Heterogeneous Actors Research Articles

The power of the markets? The international bond markets and the 2002 elections in Brazil

ABSTRACT This study uses an investment bank's fixed income research reports to analyse in unusual detail the investment activities and attitudes of international emerging bond market investors during the extreme market volatility over the Brazilian presidential elections of 2002. In examining these investors' reaction to the prospect and subsequent policies of the left-wing Lula government, the article considers Mosley's (2003, Global Capital and National Governments, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press) conclusions regarding the strength and breadth of the bond market's influence on emerging market governments. The data show that international bond market investors did not exit Brazil before the elections, putting in question whether they were the source of the rise in the cost of government borrowing that Mosley and others see as indicative of the market's strength. This suggests that our understanding of the actors responsible for market movements remains incomplete. The article, therefore, challenges the idea, common within international political economy, of ‘the market’ as a single entity, with common actions and policy preferences. The data presented strongly suggest ‘the market’ is in reality made up of multiple, heterogeneous actors, often lacking any unity of opinion or purpose. After Lula's election victory, market prices recovered and the data show that international investors increased their investments in Brazil, despite slower policy implementation than market practitioners desired and the new government's social agenda. This supports a questioning of the true breadth of investors' policy interests and, therefore, influence.

Development of cooperation in new venture support networks: the role of key actors

PurposeNew venture support networks (NVSN) are an instrument of enterprise policy with the aim of effectively coordinating the activities of different organisations involved in new venture support. This paper aims to illuminate the role of certain key actors in facilitating and maintaining cooperation in such networks, which are characterised by a heterogeneous actor structure and a lack of a network culture due to having been established by political initiative.Design/methodology/approachThis paper discusses case studies in five German NVSN, which are all part of the governmental initiative “EXIST – Entrepreneurs from Universities”, established in 1998.FindingsIdentifies three general functions for key actors: generating benefits for the member organisations from without and within the network; communicating these benefits to the member organisations; and maintaining a balance between the heterogeneous interests of the network partners.Research limitations/implicationsThe study identifies the roles that key actors perform in the EXIST networks, but it does not show any causal relation as to the actual success of the key actors.Practical implicationsThe results can be applied in planning and managing enterprise policy and other projects involving inter‐organisational cooperation with a heterogeneous range of actors.Originality/valueThis is the first examination of the role of key actors in the context of NVSN, which are themselves a recent phenomenon and a novel concept in academic literature.

Individual and Collective Choice and Voting in Common Pool Resource Problem with Heterogeneous Actors

In this paper we investigate the effects of heterogeneity in common pool resource (CPR) problems. We examine whether heterogeneity impedes or facilitates coordination on an efficient use of a CPR by proposing and voting on allocation schemes. In a full information design we compare extractions and voting behavior in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. If the CPR is extracted individually, we find no difference in efficiency between heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. However, when groups can vote on allocation schemes, homogeneous groups are more likely to reach an efficient agreement than heterogeneous groups.

Governmentality and power in politically contested space: refugee farming in Hong Kong's New Territories, 1945–1970

A small proportion of Mainland Chinese refugee flows into British Hong Kong following the 1949 Communist Revolution in the People's Republic of China were vegetable farmers, who by the late 1960s engendered a vegetable revolution in New Territories agricultural space. Heterogeneous actors and their differing modalities of power in the late-colonial government possessed an active managerial role in this vegetable revolution anchored in issues of marketing and land tenure. While post-World War Two developmentalist ontologies help explain government intervention in the post-war agricultural economy, this research focuses primarily on the disciplinary techniques deployed within the governance rationalities of the early Cold War period to cultivate pro-government loyalties among a potentially proletarianized, trans-border refugee farming population perceived by colonial authorities as being susceptible to Communist influence. As ‘experimental space’, marketing innovations were a qualified success, but progress in land reform failed because of the local geopolitical context of colonial rule in the contested space of the New Territories.

Cooperation in regional new venture support networks: experiences from Germany

PurposeTo introduce new venture support networks (NVSN) as a topical instrument in German entrepreneurship policy, and to discuss critically the problems in achieving cooperation between the member organizations in these networks.Design/methodology/approachConceptual analysis with illustrative empirical examples derived from 17 semi‐structured interviews with actors involved in the German federal NVSN initiative “EXIST – Entrepreneurs from Universities”.FindingsIdentifies two major sources of obstacles to achieving cooperation in politically initiated NVSN: heterogeneous actor structure; and lack of culture as a network due to the “artificial” political origin of the network.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper only identifies problem areas and illustrates these with empirical examples. Further research is required so as to analyse how the problem areas could be improved.Practical implicationsIdentified problem areas should be considered when planning (entrepreneurship) policy initiatives that include inter‐organizational cooperation.Originality/valueIntroduces and critically analyses a topical and so far little studied phenomenon of entrepreneurship policy.

GEOMETRIC BROADCAST PROTOCOL FOR HETEROGENEOUS SENSOR NETWORKS

We present Geometric Broadcast for Heterogeneous Sensor Networks (GBS), a novel broadcasting protocol for heterogeneous wireless sensor and actor networks. While broadcasting is a very energy expensive protocol, it is also widely used as a building block for a variety of other network layer protocols. Therefore, reducing the energy consumption by optimizing broadcasting is a major improvement in heterogenous sensor networking. GBS is a distributed algorithm where nodes make local decisions on whether to transmit based on a geometric approach. GBS does not need any neighborhood information and imposes very low communication overhead. GBS is scalable to the change in network size, node type, node density and topology. Furthermore it accommodates seamlessly such network changes, including the presence of actors in heterogeneous sensor networks. Indeed, GBS takes advantage of actor nodes, and uses their resources when possible, thus reducing the energy consumption by sensor nodes. Through simulation evaluations, we show that GBS is very scalable and its performance is improved by the presence of actors. At the best of our knowledge, GBS is the first broadcast protocol designed specifically for heterogeneous sensor and actor networks.

What has requirements research ever done for us? (goal-modeling techniques)

Requirements research has produced two principal goal-modeling techniques-knowledge acquisition in automated specification (KAOS) and i*. Both investigate goals that can provide criteria for determining whether requirements are relevant and complete. KAOS treats goals as desired system properties that traditional requirements-gathering techniques discover. It structures them into directed acyclic graphs. The i* approach models information systems as heterogeneous actors with different, often competing goals that nonetheless depend on each other to undertake their tasks and achieve these goals.

Stepwise deployment methodology of a service oriented architecture for business communities

This paper describes the deployment of a Service Oriented Architecture in the specific context of the ‘Business Communities’, i.e. Communities of heterogeneous actors that cooperate in the same business area. The architecture is based on XML and Web Services technologies. More specifically the paper analyzes the structure and the requirements of Business Communities in general, derives the requirements of the architecture and describes its implementation. Finally, a case study is presented to show how the architecture has been implemented for the Business Community of the Port of Genoa characterized by users operating in the cargo and transport business area.

Transborder Regional Alliances in Europe: Chances for Ethnic Euroregions?

This contribution deals with obstacles to development of ethnic transborder regional alliances in Europe. It includes some theoretical considerations as well as case studies of three European border zones with so-called ‘interface minorities’. These are the Belgian–German border zone, the Basque Country and the former Habsburg Kronland of Tyrol. From a perspective that European integration and regionalism are phenomena related to state decline, the dynamics of transborder regional alliances or ‘euroregions’ can be considered to take place relatively independent of the confines and institutional structures of the states. However, critical evaluations of the phenomena of regionalism indicate that we should be careful not to assume that regional actors in a border zone with interface minorities are self-evidently inclined and able to create an ethnic euroregion. Instead, it is more realistic to assume a more complex situation with a heterogeneous field of actors and constraining conditions emanating from the structural and social institutionalisation of the states. In all cases the different positions of regional populations in the different state contexts have brought about asymmetries in the complex of elements that constitute ethnoregional dynamics. The cases seem to confirm that the principle obstacles to the formation of ethnic euroregions are related with institutional differences between the states and heterogeneity of actors.

Something new in old Europe?

This paper investigates whether EU research programmes have led to innovations in European social research. This is based on an assessment of a group of EU‐funded projects on the changing nature of work in Europe. EU‐funded projects have contributed to the creation of a European social space for European researchers, but at the cost of consolidating English as the lingua franca of European social research. Such projects tend to involve heterogeneous research actors and are oriented towards policy issues. To some extent they are therefore representative of a ‘Mode 2’ form of knowledge production. More clearly, they have ensured that social research about Europe is no longer simply comparative research. The new EU Sixth Framework Programme on RTD will undermine many of these achievements through its focus on conventional definitions of ‘excellence’ and the insistence on large‐scale research instruments.

Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption in Morocco (review)

Jamila Bargach. Orphans of Islam: Family, Abandonment, and Secret Adoption In Morocco. Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. pp. 304 Ethnography, writes Jamila Bargach in her introduction to Orphans of tlslam becomes...the art of evocation (p. 13). And indeed, ethnography that follows in this often beautifully written book does evoke, to great effect and at many levels. Most poignantly, Bargach summons voices and experiences of illegitimate children, adoptive parents, state social workers, and others whose lives circulate in and around social processes of child abandonment and in Morocco. We are made privy to ethnographer's excursions to court offices and hospital wards, her interviews with those abandoned as children, and her visits to homes of adopting families. Whatever analytical merits of this book and there are many Bargach remains true to her claim that voices, stories and narratives she recounts are not mere illustrations for ideas or arguments but rather the very essence of this work (p. 12). Orphans of Islam is full of both human pathos, representing tortured lives of those stigmatized as bastards in Morocco, and unapologetic politics insofar as that representation is at once a call for recognition of hidden reality and a charge to redress it. The idea of ethnography as evocation, as deployed by Bargach, appears to be aimed at two related issues. First is matter of ethnographic closure which author wishes to complicate and which topic cannot abide. As Bargach demonstrates, Moroccan phenomena under investigation betray heterogeneity scarcely captured in English notion of adoption as a relatively monolithic process. Rather, a variety of social and legal relationships, each with attendant cultural and linguistic signifiers, can be mobilized when in Morocco care of a child is undertaken by adults other than biological parents. What Bargach calls customary adoption, for example, refers to arrangements by which a child is considered a gift from one family to another. This informal transaction neither alters child's lineal identity nor necessitates a complete social break from family of origin. Bargach is primarily concerned with two other general kinds of adoption-extralegal or secret and legal guardianship (kafala) of a minor-both implicated more formally in state and Islamic law. The heterogeneity of actors, institutions, and places with which Bargach deals further complicates singularity implied by rhetorical strategies of ethnographic closure. There is neither a single place nor an insular community represented in this book, and minimal attention devoted by Moroccan state to child abandonment and is insufficient to create a singular national-bureaucratic space in which these phenomena operate. Moreover, Bargach shows that abandonment and are situated in globalized spheres of missionary work, NGOs, and economic development. What we learn from voices and cases which Bargach evoke is not that each represents abandonment and in Morocco writ small but rather that a nexus of intersecting kinship ideologies, textual traditions, state institutions, and committed (inter)national actors constrain and construct conditions of possibility in which abandonment and unfold. Second, particular cases of abandonment and are further meant to evoke insofar as they throw chaos in established and accepted paradigms(13). The normative paradigms under scrutiny here are those emerging from within both theoretical terrain of academic anthropology and cultural terrain of Moroccan society. In first instance, Bargach forces us to reconsider Orientalist notions that, by virtue of orthodox Sunni prohibitions against practice, is absent in Islamic society. In debunking this claim with a rigorous ethnography of practical within and beyond scope of Moroccan/Islamic law, Bargach renders important service of filling a gap in anthropological representations of Morocco. …

San Sebastián de Las Ovejas: pureza perdida y revitalización en el norte neuquino (Argentina)

En el siguiente artículo desarrollaremos cómo el culto y la fiesta de celebración a San Sebastián en Las Ovejas sufrió en estos últimos años una serie de transformaciones que están en estrecha relación con cambios institucionales de la Iglesia Católica, la vida política y económica de la Argentina y más específicamente de la provincia de Neuquén. La reapertura democrática argentina en 1983, y al casi simultáneo proyecto de integración económica del Cono Sur americano, denominado Mercosur, está implicando que economías nacionales relativamente cerradas se vayan abriendo e integrando en un solo mercado con la finalidad de conseguir mayor competitividad y asegurar mercados. Esto exige que las fronteras internacionales se tornen más permeables. La heterogeneidad de actores (sacerdotes, políticos, devotos, etc.) e intereses (económicos, turísticos, religiosos, etc.) de la fiesta indican su multivocalidad; y como el propio origen de la celebración está ligado al corte de las relaciones intercordilleranas hacia mitad del siglo XX, la devoción a San Sebastián aparece como un mediador entre la localidad y la nación argentina, su pasado chileno y la institucionalidad de la Iglesia Católica. Finalmente, el análisis de la organización y el significado de la celebración nos permite entonces reflexionar sobre ciertas categorías clásicas y en apariencia antagónicas de la antropología como tradición/innovación o conflicto/armonía.

The cultural swirl: anthropological perspectives on innovation

Abstract As the emergence of a globalized economy transforms the conditions under which economic performance and productivity growth occur, the ability to innovate has come to the fore as the key factor determining the competitive advantage of national economies, entire industries and individual firms alike. Linking the economic concern with the new products and services to more general questions of the social organization of culture, this essay sets out to explore the contribution of anthropology to an understanding of how innovation occurs. Against the backdrop of theories of cultural change and the identification of parameters that define innovative environments, anthropology enquires into how historical contingency and social agency make innovation possible. In‐depth ethnographic studies emphasize that innovation is much less dependent on the creative individual than on the interaction within social milieux that create what anthropologist Ulf Hannerz calls a ‘cultural swirl’. Such milieux appear to function best when they incorporate heterogeneous actors and are not closed systems but exposed to serendipitous encounters and exchanges with others actors and milieux.

Multiplicity in Scientific Medicine: The Experience of HIV-Positive Patients

This article examines HIV-positive patients’ experiences of treatments within a context characterized by the multiplicity of opinions expressed both by specialists and the public domain (media in particular). It is based upon a survey of 63 patients encountered in a Paris hospital. The authors demonstrate the contrasts between these patients in terms of two main dimensions: the degree of the patients’ proximity to specialist knowledge, and the level of homogeneousness that the patients attribute to medical know-how. At the point where these two dimensions meet, the article distinguishes between three forms of patient attitude towards treatment; in other words, three ways of simultaneously positioning oneself with regard to the media, associations, doctors and family circles/entourage: resorting to exteriority; self-integration into biomedical institutions; arranging heterogeneous actors. It analyses the transformations relating to the main experience profiles highlighted by sociological studies of other pathologies.

The Struggle for District-Based Health Information Systems in South Africa

This article describes the initial period (1994-2001) of an ongoing action research project to develop health information systems to support district management in South Africa. The reconstruction of the health sector in postapartheid South Africa striving for equity in health service delivery and building of a decentralized structure based on health districts. In terms of information systems (IS) development, this reform process translates into standardization of health data in ways that inscribe the goals of the new South Africa by enhancing local control and integration of information handling. We describe our approach to action research and use concepts from actor-network and structuration theories in analyzing the case material. In the detailed description and analysis of the process of IS development provided, we focus on the need to balance standardization and local flexibility (localization); standardization is thus seen as bottom-up alignment of an array of heterogeneous actors. Building on a social system model of information systems, we conceptualize the IS design strategy developed and used as the cultivation of processes whereby these actors are translating and aligning their interests. We develop a modular hierarchy of global and local datasets as a framework within which the tensions between standardization and localization may be understood and addressed. Finally, we discuss the possible relevance of the results of the research in other countries.

Un monde sans bois ni lois. La déforestation des pays tropicaux

Two decades ago the world became aware that the rapid destruction of tropical forests required new measures and new forms of management, but no global policy has taken hold. Why not? The concept of the commons is of hardly any use in the matter, particularly because of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors and the overlapping of forest management problems with those of development in general. The recent infatuation with local participation and regulation by market forces will perhaps pave the way for solutions. If the decline of tropical forests is inevitable, at least one thing is undeniable: the obsessive anxiety that it causes

Sociotechnical networks and information management in health care

In this paper, the notion of a sociotechnical network is used to illustrate the mutuality of technology and organisation. The paper tells the story of the proposed implementation of an executive information system in a newly corporatised hospital. In order to build a coherent and stable network, diverse interests of heterogeneous actors had to be accommodated within the executive information system. Ultimately, the failure to unify the multiplicity of interpretations surrounding the proposed system meant that the project ceased to exist.

Making the Pap smear into the "right tool" for the job.

Despite being a rather recalcitrant tool, the "Pap smear" is today the major cancer screening technology in the world. This paper examines how and why hetrogeneous actors chose to advocate the Pap smear as a screen for cervical cancer in the late 1940's, and to tinker both in and far beyond the diagnostic laboratory for over 50 years to make the Pap smear "fit" as a screening and clinical technology. Tinkerings included gendering the division of labour, attempting to automate reading of smears, juggling costs, exploring alternative screening technologies, pushing for regulation of laboratories, and settling for locally-negotiated orders of clinical accuracy instead of global standardization, still elusive today.

Social Dilemma Models under the Heterogeneity of Actors

Social Dilemma Models under the Heterogeneity of Actors

Informal networking

Modern technical solutions are characterized by an increased interrelatedness between heterogeneous actors and knowledge fields. No single firm can keep pace with the development of all relevant technologies. Therefore, firms must have access to external knowledge sources. Informal networks or cooperative environments are an organizational device for external learning. In the paper the master-equation approach is applied to model the evolution of an informal network. Using this method, we can totally dispense with the rigorous assumption of perfect rationality that is usually employed when modelling cooperative behaviour. Our results show that under a regime where technology is of major importance, know-how sharing and the emergence of informal networks is possible via self-organization.