This comment discusses on how legal change can originate from society and the private sphere. It argues that Hesselink’s perspective is too strongly oriented on public sphere and ignores the societal sphere including its transformative potential. The comment centres the concept of private law institutions and institutional change that is a core element in both Katharina Pistor’s diagnosis on coding of capital in law and Martijn Hesselink’s related proposal to reform private law institutions through a comprehensive principle-oriented code. The comment first introduces the idea of legal institutionalism in Pistor and Hesselink to then add to it an additional perspective from a new institutional theory that identifies the transformative potential within the social institutions themselves. It is then argued that the law, rather than being in need of radical change, needs to be radical in being responsive to the societal institutions. The contribution concludes by outlining on the basis of three examples – contract, tort and private international law – how societally responsive private law institutions can look like.

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

This article sheds light on the informal institutional settings that guide the social and economic lives of Muslim migrants in Moscow. Mosques and medresses (Muslim theological schools) serve as central locations from which these institutions emanate, evolve, and transform. Case studies of trade networks and Hijama (wet cupping) healing practices demonstrate the inner workings of such institutions. The article draws on the theoretical traditions of informal institutions and new institutionalists focusing on anthropological works on agency and institutions. These analytical frameworks and concepts help explain the mechanisms and processes involved in the institutionalization of Muslim lives in Moscow. I argue that individual agency and charismatic leadership of individual members of the community play formative roles in institutionalizing daily practices and constituting normative orders of Muslims in Moscow. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Moscow and Perm during 2016, 2017, and 2019.

In this paper, we develop and empirically test hypotheses about the diffusion of imported management practices in Turkey. We emphasize the sociopolitical legitimacy of these practices and present hypotheses as to timing, motivations, and self-promotion. We test these hypotheses with quantitative data on Total Quality Management (TQM) adoption by industrial companies in Turkey. Findings reveal that elite companies adopt TQM earlier on, self-report greater levels of sociopolitically driven legitimacy concerns, and are more likely to participate in a prestigious quality award contest. Overall, our study contributes to diffusion research guided by the new institutional approach by expanding existing models to the diffusion of imported practices across organizations in late-industrializing recipient countries. We particularly show that sociopolitical legitimacy of imported practices that is more characteristic of late-industrializing recipient contexts may generate a divergent pattern of diffusion whereby elite organizations emerge as early adopters and engage in brandishing adoption.

The relationships between the State and political parties have often been analysed in dual terms. Yet, as Katz and Mair already noticed in their well-known (and criticized) article on the emergence of the cartel party, a clear separation between parties and public institutions has never been completely achieved, in the evolution of liberal democracies. In contrast, while parties act as agencies of institutionalization, public institutions recognize (de jure or de facto) parties as the legitimate actors of political representation. From this perspective, it is worth considering party change as a process intertwined also with institutional change. To date, however, the analysis of such a relationship has been neglected by political scientists, who have privileged explanations of party change based on other factors, whether at systemic or at a micro level. By avoiding a priori assumptions about causality, our main research question is the following: is it possible to identify patterns of co-evolution between State institutions – more specifically, public administration – and party organizations? Building on a new institutional approach to organization theory, the aim of this article is to investigate to what extent the evolution in the size of party organizations and in the size of public administration has followed similar trajectories. Our study focuses on the United Kingdom and Italy, from 1950 to 2010. Our findings confirm that parties' external face expands when public spending and the number of public employees increase, and vice-versa. The same holds for parties' internal face, at least in the Italian case.