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Special Issue on Institutional Theories and Functional Differentiation

Guest Editors:
Steffen Roth, ESC Rennes School of Business, France and Yerevan State University, Armenia
Matthias Georg Will, University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

The Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics plans to publish a Special Issue on Institutional Theories and Functional Differentiation in its forthcoming Volume 29, Issue 1, 2017.

Background
Modern societies have often been defined as secularized, mediatized, or economized. These definitions, however, can be made only against the background of functional differentiation, which is said to be the dominant form of social differentiation in modern societies. Today, modern man naturally talks business, defends the separation of powers, and tends to avoid religion in small talk. But yet, functional differentiation is still implied rather than applied by most scholars, with modern social sciences remaining predominantly concerned with the cross-tabling of variables associated with pre-modern forms of differentiation. Many otherwise accurate analyses of modern societies therefore remain contingent mainly on political and economic key factors, thus performing rather than studying identities of the persons, organizations, and societies concerned.

Institutional theories are not limited to this narrow set of key factors insofar as they make plenty of cases for the idea that individual and organizational identities are defined by the systems’ embeddedness in a broader scope of social, moral, cultural and further contexts. Nonetheless, we still lack a clear picture of what an institution is and how to determine the precise number of institutions that exist in modern societies. Institutionalist attempts to define identities by reference to institutional embeddedness therefore refer to the concept of institution itself.

The aim of this special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics is thus to look at interactions of institutional theories and theories of social differentiation, with a particular focus being on theories of functional differentiation.

Research questions

Contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics will systematically explore new or yet existing interfaces of institutional theories and theories of social differentiation. One outcome of these explorations may be more systematic and colourful views of different forms of institutional embeddedness. Further possible topics of contributions to this special issue may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• How and why are certain institutions taken for other institutions? Why are, for example, particular laws, the mass media or and “the institution of religion” decoded as political institutions.
• How may research in polyphonic or multifunctional organization be consistently linked with institutional organization theory?
• What is the impact of mental models and artefacts on the development and design of institutions? Which models or artefactspromote the logic of special sub-systems and which promote all sub-systems?
• What cognitive challenges are linked with functional differentiation?

For further information about this special issue, please contact the editorial team via jie@sagepub.in. Aspiring authors are requested to initially send in a brief proposal of max. 1000 words. After the review and acceptance of these proposals, full papers (not exceeding 8000 words) are to be submitted in line with the submission guidelines available at http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202086/manuscriptSubmission

Proposals submitted to the special issue should be emailed to jie@sagepub.in, and will be subject to the standard reviewing process of the journal.

Submission of proposals: September 30, 2015.
Notification of authors of accepted proposals: October 31, 2015.
Submission of manuscripts: March 1, 2016.
Resubmission of revised manuscripts: July 1, 2016.