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This chapter examines the influence of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy on some of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the past three decades. Mobilizing the epistemic community framework, it demonstrates how network members, acting as amici curiae, litigators, academics, and judges worked to transmit intellectual capital to Supreme Court decision makers in 12 federalism and separation of powers cases decided between 1983 and 2001. It finds that Federalist Society members were most successful in diffusing ideas into Supreme Court opinions in cases where doctrinal distance was greatest; that is, cases where the Supreme Court moved the farthest from its established constitutional framework.

The purpose of this paper is to open a theoretical discussion on the preventive anti‐money laundering (AML) regime, both international and domestic in Russia, building theoretical assumptions on the role of epistemic community in the AML network in Russia.

The discussion is based on the analysis of the preventive pillar of the AML regime in Russia. Cognitive (or knowledge‐based) approach is used to study domestic AML regime and to reveal the main reason of the network deficiencies in Russia.

The paper argues that the representatives of banking community in Russia should play the role of epistemic community to foster better understanding of the context and purposes of the AML regime, thus, decreasing uncertainty, facilitating cooperation between the stakeholders, and eventually having a great influence on the quality of the AML regulations elaborated by the policy makers.

The paper limits its scope to the study of money laundering (ML) prevention focusing on the financial institutions – banks – which play the most important role in Russian AML network.

The paper reveals the roles of the main actors of Russian AML regime play. The ineffectiveness of the regime could be eased by increasing communication and cooperation between the stakeholders. The formal compliance approach used by the regulator in the financial sector supervision has not been effective and should be reviewed with the shift to the reasonable judgment approach used by both supervisor and financial institutions to prevent ML in Russia.

Studies of the peculiarities of the AML legislation implementation in different countries is one of the helpful tools to measure the efficiency of the global AML regime.

This chapter investigates whether traditional design-oriented coordination instruments or more modern management concepts have a stronger influence on the success of forward technology transfers within MNCs.

We conducted an empirical study analyzing the relative influence of (a) traditional coordination instruments (structural, technocratic, and person-oriented) and (b) modern management concepts (epistemic community and absorptive capacity) on the success of forward technology transfers within MNCs.

The study finds evidence that the traditional coordination instruments relate to specific aspects of the success of such transfers. Comparing the different types of coordination instruments, this chapter shows that not only the person-oriented, but also the structural and technocratic coordination instruments relate positively with the achievement of technology transfer goals. The study finds stronger relationships between the traditional coordination instruments and the technology transfer goals than between the modern management concepts and the technology transfer goals.

We believe that these results have important implications for the management of international technology transfers in particular and for the focus of future (international) management research in general. Future MNC research studies need to include traditional coordination instruments, since they continue to strongly influence organizational behavior and outcomes. This would help to make organizational research on MNCs more cumulative and complete.

This paper aims to understand how social finance and impact measurement experts include stakeholders' voices in valuations of social and environmental impact.

The paper used the content analysis of an online discussion forum where experts discussed impact valuation approaches.

Many experts seek impact valuations that take into account the experiences of those whose lives are most affected. Ideally, these accounts need to be emic to (in the language of) those stakeholders, and polyvocal (representing many different stakeholders' voices). However, these experts also seek to effect systemic change by encouraging mainstream financial markets to use social and environmental valuations in their decision-making. These experts consider full plurality too complex to be useable by financial markets, so the experts argue in favor of etic valuations (stated in the language of investors), to appeal to mainstream finance, while endeavoring nonetheless to represent multiple stakeholders' voices. The authors identify two discursive strategies used to resolve this tension: effacing of differences between diverse stakeholders, and overstating the universality of money as a common language.

The terms emic and polyvocal provide experts with nuanced ways to understand “stakeholder voice.” The authors hope these nuances inspire new insights and strategies and help the community with their goal of bridging to mainstream finance.

The paper presents a theoretical framework for describing plurality in impact valuations and examines the challenges of bridging from social finance, which seeks to give voice and representation to those whose lives are most affected, to mainstream finance.

This paper aims to improve the understanding of individual transdisciplinary PhD research in a developing country context, focusing on three individual PhD case studies in South Africa.

Multiple-case method was used, and three completed transdisciplinary PhD research efforts undertaken at the Stellenbosch University were selected. They were coordinated through the TsamaHub, an inter-faculty platform at the University which organises educational modules for transdisciplinary research. Using actual research experiences and reflections of the three individual PhDs, the paper evaluates their work in terms of ontological, epistemological, methodological and methodical/methods aspects.

The central challenge to individual PhD researchers is engagement with non-academic actors to enable joint problem formulation, analysis and transformation. To overcome this, the paper suggests that developing individual epistemic relationships to build “transdisciplinary epistemic communities” should be considered for inclusion as an intentional aspect of transdisciplinary research design.

“Transdisciplinary epistemic communities” is still a concept in its infancy and needs more work before it may be theoretically and practically useful.

Continuously guiding the individual transdisciplinary research process in a reflexive, recursive, transparent and equal manner is absolutely critical because transdisciplinary research cannot be done successfully if dominated by overly methods-driven approaches.

The discourse around transdisciplinary methodology has major implications for the design of individual PhD research. The paper provides recommendations to enhance the theory and practice of individual transdisciplinary PhD research.

Today, the global education market is one of the faster growing sectors, and it has attracted several new actors or what we call educational brokers who are now responsible for shaping national agendas. The newer actors in education are vastly different for the former players in that whereas previous actors engrossed national educational systems through the provision of technical assistance to meet international standards, best practices, and benchmarks, these newer players are for-profit entities that emphasize austerity, leanness, human resource maximization, performance targets, and competition. Therefore, in this new educational landscape, national governments are seen as “clients” who receive “expert” advice from “external consultants” that have an assortment of experiences across different sectors. Education governance is no longer a statist endowed but one that incubates in laborites of best practices resonates with existing case studies and results driven based on Big Date collected. We argue that educational brokers are responsible for the emergence of a hybrid form of education governance that use business and market techniques to reform strategies within the education sector. We conclude by suggesting that collectively educational brokers are using what we call “educational sub-prime mechanisms” – higher interest rates, reduced quality collateral, and less advantageous terms to counterweight higher credit risk – to manage educational portfolios and newer forms of educational risk.

This paper examines the historical evolvement of competing institutional logics (i.e. religion, profession, state, market and community) underpinning Islamic accounting standardisation projects and power relations between internal actors representing these logics.

The paper adopts a case-study approach and analyses two Islamic accounting standardisation projects implemented at the national and international levels. Documentary review and semi-structured interviews are used for data collection. Analysis is informed by the “Institutional Logics Perspective” and Bourdieu's notion of “power as capital in a field”.

Research findings illustrate how some local actors pre-dispose themselves in promoting strict compliance to IFRS, while others endeavour to ensure compliance to “Islamic Sharia requirements” in financial reporting. In this power dynamic, there is an ongoing “constructive resistance” actively exerted by the latter group against the former, preserving the existence of religion-based reporting demands in Islamic accounting standardisation approaches. The paper also highlights chronological “dynamic” accounts that explain the evolvement of institutional logics prevailing in these projects over different historical stages at both national and international levels.

This paper's findings contrast and challenge the existing assumption that the “epistemic community” promoting IFRS agenda always faces “passive responses” from local actors. Moreover, the paper's offering of a dynamic view to institutional logic mapping extends the previously used “static analyses” of logics prevailing in Islamic accounting standardisation projects.

The aim of this paper is to provide an account of the period prior to the creation of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI): a body that was critical to the institutionalization of sustainability reporting (SR). By examining this “pre-history,” we bring to light the actors, activities and ways of thinking that made SR more likely to be institutionalized once the GRI entrepreneurship came to the fore.

The paper revisits a time period (the 1990s) that has yet to be formally written about in any depth and traces the early development of what became SR. This material is examined using a constructivist understanding of regulation.

The authors contend that a convergence of actors and structural conditions were pivotal to the development of SR. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that a combination of actors (such as epistemic communities, carriers, regulators and reporters) as well as the presence of certain conditions (such as the societal context, analogies with financial reporting, environmental reporting and reporting design issues) contributed to the development of SR which was consolidated (as well as extended) in 1999 with the advent of the GRI.

This paper theorizes (through a historical analysis) how SR is sustained by a network of institutional actors and conditions which can assist reflection on future SR development.

This paper brings together empirical material from a time that (sadly) is passing from living memory. The paper also extends the use of a conceptual frame that is starting to influence scholarship in accounting that seeks to understand how norms develop.

This paper aims to draw attention to a broad range of experimental institutional initiatives which operate in the absence of a global antitrust regime. The purpose of this paper is to offer food for thought to scholars in other fields of international trade law facing challenges from divergent national regimes.

Taking inspiration from political science literature on institutions, this paper crafts a broad analytical lens which captures various organisational forms (including networks), codes (including soft law) and culture (including epistemic communities). The strength and shortcomings of traditional “bricks and mortar” institutions such as the European Union (EU) and General Agreement Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organisation are first examined. Then, the innovative global network of International Competition Network (ICN) is analysed.

It highlights the value of the global antitrust epistemic community in providing a conducive environment for extensive recourse to “soft law”. Examples from the EU and the ICN include measures which find expression in enforcement tools and networks. These initiatives can be seen as experimental responses to the challenges of divergent national antitrust regimes.

It is desktop research rather than empirical field work.

To raise awareness outside the antitrust scholarly community of the variety of experimental institutional initiatives which have evolved, often on a soft law basis, in response to the challenges experienced by national enforcement agencies and businesses operating in the absence of a global antitrust regime.

It offers some personal reflections on the ICN from the author’s experience as a non-governmental advisor. It draws attention to the ICN’s underappreciated range of educational materials which are freely available on its website to everyone. It submits that the ICN template offers interesting ideas for other fields of international trade law where a global regime is unrealisable. The ICN is a voluntary virtual network of agencies collaborating to agree ways to reduce clashes among national regimes. Its goal of voluntary convergence is portrayed as standardisation rather than as absolute congruence. Even if standardisation of norms/processes is too ambitious a goal in other fields of international trade law, the ICN model still offers inspiration as an epistemic community within an inclusive and dynamic forum for encouraging debate and creating a culture of learning opportunities where familiarity and trust is fostered.

Our chapter focuses on the situation of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their families in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the results of a qualitative study aimed at outlining the state of policies dedicated to individuals with ASD prior to and during the global health crisis. We conducted desk research based on documents published by third sector organisations dedicated to individuals with ASD and categorised in our study as epistemic communities. Next, we carried out interviews with parents and professionals on the social practices of supporting children and adolescents with ASD during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region of Lesser Poland [PL: Małopolska]. The discourse of NGOs enabled us to identify the greatest challenges of individuals with ASD and their families and solutions introduced prior to and during the pandemic. Based on the accounts of parents and professionals, we found that as many as every single person with ASD struggled with the epidemic in an individual manner, ceasing pre-pandemic habits, adapting to the new school context, and missing contacts with peers were the major difficulties.