Since the enactment of the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance in 1971 and the establishment of Antiquities and Monuments Office in 1976, the Hong Kong Government has set up several institutions with particular ordinances and schemes for Heritage Conservation. With the set-up of government initiatives, yet the protection of physical and cultural heritage is still limited due to the ambiguity of...

Active aging, that is the idea that policy encourage and enable people to participate actively in social, political and economic life, is a political backwater in Europe. Since demographic aging affects may different policy domains in different ways, the institutional landscapes in which aging and active aging policy takes place are fragmented. This means that two distinct and countervailing in...

Relying on an alternative theoretical framework (i.e. institutional theory), rather than the dominant agency theory, this paper examines the connections between corporate governance mechanisms and good practices, as informed by an empirical and contextual analysis. On the basis of research methods triangulation, this study presents nine specific antecedents of good corporate governance in weak ...

Standard sociological theories of ‘taste-as-refinement’, which view taste as a means to maintain social distance among different social classes, conflict with tastemaking practice in pluralistic societies where taste standards are no longer exclusively defined by a society’s elite strata. To better account for the heterogeneity of tastemaking in modern societies, this article suggests a framewo...

a number of new concepts have emerged in the last two decades whose proponents claim that if achieved, they would deliver more sustainable urban environments. among them, new urbanism and urban village are the ones with the most theoretical support and practical application. both ideas, however, have been criticized in several grounds. but no study has been carried out to show the effectiveness...

Weak enforcement of international contracts can substantially reduce international trade. We develop a model where agents build reputations to overcome the difficulties that this institutional failure causes in a context of incomplete information. The model describes the interplay between institutional quality, reputations and the dynamics of international trade. We find that the conditional pr...

This research investigates how institutional carriers – from rules and power systems to cognitive schemas and information technology – influence the reproduction of centralized decision-making governance structures in virtual communities. Studying a group of four virtual communities, the findings show that community members invoke a variety of institutional carriers in order to try to legitimat...

Hybrid organizations operate in a context of institutional plurality and enact elements of multiple, often conflicting institutional logics. Governance is highly relevant in navigating such an environment. This study examines how hybrid organizations set up their governance structures and practices. Building on survey data from 70 social enterprises, a subset of hybrid organizations, we identif...

BACKGROUND In many low-income countries women tend to deliver at home, and delays in receiving appropriate maternal care can be fatal. A contextual understanding of these delays is important if countries are to meet development targets for maternal health. We present qualitative research with women who delivered at home in rural Nepal, to gain a contemporary understanding of the context where w...