Multilayered Contingencies of Transformative Events

This article investigates the role of agency in the causation of transformative events by looking at the competition between rival strands within social movements. The creative activity involved in the elaboration and execution of rival strategies is used as a proxy for agency. We present a paired comparison of two very different transformative events in twentieth-century Ireland—the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Long March from Belfast to Derry in 1969—and the strategic interactions preceding them. The comparison shows how agency and structure can interact around transformative events. High levels of agency were instrumental in making the events, and in turn these events catalyzed powerful social forces. These forces were structural—that is, they reflected divisions, tensions, and power relations that were deeply engrained in the social structure over the long term. However, these structural forces could have remained dormant had it not been for the bursts of agency that brought about the transformative events in question. We also see in these cases that the balance between structure and agency is dynamic, sometimes shifting from one moment to another rather than remaining constant.

The introductory chapter presents the theoretical framework of the research, its empirical design and the content of the volume. Our analysis of the Charlie Hebdo attacks addresses in particular the claims, frames, and justifications that civil society actors introduce in multiple public spheres. We want to understand both the content and the forms of these interventions by considering the appropriation of existing discursive opportunities by collective actors, but also their embeddedness within strategies of resource mobilization. Locating our research within social movement studies, we point at the cultural dynamics during discursive critical junctures, showing the ways in which different actors address transformative events which challenge their visions. As a “transformative event” the attacks point at the capacity of action itself to produce contextual opportunities and organizational resources that are mobilized in the strategic interactions of various actors. In this chapter, we first reflect on the concept of transformative events as triggering critical junctures, defined as moments in which changes happen suddenly rather than incrementally (as well as subsequent choice points), and on the very conceptions of citizenship that are affected by them. We then move to a discussion of the forms that debates might take in the public sphere (referring in particular to the concept of deliberation). After that, we present our analytic model, followed by a justification of the research design and the methodological choices. The chapter ends with a presentation of the volume.

Network graph theory and organization model analysis based on the mathematical modeling with the dynamic systematic data perspective is studied in the paper. As a new attempt of classification organization of network information resources, free classification has brought new theory and supplement to the classification. In the modern Internet era, free classification has a broad space for use and also development. Compared with the traditional classification, it is more suitable for the classification of network information resources. Hence, for the better study, the mathematical model based graph set will be studied. Through the analysis of the general existing network classification system, it is found that there are still many problems to be improved in the classification system used for network information organization, hence, this research study utilizes the dynamic model to improve the accuracy. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated by using the systematic testing.

Local niche experimentation in energy transitions: A theoretical and empirical exploration of proximity advantages and disadvantages

In about the last two decades, global nonlinear dynamics has been evolving in a revolutionary way, with the development of sophisticated techniques employing concepts/tools of dynamical systems, bifurcation, and chaos theory, and applications to a wide variety of mechanical/structural systems. The relevant achievements entail a substantial change of perspective in dealing with vibration problems and are ready to meaningfully affect the analysis, control, and design of systems at different scales, in multiphysics contexts too. After properly framing the subject within some main stages of developments of nonlinear dynamics in solid/structural mechanics, as occurred over the last 40 years, the article focuses on highlighting the role played by global analysis in unveiling the nonlinear response and actual safety of engineering systems in different environments. Reduced order models of macro-/micro-structures are considered. Global dynamics of a laminated plate with von Karman nonlinearities, shear deformability, and full thermomechanical coupling allows to highlight the meaningful effects entailed by the slow transient thermal dynamics on the fast steady mechanical responses. An atomic force microcantilever is referred to for highlighting the severe worsening of overall stability associated with the application of an external feedback control and the importance of global dynamics for conceiving and effectively implementing a control procedure aimed at enhancing engineering safety. The last part of the article dwells on the general role that a global dynamics perspective is expected to play in the safe design of real systems, in the near future, focusing on how properly exploiting concepts and tools of dynamical integrity to evaluate response robustness in the presence of unavoidable imperfections, and to improve the system’s actual load carrying capacity.

The topic of this chapter are cognitive neuroarchitectures, which have been developed since the mid-eighties in connectionism as theoretical models to explain, based on empirical-experimental data, as neurophysiologically plausible as possible perceptual and linguistic performances of self-organizing neuronal networks in the human brain that are related to the binding problem. Thus, neurocognition can be viewed as organized by integrative (phase) synchronization mechanisms that orchestrate the flow of neurocognitive information in self-organizing networks with positive and/or negative feedback loops in subcortical and cortical areas of the brain. This dynamic perspective on cognition contributes significantly to bridging the gap between the discrete, abstract symbolic description of propositions in the mind and their continuous, numerical, and dynamic modeling in terms of cognitive neuroarchitectures in connectionism. This dynamic binding mechanism in connectionist cognitive neuroarchitectures thus has the advantage of enabling more accurate modeling of cognitive processes by conceptualizing these neuroarchitectures as nonlinear dynamical systems. This means that neurocognition is modeled using a neurodynamics in abstract n-dimensional phase spaces in the form of nonlinear vector fields or vector flows.

Intelligent transportation systems are driven by the necessities of people to move from one place to another, including goods and services. While traveling, vehicles have the opportunities to socialize with other vehicles just by encountering them along the way and being influenced by travel factors such as speed, traffic volume, and special events. These encounters can be used to upload and download environment and network information that can be utilized to create a carefree and comfortable journey. In this work, we investigate vehicular networks from the perspective of the social dynamics by considering their pick-up and drop-off points, distance traveled, and vehicular interactions. As social entities, vehicles can practice socialization skills to achieve travel objectives. Simulation results employing recent mobility trajectories have shown that different transportation modes tend to display various social behaviors that can be affected by the vehicular network’s characteristics and can later be used to improve the travel experience of the general public transportation.

In the context of rapidly developing emerging industries, shifting investment hotspots, and a turbulent external environment, investment institutions continuously adjust and manage their ego network strategies to ensure survival and promote sustainable development. The long-term development and competitiveness of venture capital (VC) firms largely depend on their ability to generate excess returns and achieve successful exits, such as IPOs and mergers and acquisitions. This study focuses on venture capital ego networks from a dynamic perspective. From both the node and tie dimensions, it systematically examines the effects of ego network dynamics—growth and diversity—on investment performance. It further explores the underlying mechanisms through network stability and information diffusion. Based on empirical analysis using Wind database data from 2013 to 2022, we find that the growth of VC ego networks has a significant negative effect on investment performance, and this effect works through reduced network stability. In contrast, ego network diversity shows a significant positive effect on investment performance, with project information diffusion playing a mediating role. Based on the above findings, we suggest that venture capital firms should shift their ego network management strategy from blind and simple “rapid expansion” to quality-focused “careful cultivation”. While maintaining the stability of their ego networks, firms should also pay attention to the diversity of relationship configurations, so as to better transform network resources into investment performance and promote the growth and sustainable development of venture capital firms.

Pteridine reductase 1 (PTR1) is a folate and pterin pathway enzyme unique for pathogenic trypanosomatids. As a validated drug target, PTR1 has been the focus of recent research efforts aimed at finding more effective treatments against human parasitic diseases such as leishmaniasis or sleeping sickness. Previous PTR1-centered structural studies highlighted the enzyme characteristics, such as flexible regions around the active site, highly conserved structural waters, and species-specific differences in pocket properties and dynamics, which likely impacts the binding of natural substrates and inhibitors. Furthermore, several aspects of the PTR1 function, such as the substrate inhibition phenomenon and the level of ligand binding cooperativity in the enzyme homotetramer, likely related to the global enzyme dynamics, are poorly known at the molecular level. We postulate that future drug design efforts could greatly benefit from a better understanding ofthese phenomena through studying both the local and global PTR1 dynamics. This review highlights the key aspects of the PTR1 structure and dynamics relevant to structure-based drug design that could be effectively investigated by modeling approaches. Particular emphasis is given to the perspective of molecular dynamics, what has been accomplished in this area to date, and how modeling could impact the PTR1-targeted drug design in the future.

Discrete dynamical systems can exhibit complex behavior from the iterative application of straightforward local rules. A famous class of examples comes from cellular automata whose global dynamics are notoriously challenging to analyze. To address this, we relax the regular connectivity grid of cellular automata to a random graph, which gives the class of graph cellular automata. Using the dynamical cavity method and its backtracking version, we show that this relaxation allows us to derive asymptotically exact analytical results on the global dynamics of these systems on sparse random graphs. Concretely, we showcase the results on a specific subclass of graph cellular automata with "conforming nonconformist" update rules, which exhibit dynamics akin to opinion formation. Such rules update a node's state according to the majority within their own neighborhood. In cases where the majority leads only by a small margin over the minority, nodes may exhibit nonconformist behavior. Instead of following the majority, they either maintain their own state, switch it, or follow the minority. For configurations with different initial biases towards one state we identify sharp dynamical phase transitions in terms of the convergence speed and attractor types. From the perspective of opinion dynamics this answers when consensus will emerge and when two opinions coexist almost indefinitely.

In various economic environments, people observe other people with whom they strategically interact. We can model such information‐sharing relations as an information network, and the strategic interactions as a game on the network. When any two agents in the network are connected either directly or indirectly in a large network, empirical modeling using an equilibrium approach can be cumbersome, since the testable implications from an equilibrium generally involve all the players of the game, whereas a researcher's data set may contain only a fraction of these players in practice. This paper develops a tractable empirical model of linear interactions where each agent, after observing part of his neighbors' types, not knowing the full information network, uses best responses that are linear in his and other players' types that he observes, based on simple beliefs about the other players' strategies. We provide conditions on information networks and beliefs such that the best responses take an explicit form with multiple intuitive features. Furthermore, the best responses reveal how local payoff interdependence among agents is translated into local stochastic dependence of their actions, allowing the econometrician to perform asymptotic inference without having to observe all the players in the game or having to know the precise sampling process.

Caregiving research has typically relied on cross-sectional data that focus on the primary caregiver. This approach neglects the dynamic and systemic character of caregiver networks. Our analyses addressed changes in adult child care networks over a 2-year period. The study relied on pooled data from Waves 1 through 5 of the Health and Retirement Study. Based on a matrix of specific adult child caregivers across two consecutive time points, we assessed changes in any adult child caregiver as well as in the primary adult child caregiver. More than half of all adult-child care networks, including more than one fourth of primary adult child caregivers, changed between waves. Gender composition of the caregiver network and availability of other adult child caregivers were particularly important for network change, but socioeconomic context, caregiver abilities and resources, and caregiver burden played a role as well. The results underline the need to shift caregiving research toward a dynamic life course and family systems perspective. They also raise concerns about the viability of informal care networks for future smaller birth cohorts and suggest that health care providers need to recognize and address coordination and potential conflicts among care network members.

This paper delved into the intricate relationship between e-government and development in Africa, assessing the impact of international politics, foreign aid, and global dynamics on e-governance projects. Challenges spanning financial constraints, inadequate legal frameworks, technological disparities, cyber security threats, and the need for local-context-driven strategies emerge as prominent hurdles. The paper employed a comprehensive literature review that investigated the nexus between e-governance and development in Africa; with a particular focus on the influence of international politics. It was revealed that successful e-government implementation can lead to reduced corruption, increased transparency, and revenue growth. The paper also discovered that African countries often rely on foreign aid for such projects, and global power dynamics influence technology adoption and infrastructure development, presenting implementation challenges. It was further established that African countries face challenges that include financial constraints, inadequate legal frameworks, infrastructural deficiencies, and implementation hurdles. Key recommendations include establishing robust monitoring mechanisms, prioritizing investment in e-governance, enhancing capacity building, diversifying funding sources, and addressing systemic challenges to facilitate effective e-governance implementation

Introduction to the Special Issue

This article challenges the liberal assumption that socialist societies were closed or isolated entities, and that it was the 1989 revolutionary moment that both freed them and integrated them into global dynamics. Everyday encounters with a particular vision of the global had already shaped the political imagination of ordinary Romanians prior to 1989. Such encounters constituted their instruction into concepts of liberalism and the liberal subject, freedom and democracy. By looking at informal (and illicit) networks of consumption of both goods and ideas (such as tuning into Radio Free Europe and Voice of America), I seek to explore the sensorial dimension of everyday politics in communist Romania and to illustrate how such a sensorial experience reinforced the imagined distance between a free and prosperous ‘outside’ and an impoverished and oppressive ‘inside’. I use Michel de Certeau's theorizing on the everyday, and Ashis Nandy's preference for the ‘non-player’ as the ordinary hero of violent political projects, to go beyond the framework of power and resistance, and to explore the more nuanced practices of coping, survival and subversion.