The problem of this study was an analysis of the selection of news by newspaper editors in another culture. The purposes of this study were: 1. To examine the news perceptions of three French foreign news editors. 2. To discover if social forces influence the selection of news. 3. To discover if personal attitudes of a foreign news editor affects his selection of U.S. news. 4. To learn whether the institution that employs the foreign news editor affects his selection of U.S. news. 5. To find out if the societal influence to maintain cultural consensus affects selection of U.S. news by a French foreign news editor. 6. To discover if there is a relationship between the number of news items received in a category and the selection of news items from the same category. To carry out the purposes of this study, answers were sought to the following questions: 1. Do values of the French culture affect the selection of U.S. news items? 2. Do the three French news editors have to adjust their selection of U.S. news? 3. Do the attitudes of the French editors affect their selection of U.S. news? 4. Do the publication production problems affect the selection of U.S. news by the French editors? 5. Does the content of the wire affect the selection of U.S. news; that is, will there be a relationship between the number of items received in a category of news and the selection of news items from the same category.

The thesis deals with the problematics of institutional influence of an international organization (NATO), which is placed in the context of transformational processes of defence institutions of Armenia and Georgia reviewed as case-countries. The notion of defence institutions refers largely to ministries of defence and the national armed forces as key units of analysis that are exposed to multiple mechanisms and mods of external institutional influence, that of the Alliance. The objective of the study is to shed light on the dynamics of institutional cooperation between NATO and the case – countries and to highlight the underlying causes responsible for varying results of national compliance in a defined set of functional areas of defence common for Armenia and Georgia. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / Thèse en cotutelle avec l’Universität Bielefeld / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study explores the development of a Western firm's subsidiary in the Ukraine and sets out to contribute to the theoretical development about the managing of subsidiaries in the Post-Soviet market. The cross-institutional approach to analyse the subsidiary has been adopted to explore influence from the institutional setting of the parent firm and from local institutions. In the theoretical framework, special attention is directed to studies analysing the challenges that Western firms encounter when operating in the Post-Soviet market. Institutional theory therefore serves as a framework for theories on market entries, networks and management transfers.The empirical study is based on a case study conducted in connection to a training project for local employees of a Western firm's subsidiary operating in the Ukraine. Besides being a source of inspiration, the training project provided good access to respondents and insights about the challenges that the subsidiary faced.The analysis shows that the introduction of the Western firm's management in the subsidiary reflects in the local employees' forming of identities. A clear pattern is that local employees' development of identities in line with the Western firm's norms is supported by socialisation in settings dominated by the Western firm. A setting dominated by conflicts between Western and local norms, in contrast, resulted in developments of conflict identities. The analysis of the subsidiary's managing of influences from the local institutional setting indicates that this concerned filtering. Striking was that the subsidiary was successful in managing influences when the filtering conditions were characterised by consonance. Looking into aspects making the filtering of external influences difficult, the analysis points out barter trade and local actors' boundary spanning towards authorities in the Ukrainian society as aspects creating dissonances and vacuum. Thus, influences characterised by dissonance and/or vacuum made it particularly difficult for the subsidiary to manage these influences.One of the major contributions of this thesis is the cross-institutional approach to analyse developments in a subsidiary in the Post-Soviet market. By applying this approach the study suggests that the managing of a cross-institutional setting concerns both internal and external boundary spanning. Of vital importance for the internal boundary spanning are issues influencing local employees' forming of a 'we' with the Western firm's representatives. The standpoint is that this concerns local employees' identity identification, which is a new perspective on management transfers towards a subsidiary in the Post-Soviet market. Concerning the managing of external boundary spanning, the study points towards the importance of observing local actors' ways of dealing with dissonances and vacuum in local networks. / digitalisering@umu

This thesis addresses the question as to why multilevel politics is becoming an integral part of politics in Europe. Multilevel politics is conceptualized as a system which functions through a complex web of political relations within and across levels of decision making. The thesis argues that the rise of multilevel politics can be explained by its institutionalization in terms of the emergence, the evolution and especially the effects of relevant institutions. Based on a mixed-method research project, the influence of European institutions on subnational actors and the alignment of actor motives with institutional characteristics are empirically shown. The first chapter of the dissertation establishes the centrality of institutions for political transformation, examines the role of transnational and domestic institutions for multilevel politics, and contextualizes the research question in terms of institution-actor relations. The second chapter develops a new-institutionalist theoretical framework that explains the emergence, the evolution and the effects of the institutions, and formulates a series of hypotheses with regard to freestanding institutional influence, power distribution, material benefits and political identification. The third chapter outlines the mixed-method research design which addresses individual-level and institutional-level variations through a Europe-wide survey and a comparative case study. The fourth chapter on survey results shows generally favourable views on multilevel politics, and strong associations of these views with the independent variables under scrutiny. The fifth chapter specifies a multivariate model which includes all posited variables and confirms the majority of the hypotheses. Therefore, the new-institutionalist argument is broadly confirmed, while there is relatively weak evidence to sustain sociological explanations. The final chapter compares the Committee of the Regions and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and examines the institutional characteristics which correspond to the hypothesized variables. It is then concluded that the two institutions share several overarching similarities, and display complementarity in other aspects.