Search results for "social mechanisms"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Interventions with Sticky Social Norms: A Critique
2021
Abstract We study the consequences of policy interventions when social norms are endogenous but costly to change. In our environment, a group faces a negative externality that it partially mitigates through incentives in the form of punishments. In this setting, policy interventions can have unexpected consequences. The most striking is that when the cost of bargaining is high, introducing a Pigouvian tax can increase output—yet in doing so increase welfare. An observer who saw that an increase in a Pigouvian tax raised output might wrongly conclude that this harmed welfare and that a larger tax increase would also raise output. This counter-intuitive impact on output is demonstrated theore…
Social mechanisms and strategic action fields: The example of the emergence of the European Research Area
2017
The point of departure of this article is Fligstein and McAdam’s A Theory of Fields. It is argued that their theoretical framework would be strengthened by a more systematic focus in social mechanism-based explanations since this would increase understanding of how new strategic action fields (SAFs) emerge. This argument is illustrated by exploring the emergence of the European Research Area (ERA) as a SAF. In identifying social mechanisms the article draws both on Fligstein and McAdam’s studies and on academic capitalism literature. The main conclusion is that the emergence of the ERA was brought about by multiple social mechanisms such as collective attribution of threat/opportunity, soc…
Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight
2022
The theory of public goods is mainly about the difficulty in paying for them. Our question here is this: Why might public goods not be provided, even if funding is available? We use the Afghan Army as our case study. We explore this issue using a simple model of a public good that can be provided through collective action and peer pressure, by modeling the self-organization of a group (the Afghan Army) as a mechanism design problem. We consider two kinds of transfer subsidies from an external entity such as the U.S. government. One is a Pigouvian subsidy that simply pays the salaries, rewarding individuals who provide effort. The second is an output/resource multiplier (the provision of mil…
Perhepäivähoito- ja päiväkoti-instituutio varhaiskasvatuksen kunnallisten viranhaltijoiden puheessa
2022
Tutkimuksessa tarkasteltiin perhepäivähoito- ja päiväkoti-instituutioiden tuottamista varhaiskasvatuksesta vastaavien kunnallisten viranhaltijoiden puheessa. Tutkimus tehtiin kymmenessä suomalaisessa kunnassa, ja aineistona käytettiin teemahaastatteluja (N =42). Perhepäivähoito ja päiväkotitoiminta ymmärrettiin diskursiivisen institutionalismin näkökulmasta sosiaalisina käytäntöinä, joiden merkitykset ilmenevät ja muuttuvat varhaiskasvatuksen instituutioiden kielenkäytössä. Aineistoa analysoitiin diskursiivisesti, ja puheesta erotettiin vaihtelevia tapoja puhua perhepäivähoidosta ia päiväkotitoiminnasta. Löydetyissä puhetavoissa perhepäivähoidolle ja päiväkotitoiminnalle tuotettiin erilaise…