Actor-centered Perspective Research Articles

How to Get Away with Treachery, or: Actor-Centered Perspectives on Entangled Conflicts and their Urban Protagonists in the Austrian Duchy, 1462/63

AbstractThis article examines the involvement and interactions of Vienna's urban elites in the conflict of the early 1460s that marked the climax of the power struggle between the Habsburg brothers Emperor Frederick III and Duke Albert VI over rule in the Duchy of Austria. Vienna's role is addressed in two aspects: first, as a central stage for the conflict, and second, as an active participant as a political community that became increasingly integrated into the broader political networks of the duchy during the fifteenth century. Following an actor-centered approach and based on prosopographical groundwork, the study focuses on the actions of individual protagonists and various factions within Vienna's political elites. During the violent events, the urban representatives did not form a cohesive entity but interacted and allied in changing constellations with leading noble, courtly, and clerical actors in the duchy. Factors and conditions contributing to the formation of diverse interest groups among urban actors are closely examined, aiming to give a deeper insight into the dynamics and patterns of the entangled conflict.

Sustainable value creation in multinational enterprises: The role of corporate governance actors

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are increasingly expected to make their global operations sustainable, while overcoming important obstacles in a rugged global landscape. In this perspective article, we argue that a focus on their corporate governance (CG) actors – i.e., owners, directors, and executives – is key for understanding the premises of MNEs’ sustainable value creation. We develop an actor-centered perspective on MNEs whereby factors inherent to and surrounding CG actors – e.g., their cognition, personality, and values, as well as their interactions and governance – will determine the pervasiveness of their bounded rationality and bounded reliability, thus influencing whether, how, and under what conditions these key actors will contribute through their decisions to sustainable value creation. Our perspective advances nascent actor-centered research on MNEs’ non-market strategies, including corporate social responsibility and sustainability. Exploring the underlying mechanisms at the source of individual-level variation (next to firm-, industry-, and country-level variation) related to sustainable value creation may support theory development that can ultimately break new ground in explaining the strategic behavior and sustainable performance of MNEs. We formulate future research suggestions toward that end.

Criminality, chaos and corruption: Analyzing the narratives of labor migration dynamics in Malaysia.

This paper analyzes how policy-relevant actors understand the causes and effects of labor immigration to Malaysia, the country that receives the highest number of migrant workers in Southeast Asia. Whereas most research on international migration governance has focused on governance system outputs, this paper adopts an actor-centered perspective to investigate how actors narratively construct labor migration dynamics in Malaysia and how they conceptualize the drivers and impacts of labor migration policies and practices. The empirical material comes from 41 in-depth interviews with government officials, policymakers, international and regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, employers' organizations, trade unions, and embassy representatives. The study found that Malaysia's migration governance system was perceived as "chaotic" due to the seemingly inconsistent, unclear "ad hoc" policy measures implemented, and that the governance system is perceived as "corrupt." Economic incentives were also seen as the primary driver of labor immigration, yet the main impact on Malaysian society was perceived as the spread of criminality, violence and disease, a narrative centered on migrant men. This paper argues that this discourse is problematic as it may drive types of policy measures that target migrant men.

"We Could Be Much Further Ahead" -Multidimensional Drivers and Barriers for Agricultural Transition

Agricultural transition toward sustainability is subject to individual and political constraints, spurring the need to understand system dynamics from both a psychological and a public policy angle; however, empirical data remains limited. The present paper empirically contributes to theoretical frameworks on sustainability transitions and analyzes multiple dimensions related to the success of agricultural transition. This investigation employed a multidisciplinary, multimethodological approach that combined two empirical studies. The first study focused on electrically driven field cultivation as one transition process to uncover potential drivers and barriers from an actor-centered perspective via semi-structured interviews with farmers and sectoral actors (N = 33). Next, study 2 validated and complemented the context conditions that emerged from the interviews as relevant to agricultural transitions through a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) that uncovered configurations leading to agricultural transition in 38 OECD countries. Results show that for an agricultural transition, it is necessary to have a successful research and innovation policy. Furthermore, the inclusion of a green party in government is sufficient for an agricultural transition, whereas all other cases of agricultural transition are explained through a combination of different policy, polity, and politics factors. The results provide vital theoretical and practical implications for interdisciplinary research on agricultural transition processes and highlight the importance of regulative policies and political investments.

Actors, objectives, context: A framework of the political economy of energy and climate policy applied to India, Indonesia, and Vietnam

Devising policies that facilitate a transition to low-carbon energy systems requires a close understanding of the country-specific political economy of energy and climate policy. We develop a generalized AOC (‘Actors, Objectives, Context’) political economy framework to inform and enable comparison of country-specific case studies of how economic structure, political institutions, and the political environment shape policy outcomes. Our actor-centered perspective is built on the assumption that those policies are implemented that best meet the objectives of actors with the greatest influence on policy decisions. Applying the framework in practice includes four basic steps: i) identifying the societal and political actors most relevant for the formulation, implementation and enforcement of energy and climate policies; ii) spelling out these actors’ underlying objectives; iii) assessing the economic, institutional, discursive and environmental context which determines how certain objectives matter for certain societal actors; and iv) analyzing the dynamic interactions among these factors leading to aggregate policy outcomes. Context factors determine how societal actors influence political actors engaged in formal public policy formulation, implementation and enforcement, and how the dynamic interplay of different political actors’ interests results in energy and climate policy outcomes. The framework can accommodate a wide range of theoretical perspectives. We illustrate how the framework enables conducting comparable energy and climate policy country case studies, using the example of coal use in India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Finally, we discuss how the framework can contribute to the identification of entry points that could bring about policy change.

Towards coordinated self-organization: An actor-centered framework for the design of disaster management information systems

Traditionally, disaster management information systems have been designed to facilitate communication and coordination along stable hierarchical lines and roles. However, to support coordination in disaster response, disaster management information systems need to cater for the emerging roles, responsibilities and information needs of the actors, often referred to as self-organization. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a framework for disaster management information systems that embraces an actor-centered perspective to explicitly support coordination and self-organization. The framework is designed and validated to (i) analyze the current practice of disaster information management, including the way changes occur through self-organization, and (ii) study how to design disaster management information systems that support coordination and self-organization within the current practice. A case study in Jakarta is used to modify and validate the framework, and to illustrate its potential to capture self-organization in practice. The analysis showed that analyzing the actors’ activities through the framework can provide insights on the way self-organization occurs. Moreover, networking, preparedness and centralization were found to be key elements in the design of disaster management information systems with an actor-centered perspective.

MAIP: model to identify actors’ influence and its effects on the complex environmental policy decision-making process

Whether a new policy is adapted to a new social-ecological reality depends on the complex interactions that play out from the policy process itself. The established theories of the policy process do not directly or explicitly address the actors' ability to influence. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a model of actors' capacity to influence (an actor-centered perspective) which allows us to analyze the casual relationship between actors' influencing capacity and its effects on policy decision-making. This paper provides an in-depth study of the 2010 Brazilian Solid Waste Policy, a policy process characterized by high conflict that took almost 20 years to be approved by Brazilian Congress. It maps the actors' capacity of influence over the course of ten years to understand how this influence is related to policy dynamics (change and stability) and policy contents (policy instruments adopted). The study involves document analyses and interviews with relevant stakeholders. The findings identify the important role of influential actors in causing moments of paralysis and in fostering instrumental design. The insights on actors' capacity of influence and its effects contribute to our understanding of the complex dynamics of the environmental policy process.

Collaborative leadership in EMU governance: a matter of cognitive proximity

Collaborative leadership has stood at the heart of European politics since its inception. Yet EU scholars have only recently started to examine the concept and mainly from an institutional perspective. This article conceptualises the phenomenon of collaborative leadership from an actor-centered perspective. It explores a central condition for successful collaborative leadership identified in the literature: the existence of shared beliefs among the leaders involved. To do this, the article focuses on four events in the history of European Economic and Monetary Union. Using the method of cognitive mapping, the study establishes the extent of congruence in the beliefs on European integration and fiscal and monetary policy of the four leadership trios overseeing these events. On the basis of a survey of leading experts in the field, the article reveals that the level of cognitive proximity in leaders’ beliefs aligns with the perceived success with which the trios exerted collaborative leadership.

When Do Individuals Maximize Their Inclusive Fitness?

Adaptation is often described in behavioral ecology as individuals maximizing their inclusive fitness. Under what conditions does this hold, and how does this relate to the gene-centered perspective of adaptation? We unify and extend the literature on these questions to class-structured populations. We demonstrate that the maximization (in the best-response sense) of class-specific inclusive fitness obtains in uninvadable population states (meaning that all deviating mutants become extinct). This defines a genuine actor-centered perspective on adaptation. But this inclusive fitness is assigned to all bearers of a mutant allele in a given class and depends on distributions of demographic and genetic contexts. These distributions, in turn, usually depend on events in previous generations and are thus not under individual control. This prevents, in general, envisioning individuals themselves as autonomous fitness maximizers, each with its own inclusive fitness. For weak selection, however, the dependence on earlier events can be neglected. We then show that each individual in each class appears to maximize its own inclusive fitness when all other individuals exhibit inclusive fitness-maximizing behavior. This defines a genuine individual-centered perspective of adaptation and justifies formally, as a first-order approximation, the long-heralded view of individuals appearing to maximize their own inclusive fitness.

Las motivaciones para la participación voluntaria en comedores comunitarios del Estado de México

Objetivo: estudiar las motivaciones de las personas que participan como voluntarias en comedores comunitarios de dos municipios del Estado de México y, a partir de la acción solidaria y de cooperación, se analiza cómo se construyen redes y relaciones sociales entre las personas involucradas en los comedores, tanto voluntarias como comensales. Metodología: desde el construccionismo social y la perspectiva centrada en el actor se estudió la participación voluntaria en los comedores, considerando las categorías de las motivaciones del voluntariado y utilizando herramientas cualitativas como las entrevistas semiestructuradas y un cuestionario con preguntas abiertas. Resultados: se identificó una participación voluntaria proactiva y pro-social de personas que requieren alimentar a su familia, pero que, al mismo tiempo, es una participación solidaria y generosa porque se interesa por el bien de su comunidad o la alimentación de la gente que lo necesita. Limitaciones: las motivaciones de participación compiten con las necesidades alimenticias que enfrentan las familias en pobreza y las dificultades de la participación no remunerada en los comedores comunitarios pueden promover su dependencia y eventualmente incrementar su vulnerabilidad. Conclusiones: una perspectiva orientada al actor brinda los indicios pertinentes para entender los motivos por los que la participación voluntaria en los comedores comunitarios surge y se afianza en las vidas cotidianas de las personas involucradas. Además, permite analizar las prácticas sociales y discursivas que son realizadas e interpretadas por los actores sociales, así como considerar los escenarios de interacción a pequeña escala como campos de recursos y redes de relaciones.

Análise da experiência de médicos cubanos numa metrópole brasileira segundo o Método Paideia

We had hoped that the Mais Médicos Program (More Doctors Program) would have generated several changes and reflections in each municipality in which it was deployed. In order to observe those changes, we sought to analyze the experience of Cuban physicians in the Mais Médicos program from an actor-centered perspective, based on the Paideia Method - an approach that seeks to enhance the ability of the subjects to analyze and intervene in their practice. We performed semi-structured interviews to analyze our research object that consisted in the experience of those actors included professionally in the Mais Médicos program in a metropolis with unique characteristics. In order to assess the interviews, we applied Content Analysis followed by Thematic Analysis. From the discourse of the actors, of which illustrative excerpts are transcribed in this article, we can affirm that the program's potential surpassed any initial barriers, presenting itself as fine-tuning instrument for replacing the biomedical model in line with the Paideia Method.

Public Administration Reform and Its Implications for Foreign Petroleum Companies in Kazakhstan

ABSTRACTSince 2000, Kazakhstan has followed the New Public Management reform trajectory in modernizing its public sector and public service delivery. This article employs an actor-centered perspective to examine the effects of the public administration reform and its implications for foreign petroleum companies in Kazakhstan. The study builds on primary sources in the form of 81 semi-structured interviews with public servants, representatives of foreign petroleum companies and experts. The main conclusion is that the reform effects are ambiguous. Despite some success in greater efficiency of public services, many weaknesses remain, with highly varying implications for foreign petroleum companies.

The institutional determinants of private equity involvement in business groups—The case of Africa

This study examines the governance attributes of post-IPO (initial public offering) retained ownership of private equity in business group constituent firms in contrast to their unaffiliated counterparts, in 202 newly listed firms in 22 emerging African economies. We adopt an actor centered institutional-theoretic perspective in rationalizing institutional voids and the advantages of maintained governance by both business angels (BA) and venture capital (VC) private equity. Our findings reveal private equity retain higher post-IPO ownership in business group constituents compared to unaffiliated firms and that this is inversely moderated in the context of improving institutional quality – where this is particularly strong in case of foreign VC as opposed to domestic VC or BA. Our result adds to the literature on multifocal corporate governance mechanisms and the institutional determinants of private equity investment.

Discourses of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution

This article takes a discourse analytical approach to elements of the 40th commemoration of the Portuguese Revolution, focusing specifically on the absence of themes and participants by groups who were most directly involved in the Revolution, either as actors (the “Captains of Abril”), the retornados (Portuguese nationals “returning” to Portugal in the aftermath of the 1974 coup) and retornados-emigrantes (those who left Africa during this period but went on to live outside Portugal). The analyses center primarily on the speech by Portuguese President Cavaco Silva, given as the official opening of the 40th anniversary of the military coup of 25 April 1974, which brought the authoritarian regime of 48 years to an end. This examination, combined with other speeches of Cavaco Silva, newspaper reports, analyses of the integration of retornados , and a commemorative TV miniseries on the Revolution, provide the evidence for the argument that important voices of the Revolution were muted or silenced in the official commemoration of 2014. Finally, the relevance of actor-centered perspectives on commemoration is laid out for educators.

Demographic change in gainful employment: risks and potentials of ageing workforces

At the background of demographic change in gainful employment the paper analyses which challenges are faced to employ an ageing workforce productively and to foster the workability of older workers.In particular, the influence of working conditions on the age-specific workability in the spheres of health, skills and motivation is stressed. The given risks and potentials in the development of workability are embedded in a clarifying system of human resource strategies on company level in the sense of production regimes. A system of age-management is enfolded which incorporates a longitudinal perspective and tries to integrate the relevant fields of action such as work design, career management, health promotion and training. Finally, it is stressed that for implementing this strategy successfully it is not only necessary to reflect the specific company frameworks but also to observe a stronger actor centered perspective, e.g. via collective agreements.

Experts and the Modernization of the Nation: The Arena of Public Health in Poland in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Experts and the Modernization of the Nation: The Arena of Public Health in Poland in the First Half of the Twentieth Century The article examines the emergence of the public health system in the newly formed Polish state from 1918 onwards and the discourses that accompanied this process from an institutional and actorcentered perspective. The Polish health system was not a mere replica of western models, but a highly complex, innovative and dynamic system. Among other things, this is reflected in the founding of an independent Ministry of Health and the State Institute of Hygiene in 1918. Medical and hygiene experts who were trained abroad and part of international health networks such as Ludwik Hirszfeld, Ludwik Rajchman, or Kazimierz Funk transferred their knowledge to Poland and translated it into the specific constellation of space and time in the new nation state. Immediately after the war, Poland was confronted with epidemics that were spreading across Eastern Europe. Later, it was concerned with providing a hygienic infrastructure and creating a healthy and able-bodied population for the country which felt a constant threat from its neighbors Germany and Russia. Public health followed not only functional requirements, but also served political and ideological ends in enhancing social and ethnic cohesion and building the national identity of a “healthy” and “strong” population. In Poland, as in other counties, public health was an arena in which highly relevant political issues were negotiated.

Understanding Divergent Patterns of Political Discussion in Online Forums—Evidence from the European Citizens' Consultations

ABSTRACT This study examines divergent patterns of political discussion through a comparative analysis of 28 online forums, initiated by the European Commission as part of the 2009 European Citizens' Consultations. These forums shared the same design (technological and process) and had the same connection to the policy process. Still, great divergences were apparent in the intensity of discussion between the forums. The aim of this article is to create an understanding of these divergences. A hypothetic deductive approach is first employed, investigating three hypotheses about favorable conditions for political discussion grounded in prior studies and deliberative democratic theory. The results indicate that political discussions are more intense in forums where the level of consensus among participants is low. Thereafter, a comparative case study is conducted of two forums in order to foster a deeper understanding of these results, which showed that a high level of consensus was created through efforts of organized groups to mobilize support for their positions. The results of the analyses make it evident that online political discussion must be studied and understood in relation to an actor-centered perspective investigating participants' strategies and conduct.

STATES AS MOLDERS OF INFORMAL RELATIONS?

ABSTRACT This article studies the impact of a range of state institutions on citizens’ contacts with family and close friends in 20 countries. Recent studies have shown large country level differences in social participation. We aim to explain these differences from an actor centered institutionalist perspective. We present two lines of reasoning. According to the first, a high level of social security crowds out social participation, as intimate networks are no longer needed as an economic safety net. The second line of reasoning proposes that corruption or a lack of civil rights drive citizens to seek refuge in their secure intimate contacts. In a comparative, multi-level design we focus on participation in the nuclear family, in the extended family, and with the best friend. We test the two lines of reasoning simultaneously on ISSP 2001 data. We find that states matter. State institutions are an important determinant of social participation. Our findings mainly confirm the second line of reasoning, whereas the crowding out thesis is only supported for contact with the extended family. Moreover, we find that the contextual effects are not similar across social groups: the poor are more strongly affected by the institutional design than the rich.

Global cities of the South: Emerging perspectives on growth and inequality

This paper attempts to reframe debates on the equity implications of spatial, socioeconomic, and political change in global cities in developing countries through a review of recent literature on this topic. It begins by critiquing the view that global cities in developing countries are converging around a model of development similar to that of the prototypical global cities of the United States, Europe, and Japan. It argues that three emerging perspectives hold the key to an analysis that better accounts for local agency and divergent outcomes in such cities: a focus on the diversity of cities’ experience with globalization; recognition of the inherently negotiated nature of global impacts on urban outcomes; and a focus on actor-centered perspectives in urban analysis. The combined influence of these ideas amounts to a shift from a focus on global city ‘models’ to an examination of the interaction between global and local actors and institutions in a particular setting. Building on this literature review, the paper suggests an alternate framework for analyzing the link between global city development and inequality that focuses on three processes of change: the formation of public–private partnerships in urban governance, the spatial implications of the privatization of planning, and the flexiblization of labor. It argues that a focus on these processes has important implications for both theory and practice, as it allows us to understand similarity and difference in urban development, and more importantly, to understand the actors, institutions and interests that are driving change.

Teaching Is Performance: Reconceptualizing a Problematic Metaphor

Analogies between teaching and performance have recently emerged in educational literature, but with a reductive, actor-centered perspective that diminishes the complexity of both performative and instructional phenomena. This article reconceptualizes performance as a generative metaphor for educational research based on theoretical and methodological points of contact between instructional communication and performance studies. It asks which aspects of educational experience open themselves up to performance-centered research and explores issues around which new research agendas can be developed in both disciplines.