Abstract
A core tenet of our argument relates to the capacity of national to learn and adapt to ever changing global environments that is now more and more determined by global governance frameworks that defines rules, transparency. There are three main arguments that we are making. First, global epistemic communities should promote institutional learning at the local level through knowledge transfer as a vehicle to establish national and local epistemic communities. Second, institutional learning results in improvements made to policies as outcomes but also the institutional arrangements in place without directly challenging the existing way of doing things.
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Notes
- 1.
For future information on this topic, see The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) at: http://www.unece.org. UN/ECE is one of the five regional commissions of the United Nations. Its member states, currently numbering 55, include not only Western, Central, and Eastern Europe but also Israel, the USA, and Canada. The UN/ECE Working Party on Technical Harmonization and Standardization Policies provides a unique forum for debating and anticipating problems that might otherwise arise, with equal participation by all governments concerned and by international, regional, and national organizations, and the private sector.
- 2.
Tanja A. Börzel, “What’s so Special about Policy Networks? An Exploration of the Concept and its Usefulness in Studying European Governance”, EioP, 1997, Vol. 1, No. 16; and Nicolas Dahan, “The role of multinational corporations in transnational institution building: A policy network perspective”, Human Relations, 2006, Vol. 59, No. 11, 1571–1600.
- 3.
This is not to say that governments are not powerful holders of national interests, but rather, they are among shareholders of these interests together with other organizations and institutions.
- 4.
For more analysis of control see the regulation and standards setting section in this study.
- 5.
Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990.
- 6.
Ibid, pp. 31.
- 7.
Lasswell, H., and Kaplan, A., Power and Society, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950, pp. xii.
- 8.
Deleon, P. “The Democratization of the Policy Sciences.” Public Administration Review, 1992, 52 (2), pp. 163.
- 9.
Dryzek, J. “Policy Sciences of Democracy.” Polity, 1989, 22, pp. 98.
- 10.
Formal rationality is a type of decision-making, which is subject to calculation that goes into an action to increase its chance of success. Its decisive feature is that it eliminates an orientation to values because they are nontechnical. Rationality is formal when problems are solved by the application of technical criteria. Substantive rationality is a type of decision-making, which is subject to values and an appeal to ethical norms. Substantive rationality does not take into account the nature of outcomes. Weber argues that formal rationality had replaced substantive rationality, because bureaucracy stresses a technical orientation to means and ends.
- 11.
The reader should note that this observation is purely based on the prevailing trends in the global system, and therefore is free from the authors’ value judgment.
- 12.
See Adler, N. and Bartholomew S., “Managing globally competent people”, Academy of Management Executive, 1992, 6(3), 52–65; Caligiuri, P. and Di Santo, V., “Global competence: What it is, and can it be developed through global assignments”, Human Resource Planning Journal, 2001, 24(3), 27–35; and Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R. I., The knowing doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
- 13.
Regarding the complex technical areas, consider, for example, the increased complexity of categories and criteria for institutional regulation in terms of establishing a mechanism for intellectual property rights (IPR).
- 14.
In fact, the existence of national bureaucracies is indeed directly related to their ability to control and monopolize expertise knowledge. A vivid example of the importance of this tendency to monopolize knowledge occurred during the energy crisis with the realization that the large oil companies possessed nearly exclusive knowledge on the state of oil reserves.
- 15.
It should be noted that in response to these issues, many important questions may arise that are not relevant to this study, and hence are left unattended. For instance, under the present condition, does formation of global solution contribute to a fairer world system in which all States recognize their historical responsibility for past neglect? Or is it simply an expedient means of ensuring the participation of developing economies in what are primarily developed economies concerns?
- 16.
For instance, see Paul R. Sparrow, Chris Brewster and Hilary Harris, Globalizing Human Resource Management, Routledge, New York, 2004.
- 17.
Innovation networks are real and virtual infrastructures and infra-technologies that serve to nurture creativity, trigger invention, and catalyze innovation in a public and/or private domain context (for instance, government–university–industry public–private research and technology development coopetitive partnerships) (Carayannis and Campbell 2006; Carayannis and Campbell 2009).
- 18.
Knowledge clusters are agglomerations of cospecialized, mutually complementary, and reinforcing knowledge assets in the form of “knowledge stocks” and “knowledge flows” that exhibit self-organizing, learning-driven, dynamically adaptive competences and trends in the context of an open systems perspective (Carayannis and Campbell 2006; Carayannis and Campbell 2009).
- 19.
Beyond this basic definition, which is debatable, a wide and often confusing array of different understandings and applications of the policy network concept can be found in the literature. Often authors have only a vague idea of what a policy network is and hardly ever make their definitions explicit. Whereas some consider policy networks to be a metaphor to denote the fact that policy making involves a large number and a wide variety of participants, others understand the networks to be a valuable tool for analyzing the relations between participants interacting with each other in a given policy sector. A third group sees policy networks as a method of social structure analysis, but do not agree on using network analysis as a quantitative or qualitative method. Yet most would agree that policy networks provide at least a minimally useful toolbox for analysis.
- 20.
Carayannis, E. and Alexander, J. “Electronic commerce and knowledge economics: trust and co-opetition in a global business environment,” Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, at http://www.arraydev.com/commerce/JIBC/970305.htm.
- 21.
Drucker, P. (1991) Post-capitalist Society. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford.
- 22.
Stewart, T. (1994) ‘Your company’s most valuable asset: intellectual capital’, Fortune, October 3, pp. 68–74.
- 23.
Arthur, W. B. (1996) ‘Increasing returns and the new world of business’, Harvard Business Review, July–August, pp. 100–109.
- 24.
At best, prices reflect those values of input that could transfer easily from one firm to another. Thus inputs’ importance for intrafirm activities or for activities that are idiosyncratic to a single firm are ignored.
- 25.
In fact, knowledge itself (in its many forms) is nearly as ambiguous as an idea, or the notion of value or importance. (see S. G. Winter, “Knowledge and competence as strategic assests”, in D. J. Teece, edit, The Competitive Challenge: Strategies for Industrial Innovation and Renewal, Cambridge, MA, Ballinger, 159–85).
- 26.
For a review and classic example of what we call the “knowledge economy rhetoric” from an economic perspective see R.G. Harris, “The knowledge-based economy: intellectual origins and new economic perspectives”, International Journal of Management Reviews, 2001, vol3, no.1, pp.21–40.
- 27.
F. Blackler, “Epilogue: knowledge, knowledge work and organizations”, in N. Bontis, and C.W. Choo (eds) The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital and Organizational Knowledge, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- 28.
Peter, F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New ‘Post-Modern’ World, 1959.
- 29.
Wikipedia: Knowledge workers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_workers.
- 30.
D. Knights, F. Murray and H. Willmott, “Networking as knowledge work: The study of strategic inter-organizational development in the financial services industry”, Journal of Management Studies, 1993, vol.30, no.6, pp.975–95; and U. Schultze, “A confessional account of an ethnography about knowledge work”, MIS Quarterly, 2000, vol. 24, no.1, pp.1–39.
- 31.
Alvesson 1993.
- 32.
“Knowledge for Development”, World Development Report 1998/99, the World Bank, Washington DC, pp. 16.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Gregorio Martin de Castro (et al), Knowledge creation processes: theory and empirical evidence from knowledge-intensive firms, Basingstoke [England], New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- 35.
Freidson (2001) distinguishes other types of knowledge aside from formal knowledge as an important aspect of what he calls “working knowledge” – knowledge and skills used in work. He talks about “practical knowledge” as the knowledge that is largely free of formal concepts and theories, learned by experience and instrumental for performing concrete tasks in concrete settings (Freidson 2001, p. 31). Another type of knowledge is “everyday knowledge.” Everyday knowledge is knowledge that is taught to children in households, communities, and in formal schooling.
- 36.
- 37.
Behavior such as opportunism, which basically means that one, or both parties, try to maximize their utility at the expense of the other party’s benefit.
- 38.
See Mauro F. Guillén, The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain, Princeton University Press, 2001; Daniel W. Drezner, “Globalization and Policy Convergence” International Studies Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 2001), pp. 53–78; Dwyer, Jennifer Holt, Why is Getting Reform Right Taking So Long? Japanese Institutional Stasis and Change in the Era of Global Finance, paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii, Mar 05, 2005; Daniel W. Drezner, “Reflection and Reappraisal Globalization and Policy Convergence”, International Studies Review, 2001, vol-3 (1), pp 53–78; and Jacob Park, “Unbundling Globalization: Agent of Policy Convergence”, International Studies Review, 2002, 4 (1), 230–233.
- 39.
It should be noted that the mandate of international advisory processes related to international organization and global governance is not a static variable, which is determined once for all during advisory period. Instead, it is subject to change and fine-tuning over time. The strength of the mandate is a function of the “level of transnational political consensus on the need for and feasibility of meaningful action.” States usually confer authority to international advisory organizations only after their realizations of benefits for underlined course of action. Political consensus on the need for action (however achieved) determines the strength of the state corporation.
- 40.
Kaufmann, D., Kray, A. and Zoido-Lobaton, P, Governance Matters I, Policy Research Working Paper, WPS 2196, World Bank, Washington DC, 1998; Kaufmann, D., Kray, A. and Zoido-Lobaton, P., Governance Matters II, Policy Research Working Paper, WPS 2772, World Bank, Washington DC, 2002; and Kaufmann, D., Kray, A. and Mastruzzi, M., Governance Matters III, Policy Research Working Paper, WPS 3106, World Bank, Washington DC, 2003.
- 41.
Chang, H-J., “Breaking the Mould – An Institutionalist Political Economy Alternative to the Neo-Liberal Theory of the Market and the State”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 26, 5, 2002.
- 42.
Clark. Kerr, The Future of Industrial Societies: Convergence or Continuing Diversity? Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 3.
- 43.
See Richard Mckenzie and Dwight Lee, Quicksilver Capital: How the rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World, New York, Free Press, 1991. Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far, Washington DC, Institute for International Economics, 1997, p.36. Moreover, in government regulation, a race to the bottom is a known phenomenon which occurs when competition between nations or states (over investment capital, for example) leads to the progressive dismantling of regulatory standards. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom.
- 44.
Johnson, Juliet, “Financial Globalization and National Sovereignty”, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston Marriott Copley Place, Sheraton Boston & Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts, Aug 28, 2002; “Globalization and Policy Convergence: Symposium Overview”, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 3 (2), August, 2001; Thierry Balzacq, Sergio Carrera, Security Versus Freedom?: A Challenge for Europe’s Future, Ashgate Publishing, 2006; William Roberts L. Clark , Usha Nair Reichert , Sandra Lynn Lomas and Kevin Parker, “International and Domestic Constraints on Political Business Cycles in OECD Economies”, International Organization, 1998, 52 (1), pp.87–120; David Vogel, Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1995; Philip Cerny, “Globalization and Erosion of Democracy,” European Journal of Political Research, 1999 vol.36, no- 1, pp.1–26.
- 45.
Colin J. Benett, “What is Policy Convergence and What Causes it?, British Journal of Political Science, April 1991, vol.21, no.2, pp. 218.
- 46.
Ibid, pp.218.
- 47.
Ronald Brickman, Sheila Jasanoff and Thomas Ilgen, Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United Sates, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1985, pp.29–33.
- 48.
Bennett 1991.
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Carayannis, E.G., Pirzadeh, A., Popescu, D. (2012). Epistemic Communities, Knowledge Transfer, and Institutional Learning. In: Institutional Learning and Knowledge Transfer Across Epistemic Communities. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management, vol 13. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1551-0_4
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