Kinds Of Actors Research Articles

「民生パワー」概念の再検討

The EC/EU has evolved as an international actor, or rather as one of the ‘great powers’ over the issue of peace and international security. This article asks what kind of actor or power the EC/EU has been since the 1970s, with special reference to EC/EU policy towards Saddam Hussein's Iraq (1979-2003).In 1972, François Duchêne described the EC as a ‘civilian power’ in discussing ‘Europe's role in world peace’. The new concept of civilian power was introduced as different from the traditional concept of military power. The EC behaved as a significant actor in external economic affairs. However, the international setting in which the EC developed its international identity changed from the East-West détente to the new Cold War. In 1982, Hedley Bull harshly criticised the notion of ‘civilian power Europe’ as a contradiction in terms, because the EC had yet to be an international actor and because the influence exerted by ‘civilian’ European states was ‘conditional upon a strategic environment by the military power of states’. From the perspectives of ‘the return to power politics’ of the 1980s, Bull was rather advocating a ‘Western European military alliance’. As the Cold War was ending and the EC was transforming into the EU with CFSP, the concept of civilian power re-emerged. Christopher Hill and William Wallace discussed the ‘actorness’ of the EU, which ‘requires not only a clear identity and a self-contained decision-making system, but also the practical capabilities to effect policy’.Section One of this article examines the conceptual history of ‘civilian power’ from the 1970s to the 1990s. Section Two attempts to apply the concept to EC/EU policy towards Iraq: from Saddam's inauguration in July 1979, through the Iran-Iraq War in 1980-88, the Gulf conflict in 1990-91 and the Operation Desert Fox in 1998, to the de facto collapse of Saddam's regime in April 2003. The EC/EU became deeply involved with the issues revolving around Iraq: oil, hostages/terrorism, economic sanctions, arms transfer, UN peace-keeping, logistical and financial assistance to the US-led multilateral forces, and the issue of a continued UN inspection or a war.The Iraq War broke out in March 2003. International society would effectively disarm Saddam of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and change his undemocratic regime. Some Americans might well be overwhelmed with a success. It would however be naïve to conclude that the EU did not play any role in pre-war and post-war Iraq. At least two significant issues remained in Iraq, the Gulf region and the world: the establishment of a truly international regime of WMD non-proliferation and the promotion of democracy with little use of military force. In terms of capabilities, the EU collectively may still be a civilian power. In terms of expectations, the EU would cease to be such a power. With ten new members joining the EU and with a EU constitution and CSDP in sight, however, the concept of civilian power Europe should be more sophisticated and more effective in describing and analysing EU diplomacy. This must also be the lasting task of European integration theory.

Environmental Organisations in New Forms of Political Participation: Ecological Modernisation and the Making of Voluntary Rules

Environmental organisations have been active since the early 1960s in putting environmental issues on the political agenda and in strengthening the environmental consciousness of the public. The struggle has been successful in the sense that there is now a strong demand for practical solutions among all kinds of actors. It is, however, difficult for states and political actors to manage environmental problems by traditional forms and instruments, due to the complex character of the problems. Therefore, environmental organisations take their own initiatives to participate in policy-making by developing new forms, within new arenas, with the help of new instruments (voluntary rules or standards). Special attention is paid to the possibilities of identifying and developing constructive roles in relation to other actors and institutions as well as the capacity to organise standardisation projects and to mobilise and make use of power resources such as symbolic capital and knowledge. In order to interpret characteristics and implications (possibilities and limitations) of standardisation strategies, I draw on the ecological modernisation perspective. Empirically, I refer to the role of Swedish environmental organisations in standardisation projects such as eco-labelling.

Environmental Organisations in New Forms of Political Participation: Ecological Modernisation and the Making of Voluntary Rules

Environmental organisations have been active since the early 1960s in putting environmental issues on the political agenda and in strengthening the environmental consciousness of the public. The struggle has been successful in the sense that there is now a strong demand for practical solutions among all kinds of actors. It is, however, difficult for states and political actors to manage environmental problems by traditional forms and instruments, due to the complex character of the problems. Therefore, environmental organisations take their own initiatives to participate in policy-making by developing new forms, within new arenas, with the help of new instruments (voluntary rules or standards). Special attention is paid to the possibilities of identifying and developing constructive roles in relation to other actors and institutions as well as the capacity to organise standardisation projects and to mobilise and make use of power resources such as symbolic capital and knowledge. In order to interpret characteristics and implications (possibilities and limitations) of standardisation strategies, I draw on the ecological modernisation perspective. Empirically, I refer to the role of Swedish environmental organisations in standardisation projects such as eco-labelling.

Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship

We develop a perspective on technology entrepreneurship as involving agency that is distributed across different kinds of actors. Each actor becomes involved with a technology, and, in the process, generates inputs that result in the transformation of an emerging technological path. The steady accumulation of inputs to a technological path generates a momentum that enables and constrains the activities of distributed actors. In other words, agency is not only distributed, but it is embedded as well. We explicate this perspective through a comparative study of processes underlying the emergence of wind turbines in Denmark and in United States. Through our comparative study, we flesh out “bricolage” and “breakthrough” as contrasting approaches to the engagement of actors in shaping technological paths.

Negotiations in Embedded Relationships: Toward an Integrative Framework

Over the last fifteen years, social network and negotiation scholars have been grappling with the same underlying question, What is the value of trading through embedded as opposed to arms-length market relationships? Despite this shared interest, negotiation and social network research has only recently started to intersect. This paper draws from negotiation and social network theory to move toward an integrative framework for understanding negotiations in embedded exchanges. Negotiation and social network theories are briefly reviewed and several unanswered questions are identified in each. Moving toward a more integrative theory, the paper decomposes exchanges into matching decisions and negotiations and proposes that different kinds of embeddedness (relational vs. structural) with different kinds of actors (buyers vs. sellers) will have different values in of these processes under different conditions (high vs. low risk).

Towards understanding network relationships in online retailing

This paper views e-commerce (B2C) as a retail innovation that evolves along with newly emerging technological system around the Internet. In the case of e-commerce, this system consists of retailers as adopters and co-developers of technological solutions invented/commercialized by specialists. As part of 'new economy' business practices, what is needed for establishing successful e-commerce venture in terms of tangible resources and competences is not necessarily acquired internally but are coordinated via network relationships. The paper proposes to identify different e-commerce strategies, and outlines the kinds of actors involved in the networks that seem to go along with each strategy. While suggesting that different e-commerce strategies correspond to different networking strategies it points at the importance of relational competences in varying online retailing contexts.

Realism under Praise, or a Requiem? The Paradigmatic Debate in International Relations

This article describes how the paradigmatic debate in the field of international relations, opposing Grotius’s tradition of transnational relations to the Hobbes vision of sovereign territorial units in rivalry for power politics, is turning to the advantage of the former. It points out that the current globalization process reinforces the transnational paradigm that focuses on individuals as international actors, with a new configuration emerging in which politics loses the hierarchical position implied by realism. Three kinds of actors (the state, transnational actors, and identity entrepreneurs) are described as promoting a special type of commitment: civic commitment to the state, utilitarian and pragmatic commitment to transnational networks, and a primary commitment to identity entrepreneurs.

A Little Dirt Never Hurt Anyone:

In many laboratory sciences, issues of cleanliness and purity are everpresent concerns. In materials science, keeping things (instruments, materials, people) clean structures the knowledge-making process. Using the work of Mary Douglas, I examine various contaminants, impurities and defects that are relevant to materials scientists. Importantly, though, definitions of what constitutes `dirt' are multiple, overlapping and, often, formally contradictory; this means that impurities are as much positive resources as threatening pollutants. In materials science labs, where many kinds of actors and forms of life intersect, pollution may be used to rein in confusion and ambiguity. This paper traces various manifestations of laboratory dirt, then examines how (un)cleanliness enables certain moves in the materials science game.

Globalisation and the English Judiciary

Globalisation has been analysed under firms, markets and regulation and needs “the study of plural webs of many kinds of actors which regulate while being regulated themselves”. This article considers how globalisation has affected the United Kingdom, English lawyers and the English Judiciary. Citation of authorities both from Europe and the United States have become commonplace. Human Rights legislation has needed an understanding of how the European Convention has been construed within Europe. The task of the lawyer, or the judge is not just to find the will of a national legislator, but to look for norms from a variety of sources, national, sub-national and supranational. How should legal education face these problems? Some suggest an “anthropological” view of legal education – less superficial, less tied to a specific hierarchical view and more open to an understanding of what will work in each locality. The article goes on to discuss generic skills as an approach to teaching the global lawyer, questions relating to the global law firm, comments on forum shopping, the “island” mentality, recession and globalisation effects disguised in other ways. The reforms of the civil procedure system at the beginning of the millennium could fall into the latter category.

Vision and Inscription in Practice

This special issue presents a range of analytic resources for the study of how human vision--as historically structured, interactively organized, and temporally unfolding discursive practice mediated by artifacts of many different kinds--plays a crucial role in the ongoing constitution of the events that make up the lived social world in which work, the relations between different kinds of actors, and public knowledge are reflexively accomplished.

Eliciting compliance from Warlords: the ECOWAS experience in Liberia, 1990–1997

This article examines the strategies initiated by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to elicit compliance with its disarmament policies from belligerents in Liberia's 1989–96 civil conflict. I propose to tackle the task within a linked and holistic four‐fold approach. First, I situate ECOWAS's intervention in Liberia from 1990 to 1997 within the changing context of international perceptions of multilateral organisation involvement in civil wars. ECOWAS's intervention had different diplomatic phases. The first phase under the Standing Mediation Committee lasted from May 1990‐June 1991, The Committee of Five Process from June 1991‐August 1992, and the Committee of Nine Process from September 1993‐July 1997. Second, I analyse the background for the collapse and the dynamics which fuelled the war in Liberia. Third, I make an empirical analysis of ECOWAS's strategies to elicit compliance from faction groups. I conclude by discussing the impact and lessons of ECOWAS's strategies in Liberia. My argument is that ECOWAS's capability to elicit compliance from faction groups as opposed to state actors was limited partly because ECOWAS was not geared towards dealing with these new kinds of actors, that the nature of international relations does not have ‘room’ to consider the interests and demands presented by such actors, and that the normal forms of sanctions and ‘corrective’ measures applied against states in interstate relations are not always effective when applied to faction groups.

Inter-organizational participation and user focus in a large-scale product development programme: The Swedish hand tool project

In the Swedish Hand Tool Project previous research was put into practice in ten new user-friendly products. The project was initiated and sponsored by six of the largest Swedish manufacturing industries and supported by a Swedish foundation. User requirements for hand tools were given precedence in the product development programme. People who deal with hand tools in different ways (users, manufacturers, distributors and researchers) participated in four working groups from the beginning to the end of the project. In addition to the design, evaluation and production of the new hand tools, marketing activities, dissemination of information and training in presenting ergonomic tools were carried out during the project. The development programme was studied by means of open observation and critical incident interviews with randomly chosen members of the different working groups and the project board. Actual activities were compared with intended activities of the three project phases. Negative as well as positive events during the project were identified. The large-scale development programme, involving several different kinds of actors, has produced ergonomically designed products, and expanded both knowledge and markets for hand tools. Relevance to industry Industry can gain from inter-organizational participation and user focus in product development. The study describes and analyses a programme to design and produce well-functioning hand tools as well as to support their distribution.

Gender and Colonial Space

The aim of this article is to highlight the gendered nature of colonial space. I aim to destabilise the assumption that imperial masculine idealised/desired space is the only spatial relation within colonial contexts, by focusing on the spatial relations of British and indigenous women at an idealised level and at the level of the 'contact zone'. Through an analysis of the complexity of different spatial relations within the colonial context, I hope both to bring to the fore different kinds of actors and actions from those generally considered within post-colonial theory, and also to make it possible to inflect the theoretical terminology developed within post-colonial theorising in a more materialist way.

THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON ENVIRONMENT-RELATED LITIGATION

This paper intends to distinguish between, on the one hand, emerging ideas, values and representations and, on the other, the actual circumstances in which they are applied by society. For this purpose, the juridical field is a privileged place for investigation, being at the same time the locus of norms and conflicts. In particular, our attention focuses on environment-related litigation in Rio de Janeiro. The distance between legal discourse and my analysis of lawsuits pertaining to the environment in Rio de Janeiro is a result of the tension between the universal character of the environmental perspective, as embodied in Brazilian legislation, and the lack of social mobilisation, combined with the complexity of kinds of actors and interests involved in juridical practices concerning environmental protection. It is suggested that this tension be understood in the light of the dynamics of social relations in the urban context of Rio de Janeiro.

Processes of Collective Political Action

This article presents a new model that explains how collective political action develops over time under different structural conditions and given institutional settings. Two kinds of actors are distinguished: (a) The representatives of the state are endowed with the power to provide a certain public good and to impose costs on citizens by means of repressive action. The state's representatives aim at gaining a certain amount of support from the citizens and regard collective political action as a disturbance of their activities. (b) Citizens use collective political action to pressure the state to provide a public good. Each citizen is faced with specific incentives for collective political action. Proceeding from certain distributions of the incentives in a collective, processes of collective political action are evoked by a critical event (e.g., a nuclear reactor incident). Computer simulations are used to explore the implications of the model for three generated data sets. In a normal and a rectangular distribution, initial collective political action decreases so that the public good is not provided. Only in a u-shaped distribution does a large extent of collective political action emerge so that a partial provision of the public good ensues.

Testosterone and occupational choice: Actors, ministers, and other men.

Occupational differences in testosterone concentrations, focusing on actors and ministers, were explored in 3 studies. The 1st examined salivary testosterone in 7 occupational groups and an unemployed comparison group and found actors and football players higher than ministers but no other significant differences. The 2nd examined salivary testosterone in 2 kinds of actors (stage actors and comedians) and 2 kinds of ministers (pastoral ministers and missionaries) and found actors high and ministers low but no differences between subgroups within each occupation. The 3rd examined serum testosterone in entertainers and ministers in an archival sample of military veterans and found entertainers high and ministers low. The results are interpreted in terms of dominance and antisocial tendencies, with the conclusion that these variables are complex and can affect occupational preference in subtle ways.

Rosette: An object-oriented concurrent systems architecture

A number of concurrent computers have been designed, such as [Ametek 1988] and [NCUBE 1986]. Taking advantage of concurrency on these computers will require new languages, operating systems, and en...

Inter-organizational politics: the World Bank and the African Development Bank

The undisputed proliferation of international organizations has been interpreted in several ways by members of the scholarly community. Probably most see the explosion in numbers and kinds of actors as a peripheral development; in the realist and neo-realist tradition, the primacy of the state and the state system remains largely unaffected. Others are sceptical of what the trend means and so have developed research agendas examining more closely international organization influence on states and impact on issues. Yet few international relations scholars have paid attention to what this proliferation means for relations among various organizations and its effects on states. However, with so many of these organizations involved in economic development activities, it is very likely that these organizations willingly and sometimes unwittingly encounter each other particularly in Third World countries. Rumours abound of IGOs and NGOs ‘stumbling over each other’ in the capitals of Sahelian countries vying for the attention of too few government officials, leading to negative impacts on policy. In Indo-China, Gordenker finds ‘increasing friction and clogging’ from the rapid expansion of United Nations High Commission for Refugees activities, as they intersect with the International Red Cross, Unicef, and private voluntary organizations. Yet not all interaction is conflictual. Nongovernmental aid agencies in Thailand co-operate closely, as do the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Kenya.

Editor's Introduction

This long essay by Liu Guokai, entitled A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution, is the first available comprehensive analysis of those three turbulent years1 published within China. Although a dissident writing a document of protest, Liu Guokai nonetheless has sought to maintain enough emotional distance to give the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong a reasonably objective analysis. While recounting the convoluted chronology of the Cultural Revolution, he attempts to identify the various social forces, the different kinds of actors, their motivations, and the dynamics that led to the formation and shifting of alliances, both horizontally and vertically. Liu's aim, as stated in his preface, was to provide the Cultural Revolution with a social analysis.

Theatre Training: Visions and Revisions

Everyone in the theatre knows something about training. We know so much, in fact, that training programs at most schools are slowly becoming indistinguishable one from the other except in terms of intensity. PARTICLEly as a result of this, most of our theatres later on—the professional homes of theatre students — wind up looking pretty much the same, filled with the same kind of directors using the same kind of actors doing the same kind of plays.