CBP’s International Conference and Workshop on Institutional Competitiveness

Center for Business and Politics cordially invites you to participate in our international conference workshop on institutional competitiveness March 10-11, Skagen, Denmark.

CBP’s International Conference and Workshop on Institutional Competitiveness

Center for Business and Politics cordially invites you to participate in our international workshop on institutional competitiveness March 10-11, Skagen, Denmark.

Globalization is on everybody’s lips. It takes up increasing space in the national and international media. Politicians initiate action plans to meet the challenges of globalization and appoint expert committees with mandates to find the true face of the phenomenon. University researchers and think tanks increasingly receive grants to investigate all possible aspects of globalization, and in recent years an enormous amount of scientific articles and books on the subject has been published.

Institutional competitiveness is a much newer concept. As the debate on globalization has reached a level of maturity, attention is increasingly directed at the ways in which people organize themselves in a global polity. Individuals, families, cities, corporations, states and international organizations cope with globalization in very different ways and, depending on the criteria established, some manage better than others. That institutional rules are changing is hardly a surprising and new phenomenon, but the term institutional competitiveness draws our attention to the link that may exist between globalization and the capacity of institutions to deliver public purpose in the broadest sense of the term.

Both terms, globalization and institutional competitiveness, are meta-concepts in the sense that they have no fixed meaning. In a sense, globalization and institutional competitiveness are “what you make of them”. Different literatures and disciplines define the concepts in their own idiosyncratic ways. This can be considered as an analytical problem, but it can also just be an indication of a healthy pluralistic debate on areas which many people perceive off as essential. The purpose here is not to pinpoint one single, authoritative definition of the terms. Rather, the overall idea is to open up the discursive space and let the many faces of globalization and institutional competitiveness come out in free competition. Basically, the point of departure taken here is that there is no “correct” way of defining the terms, but by letting them all play together it is the hope that we can highlight new interesting relations between globalization, on one hand, and institutional competitiveness, on the other.

The purpose of the conference is to improve our understanding of globalization in order to see what sort of mechanism of change it generates. Moreover, the conference aims at providing knowledge of institutional competitiveness in relation to several areas such as business systems, welfare systems, public sector etc. 

Enrollment:

Lars Bo Kaspersen, CBP

lbk.cbp@cbs.dk deadline: March 1 2006