various levels of the organization, of the potential consequences of their political behavior to their employees.

This study expands such research on organizational politics in a different cultural setting, one that is characterized by lower individualism and higher power distance.

Although universities have been decentralized for academic freedom and autonomy, resources are being increasingly centralized, and the role of central administration is growing for efficiency and excellence reasons. At the same time, a division of labor is progressing by assigning specific tasks to professionals. The professionals are also centrally managed. Educational development was introduced by central administration to cope with the massification and quality assurance of higher education. Although it played a great part in promoting educational reform, it also suffered from the rejection of academics and the lack of methodology. Unlike ITC service and student service, educational development touches the autonomy of academics and is always torn between the central administration and academics. This chapter analyzes the structural and cultural difficulty of educational development in Japan by tracing its historical development and by comparing to other countries.

Politicians' response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic worldwide relied on war scenarios having a tradition in disease management. The study contrasts how the political measures introduced during the state of emergency were presented by the Prime Minister of Hungary in his social media posts and his speeches and announcements broadcast by public media.

A computer-assisted content analysis was conducted to extract data on war and military metaphors, followed by a qualitative analysis of the metaphor scenarios used for explaining the situation and justifying action. The role of the prime minister (PM) indicated by the social media posts and by his transcripted speeches was compared with the suggestion of the visual illustrations.

The study’s findings were that verbal communication shifted between war-related metaphoric to military-related realistic. The third conceptual domain identified was fear. Messages were mostly about national cohesion, however, visually, the PM was the protagonist of the events. The communication proved efficient according to opinion polls.

The research revealed how the securitization of the pandemic took place via the political discourse constructed both for Internet users and traditional media consumers. Metaphors of fear, war and military action created the justification of the declaration of a state of emergency. The PM as a capable and responsible leader was placed in focus of the events. Although verbal messages by the PM were centred on a sense of community and joint action, the personalization of political action was remarkable by indirect means, such as visual messages. The personalization of politics throughout the period researched served the purpose of securitization of the pandemic with the PM as a charismatic leader attracting attention and giving credit to the severity of the threat along with the introduction of extraordinary measures.

This chapter investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3,000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This chapter formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether fiscal decentralization has impacts on city innovation level and to examine the moderating effects of the preference for government innovation in China.

Using a panel data of China’s 278 cities from 2003 to 2016, the authors first use fixed-effect model and quantile regression to analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level and the variations of impacts conditional on different innovation levels, followed by a mediating effect model to test the moderating effects of the preference for government innovation and its temporal and spatial heterogeneity.

The paper finds that fiscal decentralization significantly inhibited city innovation, and with the improvement of city innovation level, the inhibition demonstrated characteristics of “V” type variation. When the degree of fiscal decentralization is between 0.377 and 0.600, the inhibition of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level is the weakest. We further show that fiscal decentralization also inhibits the government's preference for innovation, reduces the proportion of fiscal expenditure on innovation and has a negative impact on city innovation. In addition, the influence of fiscal decentralization on city innovation present clear heterogeneity in space and in time. On one hand, the inhibition of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level in eastern China is significantly weaker than that in central and Western China; on the other hand, after the implementation of China’s innovation-driven development strategy in 2013, the negative impact of fiscal decentralization on city innovation disappeared.

The research findings have certain policy implications. That is, in the process of decentralization reform, on the one hand, the central government should strengthen the supervision over the fiscal expenditure of local governments and ensure that the central government can play a leading role in the local development strategy, on the other hand, the central government should guard against the distortion of fiscal decentralization on local governments' fiscal expenditure behavior. In addition, the central government should also focus on the heterogeneity of the impacts of fiscal decentralization on cities under different strategic backgrounds and different levels of innovation.

This paper extends prior research by bringing the decentralization system reform into the study of city innovation system and analyzing its mechanism and its temporal and spatial heterogeneity.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

The centralization of power in the state and federal legislatures and in their associated professional bureaucracies is a notable feature of both educational and general political decision making in Australia. In this paper “governance” refers to the process of exercising authoritative control, “politics” to public policy making and its resolution. Formal public participation in Australian educational decision making is shown to be minimal, being limited to representation by elected members in the state and federal legislatures. There is no local governmental structure or tax for education. The existing structures and their origins are explained. Two hypotheses derived from the work of Iannaccone are tested. The first states that the longer educational issues remain unsolved in the extra‐legal social networks and lower level legal areas the more likely it is that decisions on these questions will be made by central government departments and agencies. The second states that the more that questions of educational policy are resolved by central departments and agencies the more likely it is that educational policies will become undifferentiated from other kinds of politics or from politics as relating to other policy areas of government. An examination of political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries supports both hypotheses.

This paper examines the transformation of Syrian political economy from 1970 until 2005. I argue that Syria has undergone two important phases of political and economic transformation, from building a centralized state and economy in the early 1970s to embarking on the path of market economy in the early 1990s. With the logic of competitiveness guiding the direction of economic development, the socio-economic changes of the mid-1980s and after have corresponded with an important process of class and state formation. After a brief discussion of the current transition in Syria, the following sections of the paper attempt to provide a critical study of the different strategies for economic development. Section two examines the process of state and economic centralization of the 1970s and 1980s and highlights the contradictions of this period. Section three assesses the impact of economic liberalization through a study of competitiveness in the economic policies of the 1990s and 2000. The final section examines the economic and political impasse that Syria has been faced with. In conclusion, I argue that the current path of market economy as the strategy for capital accumulation has not resolved the socio-economic problems that Syria has faced in the last two decades. This strategy will continue to face contestation by marginalized groups such as factions of the Baath Party, landless peasants, workers and small producers as Syria becomes even more integrated into the regional and global economy.