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In recent years, a widespread consensus has emerged about the necessity of establishing bridges between quantitative and qualitative approaches to empirical research in political science. In this article, we discuss the use of the synthetic control method as a way to bridge the quantitative/qualitative divide in comparative politics. The synthetic control method provides a systematic way to choose comparison units in comparative case studies. This systematization opens the door to precise quantitative inference in small-sample comparative studies, without precluding the application of qualitative approaches. Borrowing the expression from Sidney Tarrow, the synthetic control method allows researchers to put \"qualitative flesh on quantitative bones.\" We illustrate the main ideas behind the synthetic control method by estimating the economic impact of the 1990 German reunification on West Germany.

Ambidexterity research has presented a range of structural and contextual approaches for implementing a dual orientation across organizations. Much less is known about the preceding process through which organizations decide to adopt an ambidextrous orientation. In this paper we focus on this first step—the charter definition process through which the activities and responsibilities of an organizational unit are agreed. Most prior studies implicitly assume that senior executives at some point identify the need to become ambidextrous and subsequently design supportive structures and contexts to implement their choice. Based on an inductive multilevel case study of four alliances, we show how this mandated (or top-down) charter definition process can be complemented with an alternative emergent (or bottom-up) charter definition process in which frontline managers take the initiative to adopt an ambidextrous orientation in their part of the organization. This emergent process is important because it enables frontline managers to respond in a timely manner to changing requirements of which senior executives are still unaware. We use the findings from our case study to develop potentially generalizable observations on the level of initiation, the tensions, the management approaches to deal with the tensions, and the outcomes that characterize this emergent charter definition process. We then put forward a multilevel process framework of how organizations initiate an ambidextrous orientation, and we discuss theoretical implications for the general ambidexterity literature, the nascent dynamic view on ambidexterity, and the broader research on how charters in organizations evolve.

In 1961 South Korea was mired in poverty. By 1979 it had a powerful industrial economy and a vibrant civil society in the making, which would lead to a democratic breakthrough eight years later. The transformation took place during the years of Park Chung Hee's presidency. Park seized power in a coup in 1961 and ruled as a virtual dictator until his assassination in October 1979. He is credited with modernizing South Korea, but at a huge political and social cost. South Korea's political landscape under Park defies easy categorization. The state was predatory yet technocratic, reform-minded yet quick to crack down on dissidents in the name of political order. The nation was balanced uneasily between opposition forces calling for democratic reforms and the Park government's obsession with economic growth. The chaebol (a powerful conglomerate of multinationals based in South Korea) received massive government support to pioneer new growth industries, even as a nationwide campaign of economic shock therapy-interest hikes, devaluation, and wage cuts-met strong public resistance and caused considerable hardship. This landmark volume examines South Korea's era of development as a study in the complex politics of modernization. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources in both English and Korean, these essays recover and contextualize many of the ambiguities in South Korea's trajectory from poverty to a sustainable high rate of economic growth.

In the post-Soviet era, democracy has made little progress in Central Asia. InChaos, Violence, Dynasty,Eric McGlinchey presents a compelling comparative study of the divergent political courses taken by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan in the wake of Soviet rule. McGlinchey examines economics, religion, political legacies, foreign investment, and the ethnicity of these countries to evaluate the relative success of political structures in each nation.McGlinchey explains the impact of Soviet policy on the region, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Ruling from a distance, a minimally invasive system of patronage proved the most successful over time, but planted the seeds for current \"neo-patrimonial\" governments. The level of direct Soviet involvement during perestroika was the major determinant in the stability of ensuing governments. Soviet manipulations of the politics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the late 1980s solidified the role of elites, while in Kyrgyzstan the Soviets looked away as leadership crumbled during the ethnic riots of 1990. Today, Kyrgyzstan is the poorest and most politically unstable country in the region, thanks to a small, corrupt, and fractured political elite. In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov maintains power through the brutal suppression of disaffected Muslims, who are nevertheless rising in numbers and influence. In Kazakhstan, a political machine fueled by oil wealth and patronage underlies the greatest economic equity in the region, and far less political violence.McGlinchey's timely study calls for a more realistic and flexible view of the successful aspects of authoritarian systems in the region that will be needed if there is to be any potential benefit from foreign engagement with the nations of Central Asia, and similar political systems globally.

Governing common pool resources (CPR) in the face of disturbances such as globalization and climate change is challenging. The outcome of any CPR governance regime is the influenced by local combinations of social, institutional, and biophysical factors, as well as cross-scale interdependencies. In this study, we take a step towards understanding multiple-causation of CPR outcomes by analyzing (1) the co-occurrence of design principles (DPs) by activity (irrigation, fishery and forestry), and (2) the combination(s) of DPs leading to social and ecological success. We analyzed 69 cases pertaining to three different activities: irrigation, fishery, and forestry. We find that the importance of the design principles is dependent upon the natural and hard human made infrastructure (i.e. canals, equipment, vessels etc.). For example, clearly defined social boundaries are important when the natural infrastructure is highly mobile (i.e. tuna fish), while monitoring is more important when the natural infrastructure is more static (i.e. forests or water contained within an irrigation system). However, we also find that congruence between local conditions and rules and proportionality between investment and extraction are key for CPR success independent from the natural and human hard made infrastructure. We further provide new visualization techniques for co-occurrence patterns and add to qualitative comparative analysis by introducing a reliability metric to deal with a large meta-analysis dataset on secondary data where information is missing or uncertain.

Embodying circular economy transition as a sustainable city concept, circularity in cities is increasingly the subject of policy innovations, urban strategies, and research & development agendas. It seems evident that a circular city should include more than the sum or multiplication of urban circular economies. Nevertheless, prevailing discourses remain till today business focused, and how circular economy creates economic, social, and environmental resilience in cities has yet to be explored. This paper conceptualizes the notion of urban circularity. It introduces an analytical framework sorting existing circularity concepts that are based on design and planning characteristics. Adopting comparative case study research on four contemporary forward-looking spatial representations of ‘circular’ places, this paper articulates their circularity interpretation. Demonstrating how diverging sustainability framings and political positions are embedded within the studied spatial representations, this paper aims to bring clarity in contemporary circular city approaches for policymakers as well as for spatial practitioners. The paper concludes with an agenda for multi-perspective and multi-dimensional circular city design, which is anchored in place specific and multi-scalar transition relations. It suggests urban landscape design as a disciplinary field to act as a pivot in transdisciplinary circularity design and research.

The effectiveness of multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in tackling grand social and environmental challenges depends on productive dialogue among diverse parties. Facilitating such dialogue in turn entails building common ground in form of joint knowledge, beliefs, and suppositions. To explore how such common ground can be built, we study the role of different facilitators and their strategies for bridging the perspectives of competing stakeholder groups in two contrasting MSIs. The German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles was launched in an initially hostile communicative environment, whereas the Fossil Free Sweden Initiative proceeded in a fertile communicative environment. We trace how the facilitators in these initiatives achieved common ground through three bridging strategies—communicative integration, temporal calibration, and process alignment—adapted to the communicative environments of these MSIs. In hostile communicative environments, facilitators achieve common ground by steering diverging stakeholder groups towards ‘reconciling’ their different language registers, knowledge bases, and meaning systems to ‘meet in the middle’ on points of agreement and shared interests. In fertile communicative environments characterised by greater mutual trust, facilitators can steer interactants to ‘strategically appropriate’ to the language, knowledge, and meaning system of a particular stakeholder group to win this group’s support. Our analysis contributes to a better understanding of how productive multi-stakeholder dialogue can be facilitated.

Much of the change that social movements try to accomplish requires changing practices inside organizations, yet reform implementation is difficult to achieve. This comparative case study of two hospitals demonstrates that implementing reform inside organizations may require internal reformers not only to mobilize with one another but also to stand up to internal defenders' countertactics in everyday encounters. Because reformer alliances across identity lines often require reformers with different statuses to collaborate with one another, defenders can divide reformer coalitions by linking reform practices to a status characteristic associated with lower-status reformers, denigrating higher-status reformers by associating them with these practices, and reintegrating higher-status reformers into the defender group. When status threat inside an organization is high to begin with, higher-status reformers are likely to be concerned about loss of privilege in the face of defenders' status-based countertactics and, in response, distance themselves from reform practices and align themselves with defenders to protect their identity and its rewards. This can undermine the multi-identity reformer coalition and cause change to fail. These findings regarding status-based countertactics contribute to our understanding of social movement implementation and microinstitutional change.

Background Peer workers are people with personal experience of mental distress, employed within mental health services to support others with similar experiences. Research has identified a range of factors that might facilitate or hinder the introduction of new peer worker roles into mental health services. While there is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of peer worker delivered interventions, there are no studies exploring how implementation might be associated with effect. Methods This was a qualitative comparative case study using data from interviews with 20 peer workers and their five supervisors. Peer workers delivered peer support for discharge from inpatient to community mental health care as part of a randomised controlled trial. In the trial, level of participant engagement with peer support was associated with better outcome (hospital readmission). Study sites with higher levels of engagement also had higher scores on a measure of fidelity to peer support principles. We compared data from sites with contrasting levels of engagement and fidelity using an analytical framework derived from implementation theory. Results In high engagement-high fidelity sites, there was regular work with clinical teams preparing for working alongside peer workers, and a positive relationship between staff on inpatient wards and peer workers. The supervisor role was well resourced, and delivery of peer support was highly consistent with the intervention manual. In low engagement-low fidelity sites peer workers were employed in not-for-profit organisations to support people using public mental health services and in rural areas. Supervisors faced constrained resources and experienced barriers to joint working between organisations. In these sites, peer workers could experience challenging relationships with ward staff. Issues of geography and capacity limited opportunities for supervision and team-building, impacting consistency of delivery. Conclusions This study provides clear indication that implementation can impact delivery of peer support, with implications for engagement and, potentially, outcomes of peer worker interventions. Resourcing issues can have knock-on effects on consistency of delivery, alongside challenges of access, authority and relationship with clinical teams, especially where peer workers were employed in not-for-profit organisations. Attention needs to be paid to the impact of geography on implementation. Trial registration ISRCTN registry number ISRCTN10043328, registered 28 November 2016.

This study analyzes the previous literature on the online safety of children and youth under “the 4Cs risk framework” concerning contact, content, conduct, and contract risks. It then conducts a comparative study of Australia, Canada, and the UK, comparing their institutions, governance, and government-led programs. Relevant research in Childhood Education Studies is insufficient both in quantity and quality. To minimize the four major online risks for children and youth in cyberspace, it is necessary to maintain a regulatory approach to the online exposure of children under the age of 13. Moreover, the global society should respond together to these online risks with “multi-level” policymaking under a “multi-stakeholder approach”. At the international level, multilateral discussion within the OECD and under UN subsidiaries should continue to lead international cooperation. At the domestic level, a special agency in charge of online safety for children and youth should be established in each country, encompassing all relevant stakeholders, including educators and digital firms. At the school and family levels, both parents and teachers need to work together in facilitating digital literacy education, providing proper guidelines for the online activities of children and youth, and helping them to become more satisfied and productive users in the digital era.