With the Treaty of Rome, European states designed a set of policy domains related to trade and the regulation of markets, a complex of governmental organisations, and a binding set of substantive and procedural rules to help them achieve the construction of a European Economic Community...

At the core of the European Union, has been the gradual creation of the "single market" across western Europe. The European Union began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and expanded to become the European Economic Community (EEC). The original intent of the ECSC was to stabilize...

Economic globalization refers to three related processes: 1) the growth in the world economy, 2) the change in the relations between first and third world countries that has resulted from the use of information technologies to reorganize production nationally and globally, and 3) the integration...

The problem of the relationship between actors and the social structures in which they are embedded is central to sociological theory. This paper suggests that the "new institutionalist" focus on fields, domains, or games provides an alternative view of how to think about this problem by...

"New Institutional" theories have proliferated across the social sciences. While they have substantial disagreements, they agree that institutions are created to produce local social orders, are social constructions, fundamentally about how powerful groups create rules of interaction and...

This paper describes two related epidemic models of rumor transmission in an age-structured population. Rumors share with communicable disease certain basic aspects, which means that formal models of epidemics may be applied to the transmission of rumors. The results show that rumors may become...

Not so very long ago it was impossible to interest students of comparative politics in law and courts which they thought had little or nothing to do with the politics of the nations they studied. Simple propositions that were truisms among law and courts specialists, such as that litigation was...

Recent years have seen an explosion of new attempts to develop and implement voluntary third-party certification programs to encourage environmentally and socially responsible production practices for globally traded commodities. This study seeks to shed light on the nature and potentials of...