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Jour Fixe with Julia Langbein and Laszlo Bruszt, 11 July 2011
07/08/2011
We kindly invite you to the next Jour Fixe on Monday with Julia Langbein and Laszlo Bruszt on
Organizing Quality
Transnationalization and institutional change in the Polish and Romanian dairy industry
The Jour Fixe begins at 4.15 pm (16.15 Uhr) and takes place at Ihnestr. 26, Room 202.
Abstract:
This paper examines why countries belonging to the same Transnational Integration Regime (TIR) display different development outcomes when taking on rules and norms that facilitate transnational market integration. Why does this process result in the exclusion of social groups in some countries, while others manage regional market integration through inclusive institutional development? To explain this puzzle, we propose to go beyond the analysis of static political and economic incentives and, instead, stress the role of action that might alter the properties of domestic public and private actors, and with that, the ways these actors define their interests and decide about their strategies. Such transformative action can come both from domestic state and non-state actors, and/or from TIRs. We argue that the quality of domestic organization shapes the nature of external intervention of TIRs. By examining regulatory convergence towards European food safety standards in the Polish and Romanian dairy industries, we show that well organized sectors manage to create developmental alliances with domestic state authorities that can use the EU in a proactive way. By contrast, fragmented and atomized economic actors and an insulated state are not capable of either formulating an inclusive development strategy and cannot play an active role when it comes to redistributing EU assistance. In the latter case, the EU has to create basic elements of state organization and it can address the distributive aspects of market integration to a much lesser degree, dissociatin large part of the domestic producers from the market in the process of integrating the sector.
