Introducing a process model of power and institutional change, I argue that actors may seek power by creating, supporting, or modifying institutions. Lacking unilateral authority to enact new institutions, actors can leverage symbolic resources into coercive resources, which may require making concessions to multiple logics and stakeholders. The emergent organizations and institutions are then ...

We study the role of takeover threats as a corporate control mechanism using [Aghion, P., Tirole, J., 1997. Formal and real authority in organizations. Journal of Political Economy 105, 1–29] model of formal and real authority. Shareholders do not monitor the manager’s actions since ownership is widely dispersed. A corporate raider may monitor and step in if a profit opportunity exists. In our ...

We generalize standard delegation models to consider policymaking when both information and authority are dispersed among multiple actors. In our theory, the principal may delegate partial authority to a privately-informed agent while also reserving some authority for the principal’s use after observing the agent’s decision. Counterintuitively, the equilibrium amount of authority delegated to t...

Scholars of insanity and its historical antecedents have paid very little attention to personal and institutional clothing. Such dress, distributed to patients in mental institutions, has always been inscribed with the conflicting narratives of the period in which it was made and worn. The language of civil and medical authority is more evident than personal choice in the shape and address of t...

States making payments to recipients of old-age assistance, aid to the blind, or aid to the permanently and totally disabled who reside in institutions have been required since July 1.1953. to designate an authority for establishing and maintaining standards in such institutions. How many of the Nation’s aged persons do these institutions care for? In what ways do they differ from the older men...

The issue of quality control has become increasingly important as more online databases are integrated into digital libraries. This can have a dramatic eeect on the search eeectiveness of an online system. Authority work, the need to discover and reconcile variant forms of strings in bibliographic entries, will become more diicult. Spelling variants, misspellings, translation and transliteratio...

Mary Piorun is Associate Director for Library Systems. In this capacity she manages the Library's technology initiatives and oversees the implementation and management of software/hardware used in the daily operations of the Library. Mary is currently the project manager for the Library's institutional repository initiative. Lisa Palmer is Catalog Librarian at the Lamar Soutter Library, UMass M...