When analysing the legitimacy of the welfare state, perceptions of the overuse and underuse of welfare are of great importance. Previous literature suggests that many people perceive overuse (misuse or fraud), and there is evidence that people also perceive underuse (non-take-up) of welfare benefits. Perceptions of overuse have therefore been called ‘the Achilles’ heel of welfare state legitimacy'. We analyse data from the European Social Survey for 25 countries and investigate the occurrence and the individual and contextual determinants of overuse and underuse perceptions. We find that both overuse and underuse perceptions are prevalent in all European countries. However, whereas overuse perceptions are more related to ideology, collective images of welfare recipients and selective welfare regimes, underuse perceptions are more shaped by self-interest and the levels of unemployment and social spending in a country. Instead of one Achilles' heel, welfare state legitimacy seems to have two weak spots.Key words: Benefit abuse, European Social Survey, non-take-up, welfare attitudes, welfare states
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The article engages with the recent studies on multilevel regulation. The starting point for the argument is that contemporary multilevel regulation—as most other studies of (postnational) rulemaking—is limited in its analysis. The limitation concerns its monocentric approach that, in turn, deepens the social illegitimacy of contemporary multilevel regulation. The monocentric approach means that the study of multilevel regulation originates in the discussions on the foundation of modern States instead of returning to the origins of rules before the nation State was even created, which is where the actual social capital underlying (contemporary) rules can be found, or so I wish to argue. My aim in this article is to reframe the debate. I argue that we have an enormous reservoir of history, practices, and ideas ready to help us think through contemporary (social) legitimacy problems in multilevel regulation: namely all those practices which preceded the capture of law by the modern State system, such as historical alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices.
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This chapter discusses the efforts of community workers to obtain consent in local communities as a basis for taking action on issues that are affecting local people’s lives. Crucial here is that community workers resist the initial urge to settle for consensus and as a consequencelimit the possibilities for creativity, exploration and interpersonal development. Drawing on two case studies, one from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and one from Chelsea (US), the requirements and process of acquiring consent are outlined. Consent in general refers to a form of permission to act or take action. In this chapter we consider it as a sense of approval by neighbourhood community members to engage in a collective course of action. Community workers often play a crucial part in the acquisition of community consent as they support the process of recognition of the diversity of interests, opinions and values that characterises local life. Consent is necessary for creatingsustainable local initiatives, incorporating, instead of eliminating, conflicting positions. This acknowledgement of diversity can be seen as an ethical requirement in community development practice, but also as a strategic issue for community workers. After all, without being able to obtain legitimacy for their engagement with local issues, effective community development work is impossible.This chapter focuses on neighbourhood-based community development work in geographical communities. However, similar principles apply in all forms of community development, including work with communities of interest and identity. We use the term‘community worker’ to refer to someone who takes on a facilitating and coordinating role with members of communities to build community capacity and/or bring about social change. Such workers may be paid and professionally qualified, or unpaid volunteers andactivists. They may live in the communities where they work/are active, or reside outside these areas. These circumstances influence the legitimacy of their interventions, as well as how consent is gained and consensus reached.
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We aim to understand how actors respond to field logic plurality and maintain legitimacy through business model innovation. Drawing on a longitudinal field study in the fashion industry, we traced how de novo and incumbent firms incorporate circular logics in business models (for sustainability) and uncover how the intersection between issue and exchange fields creates institutional complexity and experimental spaces for business model innovation. Our findings showed a shift in the discourse on circular logic that diverted attention and resources from materials innovation (e.g., recycling) to business model innovation (e.g., circular business models). By juxtaposing institutional complexity and external pressure to maintain legitimacy, we derived four strategic business model innovation responses—preserve, detach, integrate and extend—that illuminate how actors leverage shifting logics and innovate extant business models (for sustainability). We make novel contributions to the literature on organizational fields, business models for sustainability, and business model innovation.
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In the last decades, citizen initiatives have become more important for neighbourhood development. This applies as well to sustaining urban green and the (temporary) development of urban food gardening and small parks. Development through citizen initiatives is not a straight-forward task for planners as it means a new way of planning and legitimizing of planning decisions. Although citizen initiative and involvement in planning has gained much attention in planning practice in the last decades, planners still struggle with it. Citizen and entrepreneurial initiators of land-use projects for green and urban farming also have difficulty to understand the process of project approval or denial. Following the analysis of Schatz and Roberts (2016) of an ‘untenable governance ménage à trois’ of relational, participatory and neoliberal planning, it seems that in bottom-up planning three types of planning come together: technocratic, deliberative, and neoliberal. This makes the current struggles of planners and initiators involved in bottom-up spatial planning no surprise. In this paper we explore, based on a literature review, ingredients for a tool that could help professional planners (civil servants) and initiators to better understand each other and the planning process and improve the substantive discussion on land-use initiatives and in this way the accountability, credibility and thus, legitimacy of decision. To come to our list of ingredients, we take inspiration from the work of Mouffe and others who have stressed the conflicting views and interests involved in any policy issue. Taking her ‘agonistic approach’ to policy-making we aim to develop a tool that gives more room to substance in policy making: the different motivations, ambitions and political views of people in planning processes. Following scholars that take the work of Mouffe one step further, we look at concepts of boundary work and boundary objects (Metze, 2010), policy arrangements (Buizer, 2009) and a trading zone approach (Saporito, 2016) to come to a better understanding of, and a practical solution to, how to work with conflicting views in practice on planning process as well as substance. Second, we turn to social psychology and conflict resolution (Illes et al. 2014, Nash et al. 2010) to better understand the conflicts at stake around land-use decisions and to identify productive and counterproductive strategies to work with these conflicts. Third, we take inspiration in business literature to better understand how we can depict conflicting views for land-use and how we can come to a workable and integral concept of how to use a specific plot of land.
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed light on some important limitations of the ISO 26000 standard for corporate social responsibility (CSR) for the credible communication of corporate CSR claims. The paper aims to identify and explore firm-level strategies to signal adherence to the standard effectively and their legitimacy consequences for the standard. Design/methodology/approach – The identification of firm-level signaling strategies is mainly derived from an institutional description of the ISO 26000 standard and based on anecdotal evidence from current business practice, initiatives that have been taken worldwide by organizations such as national standards institutes, the ISO 26000 text and adjacent ISO documents, including ISO post-publication surveys. The paper is grounded in signaling theory. Findings – Five signaling strategies for firms are derived and explored which may reduce information asymmetries and engage in efficacious signaling of their underlying CSR quality and thus guide the communication of firms’ adherence to the ISO 26000 standard. Research limitations/implications – The findings urge to empirically investigate the use of ISO 26000 signaling strategies including their legitimacy consequences for firms. Practical implications – The findings of this paper have implications for decisions firms make when considering working with ISO 26000 and communicating their adherence, notably regarding the enhancement of the credibility of their CSR claims. Also, it offers suggestions for certification organizations, national standards bodies and policy makers that want to encourage the adoption of CSR standards, ISO 26000 in particular. Social implications – This paper may have implications for evaluating the CSR claims of firms by stakeholders and broader society. Originality/value – This paper is the first one to address inherent signaling problems of ISO 26000 and to identify signaling strategies to counter these problems in a structured way.
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This paper investigates the prospective application of arbitration by Transnational Private Regulation (TPR). It builds on the study of TPR developed by Fabrizio Cafaggi et al. TPR addresses the ever-increasing transfer of regulatory power from national to global levels, and from public to private regulators. TPR entails private regulatory co-operation be-yond the jurisdictional boundaries of States through voluntary standards. The regimes of TPR are built by a variety of actors, such as companies, NGOs, independent experts, and epistemic communities. Examples of TPR can be found in food safety, forestry management, trade, and derivatives, among other fields. More specifically, they concern private actors engaging in transnational coordination of standard setting such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) that was developed to foster responsible management of the world’s forests. There are four main characteristics of TPR: legitimacy, quality, effectiveness, and enforcement. I will describe those four characteristics in brief here. First, the legitimacy of TPR is built around consent through voluntary entry, participation, and exit of regulated entities. Important to this contribution is that the legitimacy of TPR goes beyond its legal dimension, measured by purely legal standards. Hence, the legitimacy of TPR is largely determined by standards developed by social and economic institutions relevant to specific TPR regimes. The role of those institutions in standard settings is higher in private TPR regimes than private-public TPR regimes, where some forms of compliance are mandatory. Second, the quality of TPR corresponds to the ex ante and ex post evaluation cycle of regulatory processes. It is also linked with the transparency of TPR. Third, the effectiveness of TPR is measured according to the extent to which the objectives of TPR (or selected TPR regimes) are met. And finally, enforcement of TPRis understood as ‘ensuring compliance with commitments’. Enforcement of TPR can take place through courts, administrative agencies, and private dispute resolution—including the arbitration at the core of this contribution. Cafaggi’s study identified rather selective use of arbitration in TPR, but also recommended changes to make arbitration law more adaptable to TPR. Furthermore, the study recommended that more specialized dispute resolution institutions are created to exclusively serve TPR. Against this background, I shift the main focus of analysis from TPR to arbitration. Whereas Cafaggi argued that arbitration may be suitable for TPR as a means of private enforcement, in this paper I go even further, arguing that arbitration as a means of informal, out-of-court dispute resolution is well suited to strengthen the normativity of TPR. This is so because private arbitration actors (including, inter alia, arbitrators and arbitral institutions) are already equipped with the tools necessary to facilitate cross-border TPR, which is done through informal standards and procedures with origins in the communitarian values and reputational mechanisms used by different communities before the development of modern States. The roots of most private justice regimes—including arbitration—are informed by communitarian values such as collaboration, participation, and personal trust. Those values, together with other core characteristics of arbitration correspond to all core characteristics of TPR, making both systems comparable and complementary. The analytical framework incorporated in this paper follows the four core characteristics of TPR. Hence, the paper is organized into five sections. The first section contains the introduction. In the second section, I analyze the legitimacy of arbitration vis-à-vis the legitimacy of TPR. In the third section, I investigate the accountability of arbitration as a means of quality signaling vis-à-vis TPR. In the fourth section, I focus on the remedies available to arbitrators in a view of TPR’s effectiveness. Finally, in the fifth section, I analyze enforcement through arbitration and its impact on the exclusiveness versus complementarity of TPR regimes. Conclusions follow, including recommendations for future research. Part of topic "The blurring distinction between public and private in international dispute resolution"
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This study examines how philanthropic foundations develop innovative approaches to grant-making by collaborating with social entrepreneurs who are embedded in marginalized communities. Traditionally, foundations award grants that meet predetermined strategic objectives that support their theories of change. However, this study explores an alternative approach known as participatory grant-making, in which philanthropic foundations cede control over strategy and finance by adopting an innovative approach that is based more on trust and collaboration. By analyzing in-depth interviews from 16 executives, directors, and social entrepreneurs in the United States, we demonstrate how participatory grant-making constitutes a social innovation that inverts traditional power dynamics in the philanthropic field by enhancing legitimacy, and thereby facilitating a more interconnected, inclusive, and equitable approach to solving social problems. This article demonstrates how the implementation of participatory grant-making programs can help to counter the increasing criticisms levied at traditional approaches to grant-making.
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This paper examines the network governance approach of the Dutch Urban Envoy in the context of multilevel governance in the European Union. This paper aims to answer the research question on how the scope of network governance can explore the performance of the Dutch Urban Envoy. By analyzing network characteristics, such as legitimacy, actor-level properties, and network-level properties, this paper seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the performance of the Dutch Urban Envoy. Drawing on previous research, this paper identifies the applicability and limitations of assessing network characteristics in understanding advocacy processes. The paper successfully visualizes the networks of the Dutch Urban Envoy and explores their roles and mandates, contributing to determining the added value of their position. However, the network governance approach has limitations in explaining the tangible successes and challenges of the Dutch Urban Envoy that cannot be directly attributed to their overall performance.
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