Kinds Of Actors Research Articles

Risk Assessment Method for System‐of‐Systems Operations — A Case Study of Wildfire Fighting

AbstractA SoS is a set of collaborating systems that act towards a common achievement. Risk assessment is important in the early stages of SoS operational development, both for mission objectives and to enable technology which is developed responsibly. The method considers risks that stems from both internal and external interactions which leads to losses for different kind of actors. The method has been applied to a fictional case study of wildfire fighting. The internal interactions are mostly communication between the CSs while external interactions represent dependencies of other systems as well as impacts on other systems. The outcome of the methodology is a network of connected hazards to be used for risk management and for high level SoS requirements.

Domain-Independent Lifelong Problem Solving Through Distributed ALife Actors.

A domain-independent problem-solving system based on principles of Artificial Life is introduced. In this system, DIAS, the input and output dimensions of the domain are laid out in a spatial medium. A population of actors, each seeing only part of this medium, solves problems collectively in it. The process is independent of the domain and can be implemented through different kinds of actors. Through a set of experiments on various problem domains, DIAS is shown able to solve problems with different dimensionality and complexity, to require no hyperparameter tuning for new problems, and to exhibit lifelong learning, that is, to adapt rapidly to run-time changes in the problem domain, and to do it better than a standard, noncollective approach. DIAS therefore demonstrates a role for ALife in building scalable, general, and adaptive problem-solving systems.

Innovation for sustainability: how actors are myopically caught in processes of co-evolution

In this paper, we argue that the development, uptake and adoption of innovations resembles an evolutionary process of variation, selection and retention (within broader processes of co-evolution) in which actors are myopically caught. We do so in four steps. First, we review in what ways socio-technical evolution resembles biological evolution. Second, we argue that in socio-technical evolution so-called ‘configurations that work’ can be viewed as evolutionary units, which are subject to selection pressures, variation and human-made couplings between variation and selection. This explains why innovation is often cumulative, based on variation and recombination. Third, we discuss how producers, consumers, governments and scientists are myopically caught in processes of co-evolution. While humans are capable of imagining the need for system change and details of desired systems, they are less capable of accepting the concomitant higher costs and inconveniences and adopt new interpretive schemes. Fourth, in a pluralist world, steering is done by all kind of actors, including those who actively resist transformative change. Because of this, steering by government and coalitions of change can achieve little more than a modulation of ongoing dynamics, despite disturbing evidence of a run-away climate, mass extinction, pervasive ecological degradation and steady depletion of resources. A new consciousness of the Anthropocene can evoke fundamental changes in science and the economy if—and only if—they are sufficiently carried by institutional changes and new practices. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.

Accountability enablers? The role of transnational activism in the use of the multilateral development bank grievance mechanisms

Abstract The proliferation of concerns over the transparency, accountability, and democracy of international organizations has contributed to an increase in accountability mechanisms to hold global governors to account, by both state and non-state actors. Much of the scholarly focus on this subject has been on how levers of accountability can improve global governance for Member States and actors seeking to improve decision-making, and thus outputs. This article instead examines how individuals and communities, or neglected publics, are using accountability mechanisms designed to provide them with recourse for environmental and social harm. It probes the use of the grievance mechanisms for the multilateral development banks to examine what kinds of actors use them (e.g., international nongovernmental organizations, nongovernmental organizations, or project-affected people [PAP]) and to what effect. To explore these questions, we analyze 500 complaints submitted to the grievance mechanisms of the World Bank Group; the Asian, African, and Inter-American Development Banks; and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The results demonstrate that claims for recourse come from a range of primarily local actors, but that PAP in developing countries will more often achieve positive outcomes from the grievance mechanism process if they receive assistance from international and national nongovernmental organizations. These findings therefore demonstrate that transnational activists can fulfill a facilitating role as “accountability enablers” and that domestic representatives are especially effective in problem-solving processes, while international representatives are especially effective in compliance processes.

Snail meat consumption in Buea-Cameroon: exposures to foodborne pathogens through social practices assessed in 2019 and 2021

BackgroundSnail meat is an important source of nutrition in Cameroon, but the food safety risks are poorly understood. We characterized public health risks from snail meat consumption as a social system in Cameroon, by examining local snail practices that expose snail meat handlers and consumers to foodborne pathogens.MethodsWe used exploratory qualitative approaches, that is, lived experience, face-to-face in-depth interviews, participant observation and a focus group, to explore fifteen key informants’ routines and lived experiences, and perceptions of two health officials on the food safety practices around snail meat consumption in Cameroon. This information was organized and interpreted using Soft Systems Methodology and Social Practice Theory, which permitted a systemic appreciation of local practices.ResultsWe distinguished five kinds of actors (snail vendors, market sellers, street vendors, street eaters and home consumers), who performed seven successive practices (picking, selling, cracking, washing, cooking, hawking and eating). We then identified three worldviews about snails: family support or to reduce poverty, a source of nutrition and a food choice (taste, preference). Our findings revealed participants’ competences were based on childhood learning and ‘inborn’ experiences, and materials used in snail activities reflected participants’ parentage and ‘state of poverty’. Although most interviewees highlighted ‘unhygienic conditions’ when explaining snail picking locations, participants believed washing and cooking should kill all contaminants.ConclusionSeveral opportunities for human exposures to foodborne pathogens including snail picking in domestic wastes and sewage, the selling of unpackaged live snails, improper snail meat washing and hawking in loosely closed buckets, were apparent from our analysis. These findings suggest fruitful opportunities aimed at improving health outcomes among African snail meat handlers and consumers.

Memory Politics on a Neighborhood Scale: Uses of the Past in the Historic Center and the Periphery of Valencia (Spain)

This article analyzes the production of memory on a neighborhood scale, comparing the different logics that shape narratives about the past in the historic center and a peripheral area of the city of Valencia (Spain). We analyze the uses of the past developed by three kinds of actors: local institutions, social movements, and residents. This line of research shows that administrators boost aestheticized memories oriented towards commodification and tourist promotion in the historic center and towards an unconflicted representation of interculturality in the periphery. These hegemonic narratives are being reproduced, appropriated, and negotiated by social movements and local residents, who replicate some elements of the official narratives while, at the same time, resignifying other parts and claiming neglected and erased memories. Urban memories function, therefore, as a political arena for the imposition and negotiation of different dynamics and transformations experienced at the local level.

Identification and characterization of potential change agents among agri-food producers: regime, niche and hybrid actors

The multi-level perspective has been criticized for being functionalistic and paying little attention to actor-based perspectives. Nevertheless, for the identification and assessment of potential change agents in a sustainability transition, a clear conceptual and methodological approach is necessary. This paper, thus, develops a multi-dimensional typology of niche, regime, and hybrid actors, which is conceptually grounded in transition studies and empirically illustrated by a cluster analysis based on a survey of pig and poultry farmers in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Animal husbandry is chosen as a case study because a significant share of the environmental impact within the agri-food system is attributed to this sector and there is evidence for resistance to change by mainstream actors. Conceptually, the paper provides a framework of constitutive elements for different kinds of actors and contributes to an extension of the niche–regime dichotomy by adding the group of hybrid actors. The empirical results show that cluster analysis is a suitable approach to identify conceptually meaningful differences among interviewed farmers. Among pig and poultry farmers, the regime actors are by far the largest group. The smaller group of hybrid actors, however, has large potential to act as boundary spanners. A particularly interesting finding is that several larger farms are among the group of niche actors which hints at the possibility that larger farms are not necessarily resistant to change.

Multi-actor activity detection by modeling object relationships in extended videos based on deep learning

We present a Multi-actor Activity Detection Framework (MADF) to model the interactive relationship among multiple actors for activity detection in extended videos. MADF can detect 3 groups of multi-actor activities with different kinds of actors, which involves three stages: detection, classification and post-processing. In the detection stage, both interaction proposals and actor proposals are generated in each video clip, in order to eliminate irrelevant background in the scene. In the classification stage, 3 different classification networks are proposed to classify the 3 groups of activities. And further, for person–object interaction, an attention mechanism is adopted to help the person–object classification network to pay more attention to the small-scale objects; for person–person interaction, a suppression module is used to improve the accuracy of the person–person activity detection; for person–vehicle interaction, a spatial–temporal graph convolution network (GCN) module is embedded to model the fine-grained relationship between the person and vehicle in the person–vehicle classification network, with a proposed Mutually Exclusive Category Loss (MECLoss) helping this network distinguish mutually exclusive activities. At last, we use the off-the-shelf post-processing methods to re-score the proposals for more stable results. The proposed system achieves a great progress on our baseline and achieves the state-of-the-art results in TRECVID 2021 ActEV challenge.

Intelligence scandals: a comparative analytical model and lessons learned from the test case of North Macedonia

ABSTRACT Most countries that possess intelligence services have encountered intelligence scandals involving actual or alleged intelligence activities. This paper offers a definition of intelligence scandal and creates a new analytical model for assessing intelligence scandals. Application of the analytical model to six key intelligence scandals in North Macedonia shows that various intelligence and political actors can commit a wide range of transgressions in largely internal and external political contexts with very broad political and security impacts. The case also shows the competitive nature of the triggers of the scandals, various kinds of actors’ defences, and the scandals’ long duration.

The Long Shadow of Jean Bodin

Neither the historiographical focus on sovereignty nor the concept of sovereignty is new. What is new is the stress on it as a negotiated concept, as a field for claims, and as a gray zone between the public and the private, the state and the individual. This new approach locates sovereignty not only with the sovereign, but also with the people over whom the sovereign rules; more precisely, it locates it in a field of force betwixt and between the two. Sovereignty is less a thing to be measured than it is a dynamic to be followed, a question to be asked, even a rhetorical device. Focusing on different kinds of actors, from colonial profiteers to NGO officials, this new lens allows one to see sovereign power from above as only one locus of sovereignty. Another is the individual. For her, protracted negotiations and staking of claims often define the general contours and limits of sovereignty.

Stakeholders’ power in the networking structuration processes of the urban resilience concept in Habitat III agenda (2012-2016)

The urban resilience concept was introduced in 2016 as a key concept in the Habitat III New Urban Agenda for the next 20 years. We wonder how this urban resilience concept was elaborated and who influenced it the most? The preparatory events structured several stakeholders’ networks. The relations between stakeholders allowed the flow of ideas in the consultation and production process. Some influential stakeholders strongly oriented definition of urban resilience concepts by taking power in the networking process of the consecutive meetings. The paper analyzes the network of stakeholders/concepts, during the building process between 2012 and 2016 (5,539 discourses from 290 stakeholders, in 357 events). The application of textual mining and machine learning topic modelling algorithm exposed the structure of the principal topics for building the concept of urban resilience, and presented how relations of main stakeholders with funders was crucial for the investment in policy interventions. Therefore, we underlined for the first time in an empirical way, different kinds of actors’ power in the construction process that supported the Habitat III resilience concept. We demonstrated how far some official stakeholders, but also external and private ones, oriented the construction of ideologies to validate the knowledge that supported the related actions in laboratory cities.

The Slippages of Exemplary Action: The Case of Ataman Semenov

AbstractThis article investigates exemplarity from the point of view of the subject, the person who leads an exemplary life. Asking how this differs from the case of someone who intends more simply to lead a morally good life, it argues that the former requires sharp prioritizing among the range of possible human virtues. While both kinds of actor should be understood in relational terms, namely relations to the self, direct interlocutors, and wider society, a subject becomes an exemplar by objectifying and conveying to others the chosen specific form of virtue. Taking the case of Ataman Semenov, a White general in the Russian Civil War, the article then examines the pitfalls of having to take a culturally particular exemplary position. Some of these relate to the problems that occur in general when moral exemplarity is demonstrated, the subject being unable to control misreading of the exemplary act, the hesitations of followers, or the leeway with which they attempt to emulate or imitate the act. Other problems concern the historical positioning of the exemplary subject, particularly in a time of war. By making overt certain specific virtues, and by the same token backgrounding or suppressing others, he or she has to “stand out” amid general confusion and uncertainty and therefore is certain to arouse animosity, as much as loyalty.

Do Business-Backed Think Tanks Represent Class Interests? The Co-evolution of Policy Learning and Economic Elites in the Canadian Knowledge Regime

Business-backed think tanks are often presented as representing the interests of economic elites. This article provides a more nuanced argument by using field theory to present the co-evolutionary dynamics between economic elites and other social forces. Three Canadian think tanks are examined to illustrate how different social forces can converge around business-backed think tanks, and how governance contexts and institutions shape these relationships. The paper also reflects on the kinds of learning these think tanks can enable depending on the kinds of actors that converge around them and on the forms of power that these actors represent.

Trust-building and leadership in multi-stakeholder forums: lessons from Indonesia

Multi-stakeholder forums (MSFs) are coordination spaces that enable discussions, negotiations, and joint planning between different kinds of actors. Proponents of MSFs claim that bringing different actors to the same table may help solve complex problems. Nevertheless, an MSF's process and outcomes are affected by its leadership and whether participants are able to trust each other. This paper examines the influence of trust and leadership in three MSFs addressing land and resource use in three subnational jurisdictions in Indonesia. The comparative analysis of semi-structured and Q-methodology interviews carried out with MSF participants and non-participants demonstrates the following. First, that the presence of conflicting interests of different stakeholders can hinder trust-building and cooperation. Understanding the historical relationships between stakeholders, including any positive informal relationships, is necessary to build a better strategy to handle antagonism and improve collaboration. Second, different challenges within MSFs require different kinds of leadership. A shared leadership may work in an MSF with participants with a history of positive relationships. A charismatic leader is preferable in MSFs with conflicts of interest or where participants are yet to trust each other.

What's in a category? A new approach to Discourse Role Analysis

Building on the work of John Mohr, I propose a new, broadly applicable approach to Discourse Role Analysis (DRA). Whereas the goal of behavioral role analysis is to identify the different kinds of actors that exist in interaction, the goal of DRA is to identify the different kinds of identities that exist in discourse. To do this, I suggest thinking of discourse roles as latent conceptions of identities composed of treatments, actions, and characteristics that are frequently concurrently associated with identities in stories. I propose a method to infer discourse roles from unstructured text data that draws on novel techniques from Natural Language Processing. This framework is leveraged to shed light on German news coverage of refugees (2010-2020), which employs a set of distinct discourse roles such as refugee as claimant of welfare benefits, refugee in distress at sea, and refugee as a criminal. I then assess how different refugee identity categories are situated within this discourse role structure. I pay particular attention to Geflüchtete, a category that emerged only recently in German discourse. Whereas initial use of Geflüchtete was motivated by a language critique that aimed at replacing the general term for refugees (Flüchtlinge), DRA indicates a process of categorical differentiation in which the category increasingly serves to distinguish different kinds of refugees.

Masters of Wine on Twitter: presence, activity, impact and community structure

Globalisation, the Internet and social media have changed the kind of actors with influence in the wine industry and the way these actors create signals to communicate credible information about experience and trust attributes. Among the most prestigious experts in the world of wine are the Masters of Wine (MW). Although initially devoted to international trade, they have spread their activities and their opinion is more and more appreciated by producers and consumers. The main objective of this article is to determine this community of experts’ behaviour on Twitter. In order to do so, four factors (presence, activity, impact and community) have been considered. All Twitter profiles belonging to users awarded with the MW qualification were identified and analysed. In addition, a set of 35,653 tweets published by the MWs were retrieved and analysed through descriptive statistics. The results show MWs on Twitter as high attractors (number of followers), moderate publishers (original contents published), moderate influencers (number of likes and retweets), and low interactors (number of friends and mentions to other users). These findings reveal that the MW community is not using Twitter to gain or reinforce their reputation as an accredited expert in the wine industry, giving more influential space on Twitter to consumers and amateurs.

Public Participation in the Decisional Process in Bucharest

The public participation process represents the foundation for the development of a sustainable democratic society. This research paper focuses on the relation between the citizens and public authority throughout cooperation. The concept of public participation is understood here as the interaction between different kinds of actors, through available communication channels, in order to identify needs, opinions and beliefs with the purpose of adopting and implementing them in the form of public policies and decisions. This research paper highlights a communication rupture between the public administration and the citizens in Bucharest. Given the context provided by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research paper highlights the need to modernize the public administration in order to better communicate with the population. Some of the possible causes for the miscommunication, that appeared repeatedly throughout the survey, were the disappointment of the population with the public authority, lack of civic education or difficult procedures for public participation. Some of the possible solutions mentioned by the respondents are digitalization of the process of public participation, implementation of the proposals that come from the population, better informing the citizens with respect to the projects that are to be implemented in the community and online anonymous surveys. The survey technique used in order to obtain these data was the online survey, a questionnaire applied to the population of Bucharest, from all the 6 sectors of the Capital.

THE STATE OF GLOBAL HARMFUL CONTENT REGULATION: EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS

Online intermediaries have always been regulated, locked in heated battles around intermediary liability for copyright or privacy reasons (Tusikov, 2016; Gorwa 2019). But a notable trend is the rapidly growing use of policy to try and govern user-generated content with a host of other perceived social or individual harms, such as disinformation, hate speech, and terrorist propaganda (Kaye, 2019; York 2019; Suzor 2019). Even as increasing academic and policy attention is paid to the global ‘techlash’, and leading voices outlining the various ways in which expression online is currently under threat, our understanding of the overall policy landscape remains ad hoc and incomplete. The goal of this paper is thus to present some initial observations on the state of harmful content regulation around the world, drawing upon a new original dataset that seeks to capture the global universe of harmful-content regulatory initiatives for user-generated content online. The first part of the paper presents descriptive results, showing the evolution (and notable increase) in policy development in the past two decades. The second half of the paper provides insight into which specific issue areas have attracted the most formal and informal regulatory arrangements, and assesses the scope (what kind of actors are seen as being a ‘platform,’ and how that is defined), key policy mechanisms (takedown regimes, transparency rules, technical standards), and sanctioning procedures (fines, criminal liability) enacted in these regulations.

The case for an inhabited institutionalism in organizational research: interaction, coupling, and change reconsidered

This paper makes the case for an inhabited institutionalism by pondering questions that continue to vex institutional theory: How can we account for local activity, agency, and change without reverting to a focus on individual actors—the very kinds of actors that institutional theory was designed to critique? How is change possible in an institutional context that constructs interests and sets the very conditions for such action? Efforts to deal with these questions by inserting various forms of individual, purposive actors into institutional frameworks have created inconsistencies that threaten the overall coherence of institutional theory and move it farther from its sociological roots. To provide alternative answers, we turn to the growing line of work on “inhabited” institutions. Our exegesis of this literature has two goals. The first goal is to shift focus away from individuals and nested imagery and towards social interaction and coupling configurations. This move opens new avenues for research and helps to identify the spaces—both conceptual and empirical—and the supra-individual processes that facilitate change. This shift has important theoretical implications: incorporating social interaction alters institutional theory, and our second goal is to specify an analytic framework for this new research, an inhabited institutionalism. Inhabited institutionalism is a meso-approach for examining the recursive relationships among institutions, interactions, and organizations. It provides novel and sociologically consistent means for dealing with issues of agency and change, and a new agenda for research that can reinvigorate and reunite organizational sociology and institutional theory.

The Changing Nature of Data: Sociality, Relationality, and Implications for Organizing

This symposium showcases recent research projects on the changing nature of data and its implications for organizations, online communities, and platforms. The era of “big” data, and the algorithms they feed, is underway. Scholars across the disciplines of information science, human–computer interaction, sociology, communication, legal studies, and computer-supported cooperative work have discussed the implications for society of the new forms of data, the categories they bring about, or the new ways of knowing they enable. Yet significant questions for scholars of work, technology, and organizations remain. We will present fresh insights into three aspects of the changing nature of data — sociality, relationality, and organizing consequences — and discuss the implications of these changes for organizations, online communities, and platforms. The contexts in which we will explore the changing nature of data are diverse and include organizations (high technology firm and hospital), online communities (firm-sponsored open-source software development) and platforms (online music discovery, open science infrastructure). Overall, the symposium will address these goals: (1) highlighting new findings and theory with the goal of contributing to richer understanding of the changing nature of data in organizations and fields; (2) comparing and contrasting the challenges of development and use of data, emerging technologies, and algorithms in various settings among different kinds of actors; (3) providing a forum for discussion of the changing nature of data and its implications for organizations, fields, and society. Governing the Open Science Commons Through Digital Infrastructures Presenter: Paolo Vincenzo Leone; McGill U. Presenter: Samer Faraj; McGill U. Presenter: Arvind Karunakaran; McGill U. Emergent Group Diversity in Open Knowledge Evaluation: Evidence from Online Communities Presenter: Shiko M. Ben-Menahem; ETH Zurich Presenter: Yash Raj Shrestha; ETH Zurich Presenter: Georg von Krogh; ETH Zurich The Data Work of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems Presenter: Katherine C. Kellogg; MIT Basic Objects, Categorization, and Organizing Presenter: Cristina Alaimo; Luiss U. Presenter: Jannis Kallinikos; London School of Economics