Path-dependent Process Research Articles

Land-use changes and land policies evolution in China’s urbanization processes

Ensuring food security and sustainable development in China has been threatened by the dilemma of the rapidly growing consumption of the country’s land resources. Research on the linkage between land-use changes and land policies in the process of industrialization and urbanization has received increased attention in recent years. The present study was conducted to analyze the undergoing dynamics for Chinese land policies and land-use changes based on reliable land-use data and to develop a thorough understanding of the historical drivers and pathways of land-use changes and China’s deep-seated land issues, as well as the social, political and economic factors involved. The results showed that land-use changes were linked closely to shifts in government land policies and socio-economic development in China. The evolution of land policies in China was the result of a path-dependent process, which included the reform of land use system, the economic development environment as well as a policy-making process that responded to short-term land development. The results also indicated that there have been considerable achievements regarding the land use system and land management in China. However, Chinese economic growth overly depended on investments as well as land finance, which were uncoordinated and unsustainable. The changes in land use were also the outcomes of the land policy failure. There is still a pressing need to reform land policies for more efficient and effective utilization of limited land resources; develop a trade-off and synergy among urban development, agricultural production and ecosystem preservation; differentiate land-use policies; allocate market-oriented land resource; and establish a national macro-control mechanism in collaboration with a coordinated land-use policy and basic legislation.

Reconsidering the Relationship between Air Pollution and Deprivation

This paper critically examines the relationship between air pollution and deprivation. We argue that focusing on a particular economic or social model of urban development might lead one to erroneously expect all cities to converge towards a particular universal norm. A naive market sorting model, for example, would predict that poor households will eventually be sorted into high pollution areas, leading to a positive relationship between air pollution and deprivation. If, however, one considers a wider set of theoretical perspectives, the anticipated relationship between air pollution and deprivation becomes more complex and idiosyncratic. Specifically, we argue the relationship between pollution and deprivation can only be made sense of by considering processes of risk perception, path dependency, gentrification and urbanization. Rather than expecting all areas to eventually converge to some universal norm, we should expect the differences in the relationship between air pollution and deprivation across localities to persist. Mindful of these insights, we propose an approach to modeling which does not impose a geographically fixed relationship. Results for Scotland reveal substantial variations in the observed relationships over space and time, supporting our argument.

Business model innovation from the strategic posture perspective

PurposeThis paper aims to identify the differentiated paths followed by firms to innovate in business models, among four different strategic postures and also to determine the innovation interactions between business model components, among strategic postures. The authors intend to highlight the differentiated patterns of business model innovation (BMI) in each strategic posture and provide guidance to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) managers regarding the suitable alignments of business model components when they innovate in their business model.Design/methodology/approachThe research model developed and tested in this work uses a composite model that borrows from the logic of Miles and Snow’s cycle of adaptive strategic choices as well as Demil and Lecocq’s perspective of permanent change within and between components of a business model. The authors’ model is designed first to encompass the differentiated patterns characterizing the relationships between the strategic posture of defender, prospector and analyzer profiles and the related innovation attributes of their business model components. The study was conducted with independent French manufacturing SMEs ranging from 10 to 250 employees in size and having revenues below €50m (European Commission, 2007). The analysed sample includes 169 firms from 14 sectors representative of French manufacturing SMEs.FindingsResults confirm the differentiated propensity to adopt specific BMI behaviours among strategic postures. The authors also highlight the differentiated interactions between and within BMI components. These results suggest that SMEs tend to leverage specific BMI components related to their entrepreneurial, engineering and administrative choices. Thus, firms tend to evolve in a posture-specific, path-dependent dynamic consistency in which BMI attributes interact towards a limited set of alternatives, thus anchoring the new business model into strategic choices. It has been shown that the predictability of strategy–BMI alignment is contingent on the level of fit between empirically derived strategic profile attributes and Miles and Snow’s ideal profile attributes.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper investigates strategy–BMI alignments without addressing such alignments from the standpoint of firm performance. Still, performance from a BMI perspective lies in the ability of the firm to sustain the dynamic consistency of its business model components by identifying the effects of change in interactions between and within components on overall BM performance. Further studies should explore dynamic consistency as a means for firms to generate and maintain performance by innovating in their business model when facing specific contingencies. The conceptual framework designed for the present research seems appropriate for conducting such an investigation on the performance implications of strategy–BMI fit.Practical implicationsThis research offers insights regarding manufacturing SMEs seeking guidance when changing business strategy. Indeed, by combining Miles and Snow’s configurational framework of strategic postures with Demil and Lecocq’s RCOV BM framework, the authors provide insights that can bridge the gap between intended strategy and realized strategy. The authors suggest that when realizing new strategic choices, SMEs should favour behaviours of BMI that are likely to fit the new intended strategic posture. Accordingly, the authors introduce a set of field-based BMI alignments specific to firms’ strategic posture to support the strategic management of innovation in SMEs.Originality/valueBy unravelling the alignments between strategic posture and business model innovation, this work contributes to enlightening the dynamics of Miles and Snow’s adaptive cycle. Indeed, viewing Miles and Snow’s typology from the configurational perspective of BMI provides a clearer picture of the adaptive cycle through which BMI reflects the path-dependent process of the formation of the firm’s strategic posture through the transformation of its business model.

The role of regulatory learning in energy transition: The case of solar PV in Brazil

An important problem that has attracted significant amount of attention within the context of energy transitions is the carbon lock-in: a situation in which energy systems are locked-in to high carbon technologies through a path-dependent process. Several measures to avoid the carbon lock-in involve technology-specific measures, which in turn implies that those measures may result in an energy system locked-in to certain low carbon technologies. We consider that the Brazilian system needs policies to escape the carbon lock in, which are based on providing incentives to low carbon technologies. We develop an analytical framework to analyze the role of regulatory institutions in the possible lock-in to utility-scale photovoltaic, in the sense that they create barriers to the adoption of distributed-generation photovoltaic. We show that the definition of a process to adapt the institutional framework in a context of stress in the innovation system is crucial for the adoption of new technologies. Applying our framework to the Brazilian power sector, we observe that only when regulators consider the possibility that the system is locked-in to centralized production technologies (and not when they just consider the carbon lock-in) they manage to eliminate barriers to distributed generation based on solar PV.

Editorial. EU cohesion policy and domestic territorial governance. What chances for cross-fertilization?

Territorial governance is an extremely heterogeneous activity. Each European country is characterised by a complex system of legal acts, tools, discourses and practices that had consolidated through time, as a consequence of peculiar path-dependent processes. At the same time, since more than 30 years the European Union is developing territorially relevant actions and interventions, ultimately aiming at achieving the economic, social and territorial cohesion of the continent. The mutual relations entangling domestic and supranational territorial governance remain unclear: on the one hand, the European Union is required to produce a framework for delivering its policies that is flexible enough to accommodate domestic differences; on the other hand, domestic territorial governance and spatial planning systems should adapt in order to allow room for cross-fertilization with supranational interventions. This contribution builds on the evidence collected by the research project ESPON COMPASS to frame and explore this issue. In doing so, it serves as an introduction for this special issue that, in the following contributions, presents a number of concrete examples of interaction between EU spatial policies and domestic territorial governance and spatial planning.

Path dependence in occupational careers: Understanding occupational mobility development throughout individuals' careers

The progression of occupational careers can be conceptualized as a path-dependent process, in which former decisions affect the range of occupational alternatives. The impending losses of human capital increasingly dissuade individuals from changing their occupation. We suggest that path dependence will lead to a decrease in mobility in occupational careers over time, and that occupational turbulence in the earlier career stages will be linked to turbulence in the later stages of an occupational career. Our sample comprises the first 15years after entry to the labor force in the occupational histories of 456 individuals from Germany. To test our assumptions, we introduce a method that allows us to examine the turbulence – that is, the number of occupational transitions and/or distinct occupations and/or the variation in the duration and timing of events – in occupational career trajectories. In support of our hypotheses, turbulence in occupational careers is linked to the turbulence of the further occupational career path and decreases over time. Gender also has a considerable effect on occupational turbulence. We discuss our findings and elaborate on theoretical implications for career research.

Three faces of entropy for complex systems: Information, thermodynamics, and the maximum entropy principle

There are at least three distinct ways to conceptualize entropy: entropy as an extensive thermodynamic quantity of physical systems (Clausius, Boltzmann, Gibbs), entropy as a measure for information production of ergodic sources (Shannon), and entropy as a means for statistical inference on multinomial processes (Jaynes maximum entropy principle). Even though these notions represent fundamentally different concepts, the functional form of the entropy for thermodynamic systems in equilibrium, for ergodic sources in information theory, and for independent sampling processes in statistical systems, is degenerate, H(p)=-∑_{i}p_{i}logp_{i}. For many complex systems, which are typically history-dependent, nonergodic, and nonmultinomial, this is no longer the case. Here we show that for such processes, the three entropy concepts lead to different functional forms of entropy, which we will refer to as S_{EXT} for extensive entropy, S_{IT} for the source information rate in information theory, and S_{MEP} for the entropy functional that appears in the so-called maximum entropy principle, which characterizes the most likely observable distribution functions of a system. We explicitly compute these three entropy functionals for three concrete examples: for Pólya urn processes, which are simple self-reinforcing processes, for sample-space-reducing (SSR) processes, which are simple history dependent processes that are associated with power-law statistics, and finally for multinomial mixture processes.

Sample space reducing cascading processes produce the full spectrum of scaling exponents

Sample Space Reducing (SSR) processes are simple stochastic processes that offer a new route to understand scaling in path-dependent processes. Here we define a cascading process that generalises the recently defined SSR processes and is able to produce power laws with arbitrary exponents. We demonstrate analytically that the frequency distributions of states are power laws with exponents that coincide with the multiplication parameter of the cascading process. In addition, we show that imposing energy conservation in SSR cascades allows us to recover Fermi’s classic result on the energy spectrum of cosmic rays, with the universal exponent −2, which is independent of the multiplication parameter of the cascade. Applications of the proposed process include fragmentation processes or directed cascading diffusion on networks, such as rumour or epidemic spreading.

Agency and forms of path development along transformation processes in German cities

The article provides elements of a theoretical framework to embed the discussion of regional path dependence and transformation into evolutionary approaches of complex adaptive systems. The evolutionary perspective avoids the focus on lock-in as a major challenge of path dependence, while allowing for more options along path-dependent processes including path plasticity and path creation. The empirical part is based on a qualitative study of transformation processes in three German cities, Stuttgart, Dortmund and Chemnitz, during the last 25 years, showing the variety of combinations between micro, meso and macro interactions as well as the diversity of relevant policies to gain influence on local transformation processes.

A Conceptualization and Test of Path Dependence in Occupational Career Trajectories

The progression of occupational careers can be conceptualized as a path dependent process where former decisions narrow the range of occupational alternatives. Positive feedback and mastery experie...

Embeddedness and the Evolution of Entrepreneurial Ventures

This paper analyses how and why entrepreneurship unfolds as a path-dependent process of embedding in an industry and local community. A qualitative study of small, young com-panies, within the Euro...

Social Capital. Viewing Nordic Paths of Management

How do Nordic states conduct policies in order to bring people closer to the socio-economic realm, in the sense that they, being social capital, tend to be integrated as active and participatory citizens? How do the interventionist and expensive Nordic welfare states survive in the global age, with demanding and ever changing claims to international competitiveness? This paper addresses these questions. Social capital and partnership building are introduced as terms and policy concepts in order to find answers in the framework of intended or unintended strategic endeavours. As a critical approach claims a contextual conceptualisation, we shall here view different European social models and administrative traditions in relation to comparative basic contexts in order to arrive at analytical answers. Leaning especially on the Anglo-Saxon model, the traditional Scandinavian universal welfare state model of the post-war Keynesian order has gradually been transformed into the contemporary Nordic model (Veggeland 2007). Contextual regulatory innovations and path-dependent processes have generated the survival of universal welfare state arrangements and collective action but with the mixed use of Market-Type Mechanisms (MTM) in the public sector of Anglo-Saxon origin. In summary, this blending of policies has resulted in the advantageous social capital of what is called flexicurity, social security combined with a flexible participatory labour market. We shall discuss both flexicurity policy and participatory subsidiarity defined downwards as contribution to an explanation of why the expensive welfare states of the Nordic type have not only so far been doing well but have also sustained both democratic and output-side legitimacy.

Hawkes process-based technology impact analysis

Abstract Patent citation analysis is considered a useful tool for technology impact analysis. However, the outcomes of previous methods do not provide a fair reflection of a technology’s future prospects since they are based on deterministic approaches, assuming that future trends will remain the same as those in the past. As a remedy, we propose a Hawkes process-based patent citation analysis method to assess the future technological impact and uncertainty of a technology in a time period of interest by employing the future citation counts of the relevant patents as a quantitative proxy. For this, we construct a citation interval matrix from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database, and employ a Hawkes process - a special case of path-dependent stochastic processes - as a method for patent citation forecasting. Specifically, the Hawkes process models the idiosyncratic and dynamic behaviours of a technology’s evolution and obsolescence by increasing the likelihood of another subsequent citation by oneself (i.e., self-excitation) and decaying the likelihood back towards the initial level naturally. A case study of the patents about molecular amplification diagnosis technology shows that our method outperforms previous deterministic approaches in terms of accuracy and practicality.

Regional innovation patterns from an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACTRegional innovation patterns from an evolutionary perspective. Regional Studies. Based on the conceptual notion and empirical verification that innovation follows differentiated spatial patterns, the paper analyses the conditions that enable changes in regional innovation patterns. Consistently with evolutionary theory, these changes are interpreted as path-dependent processes characterized by trajectories and paradigms, understood as learning processes. The novelty of the work rests on the adaptation of creation, diversification and upgrading pathways – generally used in the literature to explain changes in development paradigms – to the interpretation of changes in learning trajectories and paradigms, and on the empirical validation of this conceptual underpinning.

Innovative social business of selective waste collection in Brazil: Cleaner production and poverty reduction

In Brazil, municipal solid waste management (MSWM) faces several challenges in its transition from a waste disposal model to another based on selective collection with recycling and reuse. Each municipality has adopted different institutional arrangements to meet the responsibility shared by the State, industries, and consumers to operate public policies in this field. The consequence has been an inefficient recycling rate, high costs, and the exclusion of waste collectors from the official system. Therefore, the objectives of this study are as follows: (i) to submit a sustainable institutional arrangement based on cooperation between agents, with an intensive use of information technology and logistics and (ii) to assess the economic-financial feasibility of the model. The research method was based on a multilevel, interdisciplinary and systemic analytical structure for the study of path-dependent processes, proposed by Hoff (2011), associated to critical moment identification approach from Collier & Collier (1991). In addition, an economic valuation model based on discounted cash flow was used. The path dependence analysis reveals the following determinants of this situation: recent legislation; the existence of socially excluded collectors; contractual formats in public-private partnerships; and the need to raise citizens' awareness of their co-responsibility regarding environmental education.In this scenario, the alternative found by the actors is a social business that is inclusive for those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) and decentralised in micro-cooperatives with different forms of relationship with public authorities. Different from what the experiments indicate, the economic and financial viability of the model, in addition to the environmental, social, and legal benefits, are confirmed.

Understanding frequency distributions of path-dependent processes with non-multinomial maximum entropy approaches

Path-dependent stochastic processes are often non-ergodic and observables can no longer be computed within the ensemble picture. The resulting mathematical difficulties pose severe limits to the analytical understanding of path-dependent processes. Their statistics is typically non-multinomial in the sense that the multiplicities of the occurrence of states is not a multinomial factor. The maximum entropy principle is tightly related to multinomial processes, non-interacting systems, and to the ensemble picture; it loses its meaning for path-dependent processes. Here we show that an equivalent to the ensemble picture exists for path-dependent processes, such that the non-multinomial statistics of the underlying dynamical process, by construction, is captured correctly in a functional that plays the role of a relative entropy. We demonstrate this for self-reinforcing Pólya urn processes, which explicitly generalize multinomial statistics. We demonstrate the adequacy of this constructive approach towards non-multinomial entropies by computing frequency and rank distributions of Pólya urn processes. We show how microscopic update rules of a path-dependent process allow us to explicitly construct a non-multinomial entropy functional, that, when maximized, predicts the time-dependent distribution function.

A Discursive Institutionalist Approach to Understanding the Changes to the Irish Social Partnership Policy After 2008.

Abstract: Employing the critical juncture theory (CJT), a institutionalist approach, this paper examines the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at the end of the decade of the 2000s. Did these changes constitute a transformation in social partnership policy, or were they a continuation of a previously established policy pathway? The CJT consists of three elements--economic crisis, ideational change, and the nature of the policy change--that must be identified for us to be able to declare with some certainty if the changes to social partnership policy constituted a critical juncture. In this context, ideational change is very important, constituting the intermediating factor between a crisis and the subsequent nature of the policy change. Our findings will help explain the nature of the changes to social partnership policy at this time. Keywords: Crisis; critical juncture; ideas; social partnership; policy. JELs: E61, E65, H12 1. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the nature of the changes to social partnership policy after 2008. Social partnership itself can be seen from a wide variety of perspectives, giving rise of a range of different definitions. For us, in the interest of simplicity, we see social partnership as comprising 'co-operation between key players in the making of economic and social policy' (Casey & Gold, 2000, p. 9) and, as such, social partnership constitutes a neo-corporatist model for social concertation (Roche & Cradden 2003, p. 75). The economy, after years of stagnation during the 1980s, performed exceptionally well in the following decades, particularly during 1997-2007, what Timoney (2010) refers to as the peak of the Celtic Tiger. However, this prosperity ended in 2008, leading to a questioning of extant policies, including social partnership. Sudden policy discontinuities are often attributed, in a cause and effect manner, to economic crises (see punctuated equilibrium (Jones, 2001)). However, crises are often followed by policy continuity, not change. Thus, it is important to acknowledge that policy change is a complex process and that to understand it we need to take account of political circumstances, recognising that crises can be a necessary, but insufficient, condition for policy change. The CJT has been used to examine a range of policy changes (see Hogan & Cavatorta, 2013; Hogan & Doyle, 2007). According to Hogan's (2006) CJT, a critical juncture is a multi stage event. A crisis can create a situation where extant policies and associated ideas are called into question by change agents. Subsequent displacement of the extant paradigm, by the consolidation of a new set of ideas on how policy should operate, can lead to radical policy change. But, without ideational change, policy change will likely be first or second order, not third order (paradigmatic) change. (1) The presence, or absence, of ideational change links a crisis to the subsequent nature of the policy change. Here we use the CJT to investigate the nature of the changes to social partnership policy after 2008. 2. THE CRITICAL JUNCTURE THEORY According to Hogan and Doyle (2007), a critical juncture consists of discreet, but interconnected elements: crisis, ideational change (extant ideational collapse, new ideational consolidation) and radical policy change (see Figure 1). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Thus, CJT uses ideas in a form of discursive to overcome the limitations of traditional new institutionalist approaches, particularly historical institutionalism, in explaining policy change--specifically their static and overly determinist nature (Schmidt, 2010). Historical institutionalism has followed March and Olsen's (1984) suggestion about de-emphasizing micro processes and focuses on explaining complex processes and inefficient histories. Of particular importance to historical institutionalism is macro processes of path dependency (Pierson, 2000), a concept that borrows heavily from economic history (see Arthur, 1994; David, 1985; North, 1990). …

How to jump further and catch up? Path-breaking in an uneven industry space

Recent studies have argued that regional diversification emerges as a path-dependent process. Developed countries that industrialize do so first from core areas in an uneven industry space and have more opportunities to jump to new related industries and sustain economic growth than do developing countries that jump from peripheral areas. Can developing countries/regions jump further to break these path-dependent trajectories? Based on China’s export data, we show that regions can make such a jump by investing in extra-regional linkages and internal innovation. The effects of these two sets of variables vary across regions and industries.

Basque Country cluster policy: the road of 25 years

This paper addresses how cluster policy, particularly its management part, contributes to the processes of switching path dependency and escaping lock-ins in the old industrial regions. This is based on the case study of the Basque Country in a timeline of 25 years. Analysing the development of the Basque cluster policy on both a period and a stage-by-stage basis gives a practical understanding of the intervention framework for effective cluster policy management. Moreover, it rediscovers and stresses the importance of agile policy capacity to internal knowledge creation, constant learning and adaptation stimulating processes of path creation in old industrial regions by providing new ways of thinking about cluster policy interventions.

Validation of Material Models for Machining Simulation Using Mechanical Properties of the Deformed Chip

Finite element simulation of machining is increasingly popular in both industry and academia. Simulation accuracy is, in part, critically dependent on identification of the appropriate material constitutive laws. Calibration and validation of the laws is typically limited to using uniaxial flow stress data and/or machining outputs such as forces, temperatures, and chip morphology features. The spatial distribution of material state (i.e. microstructure, mechanical properties, residual stresses) of the machined chip, which encodes path-dependent process information, is seldom utilized for model validation. In this paper we explore a complimentary validation technique that compares model predictions against measured spherical nanoindentation stress-strain curves.