Research Ethics Committees (RECs) are increasingly institutionalised as a feature of research practice, but have remained strangely neglected by social scientists. In this paper, we argue that analysis of letters from RECs to researchers offers important insights into how RECs operate. We report a traditional content analysis and an ethnographic content analysis of 141 letters to researchers, t...

I describe a model of strategic communication within groups in policy-making situations with decentralized policy-making authority. I show that, in a cheap-talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of signaling between agents and, accordingly, both the quality of individual policy decisions and social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents c...

Objective To assess the salt content of hot meals served at the institutions of salt policy makers in the Netherlands. Design Observational study. Setting 18 canteens at the Department of Health, the Health Council, the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, university hospitals, and affiliated non-university hospitals. Intervention A standard hot meal collected from the institutional staf...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the institutional behaviour of incarcerated sex offenders. AIM To study the relationships between juvenile sex offending, thought psychopathology and institutional misconduct. METHOD We applied negative binomial regression and Area Under Curve Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC) analyses to self-report and records data from institutionalised delinque...

BACKGROUND This scoping review investigates the relationship between governance, pharmacovigilance, and Agencia Nacional de Vigilancia Sanitaria (ANVISA) in Brazil, which has authority over Brazil's national pharmaceutical policy, drug registration and coordination of the national pharmacovigilance system. The purpose is to investigate opportunities for effective pharmacovigilance. METHODS Si...

Decentralization facilitates more efficient use of local information but also can lead to agency problems and commitment failures. This paper develops simple models of a twotier hierarchy (the center vs. the local) to study the optimal division of lending authority between central and local bank managers. Using a unique data set collected by the authors from a survey of rural financial institut...

This paper studies the evolution of political institutions in the face of conflict. We examine institutional reform in a class of pivotal mechanisms—institutions that behave as if the resulting policy were determined by a “pivotal” decision maker drawn from the potential population of citizens and who holds full policy-making authority at the time. A rule-ofsuccession describes the process by w...

This paper reports on research into how a systems development methodology (SDM) operates as an institution: specifically – an institutional carrier in the process of systems development. The case study develops the argument that institutional structures (such as authority, norms, symbolic values, and routine ways of doing things) embedded within the methodology are active forces in the systems ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the salt content of hot meals served at the institutions of salt policy makers in the Netherlands. DESIGN Observational study. SETTING 18 canteens at the Department of Health, the Health Council, the Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority, university hospitals, and affiliated non-university hospitals. INTERVENTION A standard hot meal collected from the institutiona...