Actor Constellations Research Articles

Supply chain structures for distributing surplus food

PurposeNew actors have emerged in the food supply chain in response to the increased awareness of food waste and the need to distribute surplus food. The purpose of this study is to analyse the different supply chain structures that have emerged to make surplus food available to consumers.Design/methodology/approachThis study adopts a qualitative multiple-case study of three new surplus food actors: a surplus food platform, an online retailer and a surplus food terminal. Data sources included interviews, documentary evidence and participatory observations.FindingsThree different types of actor constellations in surplus food distribution have been identified: a triad, a tetrad and a chain. Both centralised (for ambient products) and decentralised supply chain structures (for chilled products) have emerged. The analysis identified weak links amongst new actors and surplus food suppliers. The new actors have adopted the roles of connector, service provider and logistics service provider and the sub-roles of mediator, auditor and consultant.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to research on closed-loop or circular supply chains for the reuse of products in the context of surplus food distribution.

Changing dynamics of social policy in democracy: comparing pension and health reforms in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Much research attaches importance of democracy to welfare expansion. We offer a revised argument to neutralize this view. Drawing on the insights of historical institutionalism, we examine the reforms of the National Pension Insurance and National Health Insurance in Taiwan, and compare their policy processes alongside four dimensions: actor constellations, interactive modes of policymaking, policy networks, and power relationships. We highlight the diverse political dynamics in terms of the state capacity and state-society relationships that led to different policy outcomes. The present study offers an insight for understanding the intricate relationships between democratization and social policy in East Asia.

A New Concert? Diplomacy for a Chaotic World

A new ‘concert’ diplomacy is needed to foster informal, minilateral constellations of relevant actors operating alongside formal institutions of global governance.

Organisational Innovation Systems for multi-actor co-innovation in European agriculture, forestry and related sectors: Diversity and common attributes

Innovation rests not only on discovery but also on cooperation and interactive learning. In agriculture, forestry and related sectors, multi-actor partnerships for ‘co-innovation’ occur in many forms, from international projects to informal ‘actor configurations’. Common attributes are that they include actors with ‘complementary forms of knowledge’ who collaborate in an innovation process, engage with a ‘larger periphery’ of stakeholders in the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) and are shaped by institutions. Using desk research and interviews, we reviewed, according to the Organisational Innovation Systems framework, the performance of 200 co-innovation partnerships from across Europe, selected for their involvement of various actors ‘all along the process’. Many of the reviewed partnerships were composed of actors that had previously worked together and most interviewees believed that no relevant actors had been excluded. In almost all cases, project targets and objectives were co-designed to a great or some extent, and the mechanisms applied to foster knowledge sharing between partners were considered to be very effective. Great importance was attached to communication beyond the partnership, not simply for dissemination but also for dialogue, and most interviewees evaluated the communication/outreach performance of their partnership very highly. Most partnerships received external funding, most did not use innovation brokers during the proposal writing process and two thirds had access to information they needed. We discuss the implications of these findings and question whether the AKIS concept as currently interpreted by many policy makers can adequately account for the regional differences encountered by co-innovation partnerships across Europe.

Greening the Car? Conflict Dynamics within the German Platform for Electric Mobility

The environmental crisis due to air pollution, high CO2 emissions, noise from traffic and soil ceiling requires profound changes to the car-dependent transport system. This article examines the political dynamics of German transport politics, focusing on the National Platform for Electric Mobility (NPE), a high-level political forum that aimed to accelerate the run-up of the electric mobility market in Germany. The NPE provides an interesting case to study the strategies of stakeholders in influencing policy-making and shaping alternative pathways to the car-centered transport system. The paper focusses on actor constellations and the conflicts that arise within the NPE, as well as the temporal dynamics within the electric mobility debate. The findings suggest that the NPE contributed to a narrow understanding of mobility transformation based on road transport and electric cars, but that it is better described as ecological modernization. Within this narrow framework, a fundamental conflict unfolds between strong advocates versus those slowing down the ecological modernization of the car. A third group demands at least a partial departure from the automobile-centered model but remains marginalized within the NPE. Aside from this core conflict, members of the NPE struggled over the location for battery cell production, the introduction of a purchase grant known as the environmental bonus, and the expansion of battery recharging infrastructure. These issues illustrate that discussions within the NPE relate to the political debates about the future of mobility, which have intensified in Germany in recent years. However, the case of the NPE shows that high-level stakeholder platforms are not an adequate forum to legitimately deliberate and to practically contribute to a wider and more fundamental rethink of future mobility concepts.

Cracks in the gearbox of car hegemony: struggles over the German Verkehrswende between stability and change

ABSTRACT The automobile permeated Western societies in the twentieth century and enjoys hegemonic protection. Nevertheless, profound changes in mobility are looming, posing new challenges for mobility research. This article develops a four-dimensional understanding of hegemony, which encompasses the integral state, material and ideological dimensions and people’s everyday practices, in order to analyse the changes in mobility. The Gramscian approach is characterized by a profound conception of power relations and serves as an instrument for analysing social struggles and related actor constellations. This understanding not only enables a precise determination of the hegemonic safeguarding of the automobile, but also of the emerging fractures in the automotive consensus and the perspectives of counter-hegemonic strategies. Based on this Gramscian perspective, the article analyses the safeguarding and brittleness of car hegemony in Germany. It is concluded that although windows of opportunity have opened for a less car-centric mobility regime, these currently lack a fundamental politicisation of the car and involvement of labour required to innovate beyond narrow ecological modernisation, which would see only moderate modal shift and technological uptake of post-fossil drivetrains while otherwise leaving the hegemony of the car unchallenged.

Governance options of municipal actors for reurbanisation in medium-sized cities. An analysis by the example of Bamberg

This paper examines the governance options for reurbanisation in medium-sized cities by using the example of Bamberg. The key questions are: Which planning approaches are developed in the areas of action housing and urban development to shape reurbanisation? How do local actor constellations and relationships shape the governance options? The contribution follows on debates about local reurbanisation drivers and an understanding of planning in terms of governance. The results show that Bamberg aimed to develop a conversion area and has thus implemented planning instruments and political-administrative structures. However, the use of the conversion areas by non-municipal actors in addition with municipal actors that are strongly guided by monetary considerations prevents the conversion in the further course and severely limits the governance options. As a result, a departure from the goal of a planned reurbanisation can be seen. The paper concludes by discussing the context under which growth policies for reurbanisation are developed and implemented.

Understanding social innovation processes in rural areas: empirical evidence from social enterprises in Germany

PurposeAgainst the background of increasing infrastructure loss in many rural areas, this study aims to contribute conceptually and empirically towards better understanding of rural innovation processes related to provision of public goods.Design/methodology/approachThe nationally focused understanding of innovation processes leads the debate on rural development into a dilemma that this study seeks to sidestep via the concept of social innovation. Community cooperatives – a type of social enterprise that has increasingly emerged in rural areas of Germany in the past decade – offer the opportunity to examine social innovation processes. This cross-case study reveals the broad range of activities in which such cooperatives are active and analyses their social innovation processes.FindingsThe study shows that the social innovation governance framework enables examination of social innovation processes. Although macro-level policy has appeared to be an important instrument for financing social innovation, public actors at the micro-level seem barely able to initiate social innovation processes unless they are also private actors and, therefore, can pursue additional incentives. The social innovations studied here seem to differ in terms of their actor constellations and resource-allocation patterns, depending on whether they are concerned with the establishment or maintenance of local infrastructure. What they have in common, however, is the initiation of formalised collective-action processes that serve to legitimise social innovation.Originality/valueBy applying an analytical framework that is new to the literature on social innovation, the study provides insight into the activities and decision-making processes of actors involved in social innovation in rural areas. In this context, community cooperatives have rarely been studied as an interface between public, private and civil society actors or as a platform for mobilising human, social and financial capital.

Strength of weakness – quality managers as agents of multiple principals

ABSTRACT The paper investigates quality management in teaching and learning in higher education institutions from a principal-agent perspective. Based on data gained from semi-structured interviews and from a nation-wide survey with quality managers of German higher education institutions, the study shows how quality managers position themselves in relation to their perception of the interests of other actors in higher education institutions. The paper describes the various interests and discusses the main implications of this constellation of actors. It argues that quality managers, although they may be considered as rather weak actors within the higher education institution, may be characterised as having a strength of weakness due to diverging interests of their principals.

Why Do Institutions Revert? Institutional Elasticity and Petroleum Sector Reforms in India

The institutional change literature has predominantly focused on successful changes and sparsely on failed changes, but the idea of institutional fields reverting to their pre-change or near pre-change state, after change attempts, remains underexplored. Although recent studies have explored similar phenomenon from the perspective of actors resisting change and trying to restore status quo, a field-level understanding of the processes and the dynamics associated with it remains underexamined. The present study, using the case of reforms in the field of petroleum exploration and production in India, examines an institutional change where the institution, once modified, gradually reverted near to its prechange state. We suggest the concept of institutional elasticity to explain such reverting of institutions, and elaborate on three boundary conditions—scope of change, pace of change, and field-level actor constellations—which have implications for the relationship between institutional elasticity and reverting of institutions.

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

Different Strokes for Different Folks: A Configurational Analysis of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

We conceptualize regional entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) as heterogeneous configurations of interdependent actors, resources, and capabilities with the potential to encourage various types of entr...

Evaluating Parliamentary Advocacy for Nutrition in Tanzania

The global nutrition community is currently putting significant efforts into supporting parliamentary advocacy, aiming to bring nutrition higher up on political agendas in low-income countries with high burdens of malnutrition. Evaluating the effects of parliamentary advocacy is fraught with methodological challenges and case studies are scarce. This article adopts a contribution analysis and process tracing procedure to evaluate whether parliamentary advocacy influenced political party manifestos in Tanzania in the run up to the 2015 general election. We present a rare and empirically rich application of this systematic qualitative evaluative method. We find that configurations of activities, actors and outputs can be plausibly understood to have had a contributory role in achieving increased attention to nutrition in the party manifesto of the election winner. We further identify key risks and assumptions that mediated parliamentary advocacy and development evaluators’ ability to evaluate its outcomes, including: targeting; timing; circulation; intelligibility; power; elites; resources; and political space.

Transboundary crisis management under the volcano: The case of the Icelandic ash cloud

AbstractThis paper discusses the intricacies of external transboundary crises, namely those cross‐border threats whose management requires coordination among EU and non‐EU countries. Specifically, it explores the extent to which European integration theories shed light on the coordination of external transboundary crisis responses by assessing the weight and role of the actor constellations involved in the civil aviation response to the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud crisis. The use of social network analysis as a methodological tool generates novel empirical evidence on the configuration of crisis management structures. The analysis shows that many EU Member States led decision‐making, whereas supranational organizations were instrumental in the coordination of the ash cloud crisis response. The centrality of these bodies contrasts with the peripheral position of most interest groups. This paper also suggests that external transboundary crises present complex management dynamics that distinguish them from generic transboundary threats. For example, the response to the ash cloud crisis was not commanded by the European Economic Area/European Free Trade Association countries where its epicentre was located. The empirical analysis was based on information extracted from a survey to experts involved in the management of this episode, as well as from ten semi‐structured elite interviews.

Relational Sociology of the Scientific Field: Communication, Identities, and Field Relations

A relational sociological conceptualisation of social fields is developed and applied to the world of academia and science. Generally, social fields are arenas of communication governed by specific institutions and by the sense (illusio) of involvement in the same game. They consist of communicative events like publications in science, claims and demands in politics etc. Scientific fields are organised around representational claims about the phenomena under study. Such communicative events offer particular definitions of the situation that subsequent communication builds on and / or renegotiates. In this process, ideas develop that structure the field, and identities of actors associated with these ideas. In this perspective, actors do not drive the processes of the field, but they serve as projection points that organise discourse in the field. Actors are connected to ideas, and thus indirectly to each other, in position-takings. Field relations then involve constellations of actors and ideas. Unlike social relationships like friendship or patronage, field relations can be one-sided, and they affect follow-up communication in the larger field rather than only between two involved actors. In contrast to previous theories of social fields, these are seen as socio-cultural constellations developing in the course of communication, rather than the competition of actors for resources, or constellations of subjective orientations.

Activating norm collisions: Interface conflicts in international drug control

AbstractThis article puts forward a constructivist-interpretivist approach to interface conflicts that emphasises how international actors articulate and problematise norm collisions in discursive and social interactions. Our approach is decidedly agency-oriented and follows the Special Issue’s interest in how interface conflicts play out at the micro-level. The article advances several theoretical and methodological propositions on how to identify norm collisions and the conditions under which they become the subject of international debate. Our argument on norm collisions, understood as situations in which actors perceive two norms as incompatible with each other, is threefold. First, we claim that agency matters to the analysis of the emergence, dynamics, management, and effects of norm collisions in international politics. Second, we propose to differentiate between dormant (subjectively perceived) and open norm collisions (intersubjectively shared). Third, we contend that the transition from dormant to open – which we term activation – depends on the existence of certain scope conditions concerning norm quality as well as changes in power structures and actor constellations. Empirically, we study norm collisions in the area of international drug control, presenting the field as one that contains several cases of dormant and open norm collisions, including those that constitute interface conflicts. For our in-depth analysis we have chosen the international discourse on coca leaf chewing. With this case, we not only seek to demonstrate the usefulness of our constructivist-interpretivist approach but also aim to explain under which conditions dormant norm collisions evolve into open collisions and even into interface conflicts.

The Limits of Change: German Family Policy and the Dynamics of Policy Transfer 2009–2017

German family policy has undergone path shifting reforms departing from the traditional male breadwinner model during the 2000s. These reforms were partially the result of policy transfers from European soft law and the Nordic family model. This contribution analyses which role ‘learning from abroad’ played for the path of German family policy in the years following these reforms and which factors help to explain these dynamics. We find that the relevance and role of policy transfer significantly changed compared to the 2000s: First, policy transfer from both the EU and the Nordic countries lost in importance as a political strategy for German family policy reforms. Second, in the one case of policy transfer from the Nordic states, it was instrumentalised by one of the governing parties to facilitate a shift reversing reform consolidating the old conservative family model. We argue that this change in the dynamics of policy transfer can be traced back to three interdependent explanatory factors: changing actor constellations and motivations of German government coalitions, declining problem pressures due to increasing female labour participation and a higher fertility rate, and a decrease in the transferability of policies from the EU and the Nordic countries. By highlighting the different dynamics and effects of policy transfer for German family policy the paper contributes to the wider theoretical debate about the hybridisation of family policy regimes.

Urban Mountain Waterscapes: The Transformation of Hydro-Social Relations in the Trans-Himalayan Town Leh, Ladakh, India

Socio-economic processes and climate change impact the socio-hydrology of many small towns in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), such as Leh in Ladakh. The rapidly urbanising town experienced a shift from agricultural livelihoods towards incomes mainly relying on the tourism sector. As results of this research show, the limited water resources essential to the everyday life of urban citizens have become increasingly important for the tourism sector and the urbanisation process. This study aims to understand the transformation of the urban mountain waterscape and the role of different actors involved. The waterscape approach frames hydro-social relations in a specific spatial context and additionally captures diverging hydromentalities within local actor constellations. Related discourses are materialised as water governance impacting the everyday life of urban citizens. A combination of quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods allows for a differentiated picture of current developments. Based on 312 household questionnaires, 96 semi-structured interviews, and a participatory photography workshop, this study provides evidence that urban restructuring induced by development imaginaries produces uneven water citizenships in Leh. Along with socio-economic shifts, the community-managed water regulation system is replaced by a technocratic scheme, centralising water supply and sanitation. While some of Leh’s citizens benefit from urban restructurings, others are confronted with environmental and social costs, such as a deteriorating water quality and a further reduction in quantity.

Transcending binaries in critical peacebuilding scholarship to address ‘inclusivity’ projects

In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.

Changing conditions for teachers’ knowledge work: new actor constellations and responsibilities

In a time of strong focus on school development, teachers’ work is increasingly linked to a variety of actors, organisations and stakeholders with different agendas and suggestions for school improvements. This paper explores the different actor constellations that teachers engage with in collaborative knowledge work and the opportunities and constraints such engagements entail. By drawing on ethnographic methods, teams of teachers from one lower secondary school in Norway assigned to developing a local curriculum were followed closely across sites over a year. The analysis, which employs resources from assemblage thinking (AT), shows how new actor constellations spatially relocate teachers’ work in ways that extend their professional roles and responsibilities. The findings also reveal that such work is epistemically demanding because it requires comprehensive collective negotiations and investigative activities from the teachers. The analysis foregrounds insights that contribute to our understanding of changing conditions for knowledge work in the teaching profession.