Consulting is a major and established business sector in almost every Western economy representing, for instance, 42% of the EU GNP. About 29% of this market comprises IT-related consulting and especially ERP consulting. Here, the implementation of information systems and the inevitable change to organisational-technical systems is also a political process. An IT-consulting project can thus be ...

For the most part foreign policy in Southeast Asia has been regarded and analyzed as an isolated policy area, separated from the structures and dynamics of the respective political systems. This seemed to be an appropriate approach as long as foreign policy was the domain of small political élites and autocratic regimes. Assuming that the processes of (re-)democratization in the Philippines, Th...

It is a piece of idle senthentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, or prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application oflegal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in th...

This paper develops a theory of the interaction between appropriative conflict and economic growth. Appropriative conflict, as measured by the diversion of resources, is viewed as the cost of securing effective property rights. We identify conditions under which conflict rises or falls as the rate of economic growth improves. The main implication of the analysis is that if the quality of proper...

Bolivia is expected to achieve United Nations Millennium Development Goal Four, reducing under-five child mortality by two-thirds between 2021 and 2025. However, progress on child mortality reduction masks a disproportionately slow decline in newborn deaths during the 2000s. Bolivia's neonatal mortality problem emerged on the policy agenda in the mid-1990s and grew through 2004 in relationship ...

The choice to give up sovereignty to another state helps explain the development of international hierarchy, while resistance often results in conflict as states instead use coercion to assert their control. This paper develops an explanation of why actors support giving up sovereignty to another state. The argument uses domestic politics to explain hierarchy, expanding beyond the existing lite...

This paper explores the social organization of disaster recovery, using Hurricane Katrina to supply context for the theoretical effort. That effort distinguishes two contrasting models of political economy. The conventional model treats the state as a unitary actor that stands outside the economy and uses policy instruments to shift society to some different equilibrium. The alternative model t...

Information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity, influence reputation, social trust and institutional actor roles. We suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model on tie formation in the German toxic chemicals policy domain. The results indicate that the effect o...

The aim of this research paper is to analyse the key political posters made for the campaigns of Irish political party Fianna Fáil framed in the Celtic Tiger (1997-2008) and post-Celtic Tiger years (2009-2012). I will then focus on the four posters of the candidate in the elections that took place in 1997, 2002, 2007 and 2011 with the intention of observing first how the leader is represented, ...

The automatic teller machine (ATM) will be for the foreseeable future the dominant mode of access to cash for those living in industrialized societies. In this article we present the ATM as a political site where a multiplicity of relationships—primarily but not exclusively between the customer and the bank—become configured in ways that serve some interests and not others. The article draws on...