Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

Organizational processes are often described as being “top-down” or “bottom-up”. At the level of EU integration relations between EU and member-state institutions can also be conceptualized in these terms. European integration is based on decisions made by representatives of its member-states and member-states have a large degree of discretion in the implementation of EU policies. This gives off an appearance of a “bottom-up” quality to pan-European policy. But when it comes to part and parcel of public administration many national government agencies can only perceive this process “top-down”. The complexity of policy design process and absence of co-ordination of how national agencies go about their business means that policy adoption is seldom straightforward across member-states. Once policies are set in motion, there are limited possibilities of review stemming from the “bottom”. In some sense, this is the story of the road to Brexit. The paper claims that current challenges to European integration may in part be attributed to this institutional setup. This paper revisits the concept of European Administrative Space to see if it can be framed in terms of “bottom-up” integration, whereby essentially member states would be encouraged to test their proposed national reforms from the point of view of EUfriendliness. Proliferation of such a practice would not require any major legal change or governance process standardization. With proper monitoring the practice could augment the existing international co-operation between government agencies by opening venues for cost sharing, and streamlining the “top-down” policy decisions once political will becomes available.

Arguably World War II had a fundamental and profound impact on the Western culture, practices and institutions. One central feature of this impact was the disillusionment with the capacity of social sciences to help policymakers improve society. The past 60 or so years have seen a major crisis of identity throughout the disciplines of social science. On one hand, positivism stood on the premise that the war was a result of irrational and pseudoscientific totalitarian social theories; on the other hand, post-modernist (and various other “postisms”) raised doubts about the possibility of social science being something more than just another variation of totalitarian ideology. This polarization has seen animated polemic and methodological confrontation with seemingly no victors. As a result, social science as a whole lost its reputation as a credible source of knowledge for successful action. A strand of social science reformers in various disciplines are trying to build alternative definitions of what social science ought to constitute which would accommodate claims of both warring sides. However, persuasive as these integrative attempts may be, such ideas are having a hard time of becoming the mainstream of social science. By borrowing from institutionalist perspectives, this paper constructs an argument that the reason for the lack of relevance of social science in business and policy is not so much a methodological weakness of the science as it is the incompatibility of institutionalized interest between business and the academe.