Non-institutional Actors Research Articles

The impact of industrial zones on regional attractiveness and competitiveness in Algeria

Abstract Subject and purpose of work Industrial zones in Algeria play a crucial role in shaping the attractiveness and competitiveness of the country’s regions. The impact of these zones extends beyond economic factors, influencing the overall appeal and competitive edge of different regions. Understanding the dynamics of industrial zones is essential for comprehending Algeria’s economic landscape and its efforts to enhance regional development. The primary objective of this article is to shed light on industrial zones and their impacts on regional industrial attractiveness and competitiveness in Algeria. Firstly, it involves clarifying the concept of regional attractiveness and competitiveness in relation to their economic, environmental, and social dimensions. This leads us, secondly, to examine non-institutional actors, specifically companies, and their interactions with their regions, based on an understanding of the local area, including the effect of industrial zones on the attractiveness and competitiveness of local companies. Materials and methods This study relies on the results of research conducted through a quantitative statistical survey among a sample of 110 companies (SMEs) located in various industrial zones in the Blida Province, allowing us to specify the impact of these industrial zones on local attractiveness and competitiveness. Results The results of our survey show that the industrial zones in Blida Province are highly conducive to the establishment of businesses, attracting project initiators effectively. The large number of businesses located in industrial zones and activity areas demonstrates that these zones remain attractive and present certain competitive advantages. Conclusions Industrial zones can play a key role in local industrial attractiveness and dynamics. When well-planned and managed, they can stimulate economic growth, promote employment, encourage innovation, and support local and sustainable development.

Public Critique by Journalists and Politicians as a Process of Democratic Legitimization

This theoretical article takes a fresh look at the relationship between journalists and politicians, based on the public critique they level at each other. It proposes that this critique should be seen not simply as the expression of reproaches between rival actors, but as a meaningful metadiscursive articulation. Public critique means, for example, defining journalism, politics, democracy, or a particular context in which the relationship between journalists and politicians takes place. Above all, public critique is part of a process of legitimization that involves journalists and politicians, who are increasingly mistrustful of institutions. Associated with the public arena, public critique is also a tool for understanding new democratic dynamics driven by noninstitutional actors (citizens’ movements or alternative media) that challenge the legitimacy of journalists and politicians.

Unveiling Extra-Institutional Agency in Nationalist Contention: Transformative Events and Grassroots Mobilizations in Scotland and Catalonia (1980s-2000s)

The literature on nationalist movements in Western democracies has almost exclusively focused on ethno-nationalist parties by attributing to them the key-role of “ethnic entrepreneurs”. Yet, non-institutional actors such as social movement organizations and grassroots groups can significantly impact the history of territorial contention and reshape movements. Their role is thus explored in the Scottish and Catalan struggles for selfdetermination between the 1980s and the 2000s. Firstly, the historical analysis of transformative events shows how the latter were set in motion by non-institutional actors. While Scottish organizations and groups operated to foster cross-party cooperation, the Catalan counterparts operated to mobilize society and popular support. Secondly, a thematic analysis of primary sources shows that the mobilizations fuelled by these events produced organizational and cultural changes in both nationalist movements. These changes left their legacy suggesting that former grassroots mobilizations made an important difference to resources mobilized in the current secessionist movements.

Shared planning in the norm-project combination

The regulations viewed as a system of recognised and agreed values must take into consideration the complexity of the relationship between humankind and the environment. This presents an ethical problem with regards to the collective moral conduct during the design of the project and the definition of adequate methodologies to support this dimension. The participatory formulae pursue this possibility but with solutions that are partially ineffective due to the asymmetry between the knowledge of the expert and of the non-expert, and the different resources available to institutional and non-institutional actors. The analysis of the regulations and a case study identifies certain critical issues and possible solutions to resolve them, which involve the role of the design architect in society.

Monitoring of Labor Protests: Results and Directions of Analysis

The article describes the methodology and analytical capabilities of the “Monitoring of labor protests in Russia”. The information base is Internet messages about labor protests, which contain the necessary information and are first entered into a textual and then into a quantitative database. The monitoring has been functioning for 15 years and has accumulated information about 4.5 thousand protests. The structure of the Monitoring is briefly described, the main concepts and variables that allow analyzing the protest movement in several directions at once.The first direction is linear data analysis, which allows obtaining the most general data on the number of protests and their most important characteristics. Another direction is the calculation of indices, which make it possible to obtain comparable and relative indicators, which make it possible to overcome the heterogeneity of the compared objects.Another important type of analysis is the long-term dynamics of protests based on the identification of trends and the development of criteria for its assessment: determining the turning points of trends from growth to decline and vice versa, as well as the intensity of trends at each stage.An actor-transactional analysis launched in 2016, which determines the number of actors involved in labor protests (35 types of actors are identified) and types of interactions (transactions) between them, both outgoing (actor activity) and incoming (actor authority). Based on these indicators, the index of significance of each actor is calculated, which is monitored in dynamics. This makes it possible to understand the role institutional and non-institutional actors play in the settlement of protests.

Analisis jejaring sosial gempa Cianjur di Twitter sebagai mitigasi dampak bencana

Indonesia is a country that has the potential for volcanic and tectonic earthquakes. One of the actions that can be taken to minimise the impact of disasters is to mitigate natural disasters through social media, such as Twitter. The #PrayForCianjur hashtag is one of the efforts to expand information by utilising Twitter to minimise the impact of the disaster in Cianjur as well as provide prompt action from related parties. This research aims to analyse the social network hashtag #PrayForCianjur, which became a topic of public discourse on Twitter after the Cianjur earthquake occurred. The study results show that the information centre actors are non-institutional actors such as @marchfoward, @aqfiazfan, @tanyakanrl, and @convomf. Meanwhile, institutional actors such as @nctzenhumanity, @detik.com, and @info_bmkg There are interesting findings in this research: actors who should be actively involved in disaster mitigation are not popular in the network. This study will operate as a foundation for providing the crisis management and mitigation teams with helpful information that they can use to prepare for and plan an efficient disaster response and to support the creation of automated crisis management systems in the future.

Inclusive counting: an essential but insufficient approach to account for missing migrants in Panama and Colombia’s shared Darien Gap

ABSTRACT International organisations increasingly call for, and support efforts to gather, more comprehensive data on missing migrants incidents. This article explores current practices of counting missing migrants, focusing in particular on Panama and Colombia’s shared Darien Gap. Drawing on a novel database of some missing migrants cases in the Darien, I demonstrate how insufficient counting practices can still provide essential information on the missing. The article examines, first, how detailing the demographic and event patterns of known missing migrants incidents can assist in estimating what may have happened to others travelling on the same migration pathway. Second, the article demonstrates how current institutional enumeration practices privilege state actors’ knowledge while failing to account for other forms of crucial knowledge on missing migrants held by non-institutional actors. To remedy these challenges, this article incorporates information held by migrants’ families and travel acquaintances on the missing together with institutional information. Ultimately, this article argues that by implementing a more inclusive counting approach for missing migrants, we can more explicitly begin accounting for the missing in the Darien Gap.

Institutional and non-institutional actors in policy-making processes: A case study

This article examines the role and importance of institutional and non-institutional actors in Kosovo’s foreign policy processes. It is based on a review of official documents, non-governmental organization (NGO) research and academic literature, using a research method of material analysis. The paper’s findings reveal Kosovo’s challenges in its policy-making processes and emphasise the essential role of international factors and NGOs. The article provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and importance of Kosovo’s foreign policy and the role and influence of institutional actors, such as the ruling party and opposition parties, and non-institutional actors, such as international actors and NGOs. The results emphasise the need for the engagement and support of the international community in Kosovo’s foreign policy efforts. In conclusion, the paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the policy-making processes in Kosovo and its foreign policy. Judah (2012) emphasised that for Kosovo to have a successful foreign policy, it must have a flourishing internal (domestic) policy because one cannot be successful without the other. The article emphasises the importance of considering institutional and non-institutional actors in the policy-making processes in Kosovo.

Protest and Trust in the Volgograd Region: Peculiarities of the Regional System of Political Communication

The institutionalization of public space in the subjects of the Russian Federation is characterized by the alignment of regional systems of political communication, which have both common basic structural elements and specific parameters determined by several factors and conditions. The article analyzes the emergence and development of the system of political communication between the institutions of regional power (primarily the executive power) and citizens in the Volgograd Region amidst the growing influence of global problems (such as the spread of COVID-19), the conduct of the special military operation in Ukraine, international sanctions against Russia, etc. At the same time, the novelty of the authors’ approach lies not so much in the study of the information and communication openness in the regional politics, but in identifying the nature of civil and political trust between the leading actors of communication in the Volgograd Region. Combining the action and political-communicative approaches allowed the authors to build a methodological strategy for the analysis of institutional and non-institutional actors of regional public policy that have different resources affecting the level and dynamics of mutual trust in the communication process. The paper argues that at present both the political activity, including the protest of the population, and the ability to reproduce sustainable and stable development are largely depending on the level of mutual trust between the regional authorities and the citizens. The authors attempt to identify the dominant factors that determine the vectors of trust and confrontation in the regional system of political communications.

Culture-Led Regeneration of Industrial Brownfield Hosting Temporary Uses: A Post-Socialist Context–Case Study from Novi Sad, Serbia

Utilizing culture as a tool for the regeneration of industrial brownfields represents a fairly new trend in post-socialist Europe. This topic has garnered some academic attention; however, studies primarily originate from EU member states, whereas the examples from non-EU cities remains largely unexplored. In addition, the literature dealing with the temporary creative use of derelict industrial sites in post-socialist cities is scarce. The case study-based paper contributes to filling these voids by investigating the creativity-driven informal activation of the Kineska Quarter in Novi Sad, the second largest city in Serbia and the European Capital of Culture for 2022, and its planned transformation into a creative district. The research aims are to examine the capacity of temporary uses to act as a hard infrastructure of the culture-led regeneration, identify the policy framework that shaped the project and highlight its shortcomings, detect potential sustainability issues, and examine how soft factors affect the use of hard infrastructure. The findings suggest that the redevelopment of a creative brownfield based on the simulation of bottom-up decision-making and hastily developed and blurry regeneration policies lead to uncertainty about its sustainability. They also suggest that post-socialist cities lacking experience in this field necessitate a context-perceptive, socially responsible, and locale-conscious approach to the (then sustainable) culture-led regeneration of spontaneously activated brownfields sites, which requires meaningful and not just pro forma involvement of non-institutional actors in the policy- and decision-making process.

Пространственно-временные паттерны развития территориальных общностей: возможный сценарий изменений

Time and space are the prerequisites for the existence of a territorial community, since all the events that take place in a certain locality, show cause-and-effect relationships that form history, traditions, and patterns of life. Urban and country residents participate in the production, consumption, reproduction and capitalization of a territory's social resources; the latter arise through social interactions, social ties, relations, motives, objectives and means of their achievement that are played out over a long time on a certain territory. Social changes affected by such factors as social resource availability determine the spatial and temporal patterns of development. The development patterns of a region are influenced by "liquid modernity", situational and spontaneous actions of actors, suddenness and eventfulness, uncertainty and variability that are essential characteristics of social resources. Considering a region as a space-time continuum, the authors suggest that the territorial communities of urban and country residents constitute an established and changing system of social ties and interactions, with models of territorial socio-economic behavior, trust in institutional / noninstitutional actors and other social resources. The spatial and temporal patterns of development are also affected by objective factors like economy crises, epidemics, wars, and the domestic and global politics. Given the evening–out of spatial difference in countries and regions, towns and settlements, glocalization is characterized by retaining local specifics related to the history, tradition, image of the territory, which we also classify as social resources. Subjective indicators are associated with understanding a region as a social space for interaction between people, groups, communities where social ties and interdependencies are formed, and ideas and meanings appear. In current conditions of nonlinear change, subjective factors can define the vector of development: people's motivation for present and future self-realization on the given territory, trust, regional identity, solidarity with fellow countrymen. Based on the findings of a complex empirical sociological study the authors worked out the composite index of social resource availability that unites all the factors mentioned. Fluctuations of the index of social resource availability determine the spatial and temporal patterns of development of territorial communities and regions.

The question of where: entrepreneurship education beyond curricular practices

PurposeThis article aims at the understanding of specific spaces where entrepreneurship education (EE) happens – inside and outside the classroom.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on frameworks such as formal versus non-formal entrepreneurial education and institutional versus non-institutional actors, this research applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore which spaces entrepreneurs attended as undergraduate students. Going beyond intentionality, the authors collected data from 175 respondents in Brazil, all of the respondents are entrepreneurs whose companies are at least one year old.FindingsResults demonstrate that student-led activities are as important as institutional ones when training future entrepreneurs, while specific in-classroom activities feature the lowest impact among the institutional ones.Research limitations/implicationsSample size and characteristics could impact the generalization power, but, since the results fit within research criteria, researchers can benefit by reflecting over new research horizons, going beyond classroom studies and understanding the university as an ecosystem of learning interventions.Practical implicationsResults can be useful to university managers when designing institutional policies, fostering a diverse set of undergraduate experiences towards entrepreneurship training.Originality/valueAlthough current literature has focused on classroom education, researchers have been pointing out the need of stepping out of the classroom, analyzing other spaces such as student-led movements, co-curricular programs and more.

How Information Flows from the World to China

Government censorship—internet shutdowns, blockages, firewalls—impose significant barriers to the transnational flow of information despite the connective power of digital technologies. In this paper, we examine whether and how information flows across borders despite government censorship. We develop a semi-automated system that combines deep learning and human annotation to find co-occurring content across different social media platforms and languages. We use this system to detect co-occurring content between Twitter and Sina Weibo as Covid-19 spread globally, and we conduct in-depth investigations of co-occurring content to identify those that constitute an inflow of information from the global information ecosystem into China. We find that approximately one-fourth of content with relevance for China that gains widespread public attention on Twitter makes its way to Weibo. Unsurprisingly, Chinese state-controlled media and commercialized domestic media play a dominant role in facilitating these inflows of information. However, we find that Weibo users without traditional media or government affiliations are also an important mechanism for transmitting information into China. These results imply that while censorship combined with media control provide substantial leeway for the government to set the agenda, social media provides opportunities for non-institutional actors to influence the information environment. Methodologically, the system we develop offers a new approach for the quantitative analysis of cross-platform and cross-lingual communication.

On the (Non)Institutional Disclosure of Urban Commons: Evidence, Practices and Challenges From the Netherlands and Belgium

The 2008 economic crisis has opened the door to new strategies for managing urban resources. In fact, the interest in urban commons (UC) has (re)surfaced both within and outside academia. While literature accounting for existing experiences is growing; UC as a practice begs for further systematization concerning the needed negotiation between institutional recognition and informal self-organization. This is particularly true for temporary urbanism, a strategy for the social repurposing of temporarily unused buildings, whose precarious nature has been deemed to represent just a fixing to the neoliberal logic. In this regard, a non-institutional perspective can help shed light on citymaking as a composite practice in which both institutional and non-institutional actors not only coexist but presuppose each other. In this paper, we explore this issue by focusing on two non-profit organizations working in the Rotterdam and Brussels's housing market: Stad in de Maak and Communa. Through in-depth interviews with the founders and core members of these organizations, as well as with participants to their projects, we show how SidM and Communa operate as intermediaries in the housing sector, filling the gaps left by the market and public actors. Most importantly, our research questions the extent to which the enacting of commoning practices by these organizations can become a pillar of citymaking, configuring an iterative disclosure and (collective) reclosure of urban resources. Evidence shows that, while enacting temporary urbanism differently, both organizations strive for social cooperative ownership of spaces for consolidating their presence in the cities.

Loops of Violence(s) Within Europe’s Governance of Migration in Libya, Italy, Greece, and Belgium

Studies have reported alarmingly high rates of traumatic experiences for refugee populations. While nearly all refugees experienced trauma in their country of origin, a vast majority of those seeking protection abroad also face (extreme) violence during their journeys and once in the country of destination. By concentrating on the migratory experiences of about 300 unaccompanied minors that we approached in Libya, Italy, Greece, and Belgium, this article analyses how different forms of violence are inflicted on these young migrants while moving to Europe. By concentrating on personal accounts of (recurrent) interactions with the EU migration and border management tools, we reveal the structural violence within the day-to-day governance of migration. Often framed as unintended or accidental, the article discusses how violence is instead ubiquitous, as it is systematically inflicted on migrants—including unaccompanied minors—in the form of repeated series of violent events or “loops of violence.” Importantly, such manifestations of violence are perpetrated by key institutional and non-institutional actors in the “migration industry” who are (in)directly involved in managing migration both inside and outside of the EU. Conceptually, we rely on K. E. Dempsey’s political geography of the different typologies of violence within Europe’s governance of migration and asylum and use it to concentrate on key transitional phases/fractures in migratory trajectories—i.e., as unaccompanied young migrants (try to) cross international borders and legal boundaries.

Особенности формирования медиаповесток неинституциональными акторами журналистского поля

The article examines the problem of agenda building, classic for theory of journalism, which acquires a new dimension in the digital media space. By using journalistic practices, non-institutional actors gain symbolic power in the field of the production of meanings. The author hypothesizes that such actors form their own media agenda, which serves as a counterbalance to the traditional-mainstream agenda, characteristic of the federal Russian TVdiscourse. The paper reveals the features of the thematic level of the agendas through the example of the news-review media format of the YouTube channel ‘varlamov’. The study is based on theoretical approaches that assume a subject-instrumental division of participants acting in the field of journalism, and employs a rational-system classification of subjectivity. In the course of research, the peculiarities of media agendas in terms of the level of their formation, thematic dominants, and the nature of the issues discussed were determined. These include the poly-thematic nature, the emphasis on the national level, the priority of internal issues over external ones, and the predominance of political and social aspects of media reality being presented. Specific topics were found to be emphasized in the analyzed media agendas: human rights and civil protests. The features of rational subjectivity were revealed. Following the interests of the audience manifests itself in the nature of economic and social news, which are related to everyday human needs. The conclusion is made that the media agenda in the cases examined is influenced by the factor of opposition to official discourse and that it is civic-oriented in nature.

Socially Constructed Negotiations between Actors and Informal Appropriation of Urban Public Green Space in Abidjan

In the African city, once placed under the control of the colonizer and then a regulatory state in the aftermath of independence, public green spaces (parks and public gardens) are now under the governance of decentralized communities, in favor of the policy of decentralization. The will of the rulers (state, decentralized collectivities etc.) aims at setting up frame-works, structures, instruments and strategies, capable of establishing authority, control and space control "stumbles" on the social practices and behaviors of other actors. This will “stumbles” on the social practices and behaviors of the non-institutional actors involved. These clashes of practices between actors in their intention to use public green spaces rationally undermine the management of those who govern. Then the development of the conflicts of use around the urban public space deserves to be intelligibly analyzed through the social sciences of the organizations in order to restore to the parks and public gardens their social functions. As data collection tools, documentation, interview guides, direct observation and photographic collection were used. Also seventy-four (74) actors made up of agents of town halls, agents of the district of Abidjan, NGOs, associations, local residents, farmers etc. In terms of results, it emerges that between the actors in a situation of co-presence, eviction operations, police seizures, verbal and physical violence and illegal activities constitute forms of conflicts of use around space, public green.

Engagement without accountability: The role of governments, field experts, and public intellectuals in the context of the covid-19 pandemic

The outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic represented a major shock. In their effort to adapt their responses to the crisis to their own conditions of survival, governments have tended to resort to arguments that limit accountability to the population. Despite the privileged place they are presumed to have within contemporary societies, experts have been displaced from the decision-making processes of governments and delegitimized by the anti-intellectual drift favored by the way in which arguments are presented and debated in social media. At the same time, despite being perceived as capable of offering inside-out evaluations of specific phenomena and therefore capable of distinguishing between truths and big lies (and anything in-between), the role of public intellectuals seems to have been limited. The article analyses the responses of great power governments and regional powers in terms of the discursive practices deployed in the context of the covid-19 crisis, and the capacity of the aforementioned non-institutional actors to confront these discourses. As editors-in-chief, policymakers have felt passionate about war metaphors that have allowed them to deconstruct and make complex subjects accessible, and as such, to ensure a sufficient level of attention and public approval so that the fight against the enemy could begin. In addition, they have prompted the implementation of emergency measures that, in a context of geopolitical confrontation, have allowed them to evade individual responsibilities. Rather than using their knowledge to provide constructive examination of complex issues and make them accessible, so the ones who listen to them can hopefully understand the impact of specific policy preferences and minimize their own losses in the increasingly competitive environment, experts and intellectuals have seen their room for maneuver to influence policy formulations severely limited.

Process expertise in policy advice: Designing collaboration in collaboration

Complex societal and environmental challenges motivate scholars to assume new roles that transcend the boundaries of traditional academic expertise. The present article focuses on the specialised knowledge, skills, and practices mobilised in the context of science–policy interfaces by researchers who advise policymakers on collaborative governance processes intended to address these pressing issues. By working on the backstage of collaborative arrangements, researchers support policymakers in the co-design of tailor-made strategies for involving groups of institutional and non-institutional actors in collaboration on a specific issue. The present article examines the expertise underpinning this practice, which we term process expertise. While already quite widely practiced, process expertise has not yet been comprehensively theorised. The study employs a self-reflective case narrative to illuminate its constitutive elements and investigates the advisory work of the authors’ research team, called “Co-Creation and Contemporary Policy Advice”, located at the intersection of science, policymaking, and civil society. The findings show that process expertise, when exercised by researchers and supported by an assemblage of enabling conditions inherent to the research context, goes beyond the possession of a set of skills at the individual level. Instead, process expertise in the context of science–policy interfaces unfolds in interaction with other types of knowledge and fulfils its task by generating a weakly institutionalised “in-between space”, in which researchers and policymakers interact to find more inclusive ways of tackling complex challenges. In this realm, relational work contributes to establishing a collaborative modus operandi at the very outset of the advisory process, while working at the processual level supports knowledge co-production among multiple actors. The article argues that it is the ongoing work of process experts at the intersection of relational and processual levels that helps maintain momentum in these collaborative partnerships. By formulating and discussing five constitutive elements of process expertise, this paper untangles the complex work that is required in collaborative research settings and gives a language to the invisible work performed by researchers who offer policymakers—and other invited actors—advice on the process of designing collaboration in collaboration.

SUBVERSIVE COMMEMORATION: MAPPING THE ASSEMBLAGE OF COUNTER-MEMORY ON TWITTER

Beyond enabling participatory forms of memory-making, digital media reconfigure power relations in memory construction. In the Philippines, we witness this through the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnakakaw (‘Day of Thieves’) to counter the heroic commemoration of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned by the state and supported by online networks that distort and deny his crimes during his 20-year regime. This case illustrates not only how digital media facilitates the negotiation of memory by non-institutional actors, but also how it sets the conditions to resist elite narratives through non-conventional ways of remembering. This study examines the performance of counter-memory (Foucault, 1977) in the intersection of networked publics, counter-narratives, and technologies of memories. We investigate the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnanakaw by mapping its social network and analyzing its discourses as digital practices (Jones, Chik & Hafner, 2015). We argue that the network derives its power from neither elite nor collective actions, but through connective action of structures, discourses and practices of remembrance. Firstly, the locus of analysis shifts from a single actor (‘who remembers’) to the assemblage (‘what enacts the remembering’) as an agent of counter-memory, with technology shaping its possibilities and boundaries. Secondly, the assemblage’s resistance to elite commemoration surfaces silenced and neglected historical narratives (‘what is remembered’) through affective articulations of protest and subversive commemorative practices (‘how is it remembered’). We theorize the ‘assemblage of counter-memory’ as the connective, discursive, and material assemblage that enact political agency to privilege marginalized narratives and play an active role in the (re)construction of memory.