This thesis examines the relationship between institutional context and firm performance, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The aim is to engage with the debate seeking to explain the observed diversity in the forms of economic organisation prevailing in socio-economic systems. The focus of the empirical work is on investigating the effects of the structure and behaviour of ban...

The institutional context in which CIS operate has failed to evolve with either the rate of software and hardware developments, or the numbers of systems installed. This realization has been dawning on the CIS community over a number of years, and has led to studies such as the Wisconsin Land Records Committee and the Minnesota Inventory of Mapping Systems. The failure of institutions to evolve...

The setting of this experiment is that of the DEFLE, French Department for Foreign Students. It is an old department of the University of Nancy2, originally designed for the training of foreign students to prepare them to study a wide range of subjects. Studies of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) were organized exclusively in terms of classes (learning with a teacher), until the CRAPEL, throu...

The perception of childhood as a period of dependence and innocence has a long history. Being strongly associated with the Romantic Movement of eighteenth-century Europe it resonates with more recent Western theories of child development, ideas about child rearing and policies relating to the care and education of children. The advent of a global society, however, demands that we examine and re...

This debate outlines some of the institutional aspects of perceived research quality and the potential implications on academic behaviour across Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. In particular the paper discusses the differences in formal measurements of research output quality in the two regions considered. The paper draws upon my personal experiences living and working in Scandinavia and th...

BACKGROUND Tobacco production is said to be an important contributor to Zambia's economy in terms of labour and revenue generation. In light of Zambia's obligations under the WHO Framework Convention of Tobacco Control (FCTC) we examined the institutional actors in Zambia's tobacco sector to better understand their roles and determine the institutional context that supports tobacco production i...

In this paper we describe an ontology model that was designed and implemented to represent academic and institutional contexts related with a research center in Mexico City. The ontology model aims at supporting logicbased query answering and reasoning regarding contexts such as geographical areas, time, persons, libraries, cultural and academic events, teaching and tutoring schedules. The type...

This study investigates the daily dynamic relation between returns and institutional and individual trades in the TAIEX futures market. I find that both past individual and institutional buys and sells have no predictive power for index returns; both individual and institutional trading activities are strongly related to their own past trades, and individual open-buy trading is also influenced ...

The healthcare sector is one where two co-existing and competing institutional logics – professional and market logics – occur. Following extant research on institutional logics and institutional work, we propose to understand “what microprocesses and institutional practices do institutional actors enact during the implementation of healthcare IT system? What are the impacts of these practices ...

In this review article, we reflect upon recent developments in institutional theory with particular emphasis on first, how organizational fields have been conceived and second, on how action has been conceptualized and incorporated into institutional accounts. We show that progress has been made in regard to our understanding of field level processes and the role of institutional actors. Howeve...