Focal Actor Research Articles

Exploring landscapes of quantum technology with Patent Network Analysis

ABSTRACT While the new chapter of quantum technologies is bringing transformative changes to our society, a quantum ecosystem, which synergises the supportive activities from both social and scientific & technological sides, is acknowledged as a critical force to push the movements. Despite the importance of a quantum ecosystem, current articles barely illustrated its interconnected relations, essential elements and the long-term attributes of developing technologies. We apply the innovation ecosystem and social-technical system theories to bridge such research gaps by realising the patent network analysis. The analytical contents include focal actors, main technological clusters and technological trajectory, and most of them correspond to relevant reports. Particularly, quantum computation is an eye-catching subfield due to its high and intensive knowledge engagements in the past years. Last, we conclude the analytical results and provide two discussions in the discussion & conclusion section as the main contributions. One is to illustrate the long-term attributes and backgrounds of the analytical contents through the lens of the multi-level perspective framework. The other illustrates a path toward a focal actor.

The Influence of Weight Bias on Processes and Outcomes in Negotiation.

In two studies, using a mix of samples, we examined the influence of weight bias on behaviors in competitive, potentially high stakes situations. As predicted, weight bias directed focal actors' treatment of counterparts in a negotiation. Negotiators made lower value offers to overweight counterparts relative to average-weight counterparts. In addition, overweight counterparts also received more negative messages over the course of their negotiation and were evaluated less favorably after the negotiation than average-weight counterparts.

Organizing a sustainable smart urban ecosystem: Perspectives and insights from a bibliometric analysis and literature review

Cities struggle to enhance their sustainability by fostering their smartness, i.e. their ability to use advanced technologies and resources in an intelligent and integrated way to achieve a socially and environmentally viable economic growth. The transition towards urban ecosystems has been proposed as a practical solution to merge smartness and sustainability in the smart city discourse. However, little is known about the recipe for implementing and organizing a sustainable smart urban ecosystem. The bibliometric analysis and interpretive narrative review presented in this article found some contrasting perspectives on the approaches that should be embraced to run a viable smart urban ecosystem, shedding light into the manifold attributes of sustainable urban smartness. The research findings suggest that the viability of smart urban ecosystems relies on the ability of focal actors to implement a techno-bureaucratic governance model which relies on an integrated policy framework that accounts for the tripartite social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by cities. Citizen-centredness and greenness are the core values that embed urban smartness. Such values are useless if not backed by community engagement. Further developments should be targeted to unravel the role of datification and computerization in underpinning the collective intelligence of smart cities for the purpose of urban sustainability.

Change in Service Provision Networks: The Case of Animal Welfare Services

This research focuses on change within informal service provision networks, specifically examining the impact that changes within a key organization can have on the larger network. Employing a before and after survey design with a treatment at the midpoint and participant observation, it asks: What is the impact of a major change within one organization on the larger external network? What is the nature of the organizational ties? and, How do political factors exogenous to the network impact the network evolution process? The findings suggest that internal change within a focal actor can have ripple effects throughout the network increasing density. Public service provision at the local level can be enhanced through an increase in partnerships between the public and nonprofit sectors. However, network evolution can be limited by the larger political environment and lack of a coordinating role on the part of local government.

When homophilous ties matter: Social network brokerage and individuals’ innovative behavior

Occupying a brokerage network position provides the focal actor with structural opportunities to access non-redundant information and knowledge which may result in an enhanced innovative behavior. However, such a network position entails important challenges associated with knowledge articulation and behavioral constraints, which may hinder focal actors’ innovative outcomes. Drawing on the contingency perspective of social capital theory, in this study, we examine how socio-demographic similarity between a focal actor and his/her direct contacts may affect the relationship between brokerage and innovative behavior. Specifically, we focus on professional background and gender as salient socio-demographic categories that depict the type of knowledge possessed as well as informational, and behavioral differences among people. The results of an empirical study on 134 employees (the response rate was 88%) and 31 supervisors (the response rate was 97%) of an Italian consulting company show that having many homophilous ties, in terms of professional background and gender, strengthens the positive relationship between social network brokerage and individuals’ innovative behavior. These findings furnish important insights for the research on intra-organizational social networks and innovative behavior. At the end of the paper, we discuss its theoretical and practical implications as well as the potential limitations that open avenues for future research in the field.

Hometown Ties and Favoritism in Chinese Corporations: Evidence from CEO Dismissals and Corporate Social Responsibility

This paper provides a systematic analysis of how hometown ties, the most common and distinct bases for interpersonal ties to build upon in China, could influence corporate governance in Chinese corporations by focusing on its impact on CEO dismissals and corporate social responsibility. We find that hometown ties between CEOs and board chairs reduce the likelihood of CEO dismissals and that the negative relationship between firm performance and CEO dismissals is weaker for hometown-connected CEOs in locally administered state-owned enterprises, for inside CEOs, for firms located outside board chairs’ hometowns, and for firms operating in regions with low social trust. Moreover, we find consistent evidence that hometown ties affect Chinese firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility. Our study highlights the important role of hometown ties in Chinese relationship-based corporate governance. It also advances a normative ethical assessment of hometown-based favoritism by highlighting its distinct dynamics and impacts on focal actors and the third parties in specific contexts of actions.

To Reveal or Not to Reveal a Secret: Navigating the Conflict between Honesty and Loyalty

Secrets create moral dilemmas. Individuals who know others’ secrets face a choice: to be honest (and reveal the secret) or to be loyal (and keep the secret). We introduce a triadic model of secret-keeping involving a focal actor who knows a partner’s secret, a partner who has a secret, and an audience likely interested in knowing the secret information; the actor faces conflicting obligations: to be honest with the audience or to be loyal to the partner. Across four pre-registered experiments (N=1,514), we show that observers judge actors who privilege honesty (and reveal the secret) to be more moral but less likable than actors who privilege loyalty (and keep the secret). The nature of the secret information moderates these interpersonal judgments. When the secret information involves unethical behavior, observers judge actors who disclose secrets to be more moral (and less likable) than they judge actors who keep secrets, but when the secret information does not involve unethical behavior, observers judge actors who disclose secrets to be less moral (and much less likable) than actors who keep secrets.

Tahapan Perilaku Aktor Jaringan Komunikasi Pada Sosialisasi Isu Bullying

Bullying has been an alarming issue for kids and teenagers nowadays. One of community that shares serious concern over this issue is Sudah Dong. This study aims to find out how the behaviour stages of actors in creating the communication networks between the volunteers of Sudah Dong community by employing the qualitative approach with in-depth interviews and observation, and theory of actor network. The result of this research revealed that the main volunteers have done the six stages of behaviour to create communication network, including problemization, interessement, enrollment, mobilization, dan inscription. Few focal actors have become the strongest nodes of the communication network and contributed much to the existence of the community. Moreover, human collectivism such as supporting organizations and private sectors were also contributing factors for the network. The non-human factors namely events and media helped attract individuals to join as volunteers. This research also found that only a few main volunteers actively participated in the community, but it was relatively effective to run the community. The shared feelings towards bullying issues and the close friendships ties were the significant factors strengthening the communication network among the main volunteers.

Social innovation governance and the role of universities: Cases of quadruple helix partnerships in Italy

This paper explores the governance of social innovation throughout quadruple helix partnerships between civil society, business, government, and academic actors. Particular attention is given to the participation of universities in such partnerships as an expression of public and community engagement under broad third mission goals. Quadruple helix partnerships may favour the governance of projects aiming at social innovation, but conflicts and drawbacks can hinder the alignment of partners’ contributions. To tackle this issue, we develop a conceptual framework that points out four key phases in such governance processes: i) identification of a common nexus, ii) building of shared strategies, iii) implementation, and iv) learning feedbacks. We apply this framework to three Italian projects under the new EU Urban innovative actions’ program. Different alignment pathways and barriers in the governance process emerge and are discussed. The results show that quadruple helix partnerships for social innovation work smoothly if a solid common nexus between partners is in place. The University is used as a focal actor to understand the mechanisms underpinning each phase and the role it may play in such partnerships.

Advancing clinical leadership to improve the implementation of evidence-based practice in surgery: a longitudinal mixed-method study protocol

BackgroundClinical leadership is fundamental in facilitating service improvements in healthcare. Few studies have attempted to understand or model the different approaches to leadership which are used when promoting the uptake and implementation of evidence-based interventions. This research aims to uncover and explain how distributed clinical leadership can be developed and improved to enhance the use of evidence in practice. In doing so, this study examines implementation leadership in orthopaedic surgery to explain leadership as a collective endeavour which cannot be separated from the organisational context.MethodsA mixed-method study consisting of longitudinal and cross-sectional interviews and an embedded social network analysis will be performed in six NHS hospitals. A social network analysis will be undertaken in each hospital to uncover the organisational networks, the focal leadership actors and information flows in each organisation. This will be followed by a series of repeated semi-structured interviews, conducted over 4 years, with orthopaedic surgeons and their professional networks. These longitudinal interviews will be supplemented by cross-sectional interviews with the national established surgical leaders. All qualitative data will be analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach and integrated with the quantitative data. The participant narratives will enrich the social network to uncover the leadership configurations which exist, and how different configurations of leadership are functioning in practice to influence implementation processes and outcomes.DiscussionThe study findings will facilitate understanding about how and why different configurations of leadership develop and under what organisational conditions and circumstances they are able to flourish. The study will guide the development of leadership interventions that are grounded in the data and aimed at advancing leadership for service improvement in orthopaedics. The strength of the study lies in the combination of multi-component, multi-site, multi-agent methods to examine leadership processes in surgery. The findings may be limited by the practical challenges of longitudinal qualitative data collection, such as ensuring participant retention, which need to be balanced against the theoretical and empirical insights generated through this comprehensive exploration of leadership across and within a range of healthcare organisations.

Rural place branding processes: a meta-synthesis

Like cities and nations, rural places have adopted the practice of place branding to improve their reputation and increase their competitiveness to attract residents, tourists, and consumers. This review aims to synthesize case studies of rural place branding in order to identify different types of processes applied and relating them to the contextual factors underlying their application. A typology of five rural place branding processes (PBP) is proposed, based on the existence and dominance of a focal actor, and other actors involved in the process. Six contextual factors that affect the application of the various PBP are identified: (1) type of place distinguishing between places with or without administrative power, (2) initiative referring to the difference between political/administrative, community, mixed, (3) support base for the branding distinguishing between strong political/organizational, strong community, strong identity, (4) brand purpose, i.e., competitiveness, identity, conservation; (5) target group, and (6) type of place brand referring to the difference between sectoral and integrated place brands. Patterns of the contextual factors have been identified that seem to be typical for the application of the different PBP types. The findings provide guidance to rural place managers and communities to apply a PBP that matches their specific context.

Call for papers for the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator: Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work

Call for papers for the 2021 Emerging Discourse Incubator: Managing Working Conditions in Supply Chains: Towards Decent Work

Managerial sensemaking in a transforming business ecosystem: Conditioning forces, moderating frames, and strategizing options

Disclosing the root cause of managerial action in environments undergoing change, is intrinsically linked to understanding how managers perceive both themselves, and their focal network including the broader surrounding environment. Despite an increased research interest into the interlink between sensemaking and strategizing, empirical evidence on how different limitations manifest in the sensemaking of individual managers in specific contexts is scarce.This study focuses on individual level sensemaking in a transforming business ecosystem as a microfoundation of strategizing. It explores the diverseness of managerial sensemaking by comparing noticed cues, moderating frames and sensemaking outcomes as reflected in different strategizing options. The empirical data derive from 52 semi-structured interviews with top managers in a local business ecosystem. Based on our analysis, we develop an empirically grounded model that unwraps the frames that influence how managers perceive and interpret the changing environment and the implications for their business.Our study provides important empirical corroboration to extant research on the cognitive microfoundations of strategizing in networked environments and adds detail to the underlying sensemaking mechanisms at play. The results highlight the local context and the identity embeddedness of focal actors herein, as factors that significantly influence managerial sensemaking in transforming business ecosystem contexts.

Steering global energy governance: Who governs and what do they do?

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring indirect governance at the global level. However, very little work has considered these relationships in the domain of energy. In fragmented global governance domains, such as energy, the G20 has frequently been identified as an actor capable of steering other actors via indirect forms of governance. Yet to date, we do not have answers to key questions including, what is the range of actors being enrolled by the G20? And what governance functions are these actors enrolled to perform? To answer these questions, I utilize a novel database of G20 enrollment since 2008, which shows that the G20 enrolls international organizations more frequently than any other actor, and that agenda setting is the most commonly performed governance function. These data are then matched with qualitative interview data to make descriptive inferences about the patterns of global energy governance, including the extent of fragmentation, the identity of focal actors, and the G20's steering role, and how these patterns have changed over time.

The evolution of a collaboration network and its impact on innovation performance under the background of government-funded support: an empirical study in the Chinese wind power sector.

To accelerate the transformation and application of basic research results, the Chinese government has repeatedly mentioned in a government work report that it is necessary to support research and innovation collaborations between knowledge research institutions and enterprises. However, few studies have focused on the evolution of collaborations between these organizations and the impact of collaborations on innovation performance (IP) in the field of renewable energy under the background of government-funded support (GFS). Based on scientific publications, we construct a GFS collaboration network in the wind power field to investigate the evolution of network structure characteristics, attribute proximity variables, and applied research collaboration (ARC), and we study the impact of network evolution on the IP of actors. The results show that the focal actor of the collaboration network prefers to engage in ARC with partners who are familiar and have the same knowledge base in different provinces. This collaboration tendency will reduce geographical proximity and increase the direct ties, indirect ties, technological proximity, and ARC of the ego network. Among them, direct ties have an inverted U-shaped effect on IP, geographical proximity has a significantly negative impact on IP, and the remaining variables have positive impacts on IP. Taken together, when the direct ties is within a certain range, these collaboration tendencies in a GFS collaboration network positively affect the IP of research institutions and enterprises.

Spectator Sports as Context for Examining Observers’ Agreeableness, Social Identification, and Empathy in a High-Stakes Conflict Situation

In a high-stakes conflict or dilemma situation, observers often feel empathy for one side versus the other. Using a high-profile conflict situation in a world-renowned spectator sport (the US Open) as context, the authors of this study examined the roles of personality and social-cognitive factors, specifically agreeableness and social identification, on empathic concern towards three individuals (a focal actor or instigator, a target, and an "innocent" bystander) involved in an emotionally charged conflict situation. Results showed direct and indirect effects of agreeableness on identification with the focal actor and empathic concern towards the individuals involved in the conflict situation. Participants' social-cognitive processes of identification with the focal actor or instigator fully mediated the effect of personality trait of agreeableness on empathic concern towards the focal actor, whereas agreeableness was directly related to empathic concern towards the target and the bystander without (full) mediation by social identification. Gender differences were found with women reporting higher empathic concern and identification towards the female focal actor and lower empathic concern towards the male target in the conflict situation, suggesting potential automatic or implicit in-group bias. Study results highlight the complex integration of personality and social-cognitive processes, including intersectionality of social identities, in the dynamics of empathic reactions during high-stakes and emotionally charged conflict situations.

Shared Positive Emotions at Work – Focal Actor Perspective to Responding to Others’ Positive Emotion

The importance of sharing positive emotions in interpersonal relationships has been well established. Still, the focal actor perspective to responding to others’ positive emotions has largely been overlooked, even though the focal actor plays a key role in the process. To shed light on this important phenomenon, we propose that the focal actor’s response unfolds through a process of four steps – noticing, feeling care, taking action, and sensemaking – and numerous intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms impacting each step. The new understanding of the focal actor response may help foster desired symmetrical emotion regulation outcome, and increase employees’ motivation to share their positive emotions to a colleague, and help employees to experience the bolstering effect of the benefits of sharing their positive emotions. In the light of the new understanding, existing concepts of shared positive emotions, including positivity resonance, high quality connections, and relational energy, are addressed. Implications for responding to and sharing of positive emotions in interpersonal relationships, as well as the practice of effective responding in the workplace, are discussed.

Ineffectual Orders: Habituated Effectuation in a Scaling Social Enterprise

The institutional complexity and economics of worth literature are largely silent on the potential for conflict between particular orders of worth—meta-cognitive conventions for making and justifying decisions—to become intractable. The entrepreneurship literature is largely silent on the potential for effectuation—a meta-cognitive process informing decision-making under uncertainty—to become habituated. Our ethnographic study of a globally scaling, inclusivity social enterprise brings together these disparate literatures to show that effectuation and its alternative, causation, can act as catalysts for conflict among orders of worth, and when habituated among focal actors, hold the potential to turn a globally scaling social enterprise into a failed organization. Insights for theory and practice in hybrid organizations and entrepreneurship are provided.

Social Attribution of Collaborative Outcomes: A Study of Status Dynamics in Jazz Music Industry

This study examines how social recognition of collaborative outcomes affects status gain of actors. While research on status dynamics suggests that actors may enhance their status by producing desirable outcomes or by collaborating with high-status actors, understanding the influence of collaborative outcomes is problematic because actors in a collaborative relationship take varying status positions and gain only partial credit for their collaborative outcomes. Drawing from attribution theory, we suggest that while desirable outcomes and collaborating with higher-status actors tend to increase a focal actor’s status individually, collaborations with higher-status actors result in gaining less credit for the desirable outcomes because audiences tend to attribute the desirable outcomes more to the higher-status collaborators and less to the lower-status actor. Analyzing collaboration networks among jazz musicians between 1950 and 2004, we found the negative moderation effect of collaborator status on gaining status from desirable collaborative outcomes; musicians gain less status from receiving positive ratings from critics and from creating novel repertoires when they collaborate with actors who have higher status than them. This finding highlights the audiences’ credit allocation to the contributors in status evaluation and reveals underexplored processes in status dynamics.

Tensions and trade-offs in multi-actor service ecosystems

The purpose of this article is to: (1) understand tensions and trade-offs that actors make through activities and interactions in their service ecosystem stemming from differing worldviews; (2) explicate how actors resolve tensions through trade-offs, identifying focal relationships and the relative influence of focal actors; (3) propose a conceptual framework of tensions and trade-offs in multi-actor service ecosystems. Drawing on Institutional Logics and Practice Theory this article provides new insights into multi-actor service ecosystems identifying tensions and trade-offs that actors make with other actors designed to achieve desired outcomes. In a first, authors demonstrate that actors exhibit different forms of focal relationships, with actors’ worldviews influencing roles and practices. Misalignment of worldviews can result in significant tensions. However, reconciling conflicting goals and practices is not always realistic or beneficial due largely to enduring worldviews of focal actors. Practical and theoretical implications are provided with an agenda to guide future research.