Introduction

Abstract

Editorial Introduction to March 2007 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. This issue deals with contributions of soft factors to origin of different processes that eventually contribute to and social change. The issue comprises nine papers that address different complementary perspectives and role of communication among actors and stakeholders involved. It also explores paramount role of communities and networks, as the place for communication at both micro and macro level. Among highlights of this issue are • A persuasive hypothesis that radical is more likely to stem from networks and incremental is more likely to be result of communities. (Dal Fiore) • A revisitation of concepts of and network through an urban sociological framework. (Piselli) • How opposite innovation styles that characterize communities and networks are strictly linked to types of media upon which they are based. (Venturini) • The role played by knowledge sharing among different economic stakeholders in order to make a local economy more competitive and resilient. (Capellin) • The results of a qualitative study of an inner-city section of Brisbane, Australia that draws on notion of embeddedness to examine organizational linkages in creative industries. (Adkins, Foth et al.) • An investigation of complex relationship between a given institutional and political context and role played by designers and actors involved in urban development. (Odenhall) • Designing of Practice (CoP) by promoting internal alignment among participants and encouraging them to take over process. (Kranendonk and Kersten.) • An examination of symbolic dimension of innovative processes that plays with concepts of discursive community and communicative genre in order to understand under which conditions an invention becomes an innovation. (Cavalli) • A discussion of parallels between communities versus networks and tension between specification and craft culture in architecture. (Francisco) Based on outcomes of a workshop entitled Communities vs. Networks as extremes of a continuum of social containers for held as part of Second International Conference on and Technologies, this issue should be in library of everyone interested in innovation, social networking, effects of technology on society, social change, social and urban studies, and sociology.