National governments are increasingly sharing the stage with many other forms of empowered social actors and authoritative players. Worldwide, alongside governmental bureaucracies, we witness the proliferation of non-for-profit and voluntary associations, business organizations and corporations, civic action committees and political parties, as well as celebrities and cultural icons. Importantly, whether they are individual- and collective social actors, these various actors are bestowed with the legitimate authority to speak their mind, act on their agenda, and influence the course of social progress. How might we conceptualize the role of such empowered social actors? This compilation of research and commentary gathers a range of institutional perspectives investigating what the devolution of state power and the so-called democratization of social action means for the nature of authority and how the multiplicity and variety of social actors impacts societies worldwide, extending from focus on agents to actors to actorhood.

The process of globalization has meant the intensification of global interdependencies and the consolidation of the global as a social horizon, and this has provided fertile breeding grounds for new organizations and the elaboration of extinct ones, This book describes and analyzes these organizations, and the modern managerialism that has accompanied them, looking at such issues as management education, corporate governance, accounting, and human resource management.

All around the world, societies are experiencing an explosion of organizations and organizing: community clubs, religious groups, social movements, as well as schools, hospitals, businesses and government agencies, increasingly take the form of complex and formal organization. Why? Why is global society recast in this format and why so fiercely? This book explores various dimensions of the trends of expansion, formalization, and standardization of organizing worldwide by exploring such organizational legacies as accounting, business management, corporate social responsibility, and performance benchmarks. Featuring contributions from prominent academics, the book argues that these processes can be attributed to globalization and to its specific tendencies of universalism, rationalization, and rise of the modern notion of the strongly bounded and purposive social actor. An application of institutional arguments to global issues, the book will be of interest to academics and researchers of Organization Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and Geography.