Cold war isomorphism: communist regimes and the West European model of worker participation

Hedin, Astrid

doi:10.1080/23254823.2016.1211024

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Yet liberalism was ascendant in world society in the decades following World War II, not hegemonic. Most notably, the umbrella of communism linked to the Soviet Union spawned its own distinctly illiberal global and transnational institutional structures (Hedin 2016). In 1949, for instance, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) emerged to promote cooperation among national planned economies.…”

Section: A Global Argument: Heterogeneous Institutionalized Models In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

Lerch,

Frank,

Schofer

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.

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Section: A Global Argument: Heterogeneous Institutionalized Models In...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

Lerch,

Frank,

Schofer

2023

Am Sociol Rev

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“…In all such institutionalist accounts of decision-making, whether from the top down or from the bottom up, the focus has inevitably been on Western-style democracies (although, see Hedin, 2016: for a case of reverse diffusion of labor policy models during International Labour Organization negotiations in the Cold War). Our aim in this paper is to test whether a state as different from such democracies as the Russian Federation – and indeed one that has long been a discursive Other of such democracies – also fits into the neoinstitutionalist framing of worldwide synchronization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Russia in world society: A comparative perspective on international references in parliamentary debates

2018

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This article explores how international references in parliaments build a synchronized world polity, even in countries that are often portrayed as being at odds with the rest of the world. The article asks whether and how Russian parliamentarians refer to the international community, and how such references compare with parliamentary debates in other countries. The "mesophenomenological" argument developed here connects World Society Theory, which demonstrates global isomorphism, with national studies of Russia, which argue for important national particularities. The empirical analysis draws on a stratified random sample of debates on draft laws in the Russian Duma from 1994 to 2013, comparable to similar samples from six other countries. The results show that 1) Russian parliamentarians refer to the international community in the same level and the same forms as in other countries; 2) Russian This is the post print version of the article, which has been published in

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“…Relevant research includes studies of the discursive struggles over normality and stigma, rightful roles and legitimate authority in East-West relations (Zarakol, 2010; cf. Elias, 1994; Mattern and Zarakol, 2016), the rise and fall of dominant narratives underpinning Cold War national security policy (Krebs, 2015), states’ use of strategic narratives to gain international influence by shaping foreign norms, identities and cause-effect stories (Miskimmon et al, 2013, 2017; Szostek, 2017a; Hedin, 2016), and the role of micro-level transnational linkage and interpersonal communication for public reception of strategic narratives (Szostek, 2017b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illiberal deliberation: Communist regime travel controls as state capacity in everyday world politics

Hedin¹

2018

Cooperation and Conflict

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Much social theory takes for granted that transnational people-to-people dialogue is inherently liberal in process and content – a haven of everyday authenticity that shelters ideas of human rights and democratic reform. In contrast, this contribution shows how communist regimes built and institutionalised an encompassing administrative state capacity to control and shape micro-level professional contacts with the West. This extensive but secret system of coercion, which was brought to light only with the opening of former communist regime archives, set a markedly illiberal framework for everyday East–West deliberations during the Cold War. Effectively, the travel cadre system may not only have delayed the demise of Soviet bloc communism, by isolating the population from Western influences. It was also intended to serve as a vehicle for the discursive influence of Soviet type regimes on the West. The article provides one of the first and most detailed English language maps of the administrative routines of a communist regime travel cadre system, based on the East German example. Furthermore, drawing on social mechanisms methodology, the article sets up a micro-level ‘how it could work’ scheme over how travel cadre systems can be understood as a state capacity, unique to totalitarian regimes, to help sway political discourse in open societies.

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Cold war isomorphism: communist regimes and the West European model of worker participation

Cited by 4 publications

References 79 publications

The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

Russia in world society: A comparative perspective on international references in parliamentary debates

Illiberal deliberation: Communist regime travel controls as state capacity in everyday world politics

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