Third-party Actors Research Articles

The pursuit of inclusion: Conditions for civil society inclusion in peace processes in communal conflicts in Kenya

Why are some peace processes in communal conflicts more inclusive of civil society actors than others? Inclusion of civil society actors, such as churches and religious leaders, women’s organizations, or youth groups, is seen as important for normative reasons, and studies also suggest that civil society inclusion can improve the prospects for durable peace. Yet, we have a very limited understanding of why we observe inclusion in some communal conflicts but not others. We address this gap by theorizing about various forms of civil society inclusion in local peace processes, and examining to what extent involvement by different types of third-party actors—governments, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—may contribute to inclusion. Empirically, we draw on a combination of cross-case and in-depth data covering peace negotiations in communal conflicts in Kenya. The findings show that civil society was less frequently included as facilitators when the government was involved as a third party, while inclusion in the form of direct participation of civil society in negotiations, or via involvement in the implementation phase, was equally common across different types of third-party actors. Our study thus provides important new insights regarding how inclusion plays out in communal conflicts.

Nationhood cleavages and ethnic conflict: A comparative analysis of postcommunist Bulgaria, Montenegro, and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT Why do interethnic tensions in some multiethnic countries escalate into violence while in other cases, the tensions exist but they are contained? Most theories focus on the nation-state model’s exclusionary logic, different forms of institutional design, and external intervention by third-party actors. My argument centres around political divisions among the ethnic majority elites over conceptions of nationhood. Elites divided by a nationhood cleavage create an opportunity space for violence through a process of double ethnic outbidding. Majority nationhood cohesion, on the other hand, facilitates cooperation on ethnic issues among majority elites, prevents outbidding, and thus preserves interethnic peace. I develop these arguments building on outcome variation among three otherwise similar Southeast European countries and on conducting 33 semi-structured elite interviews. Post-communist Bulgaria and Montenegro built enduringly peaceful interethnic relations despite dark shadows of an assimilationist past in the former and the threat posed by greater Serbian ideology in the latter. Postcommunist North Macedonia, by contrast, has frequently experienced violent conflict despite a multiethnic past and a series of consociational arrangements tried until present.

MAPPING DISCORD’S DARKSIDE: DISTRIBUTED HATE NETWORKS ON DISBOARD

Scholars and journalists have noted that Discord, a social application oriented around voice/video chat communities and popular amongst gamers, has a history of harboring white supremacist and toxic groups. Discord has recently undertaken a public rebranding to distance itself from white supremacist, alt-right, and hateful content through a commitment to proactive moderation (Brown, 2020). However, Discord relies extensively on third-party services (like bots and server bulletins), and current scholarship has not adequately accounted for the role of such third-party actors in facilitating hateful and white supremacist networks on private platforms like Discord. This study notes how Discord’s model for curating only popular servers offloads the ethical burden of searchability to server bulletin sites like Disboard, to deleterious effect. This study involves two parts: 1) we use critical technoculture discourse analysis to examine Discord’s blogs, moderation policies, and API (Brock, 2018) and 2) we present data scraped from publicly-available descriptions and tags of 3,600 Discord servers listed on Disboard. Our study finds that thousands of servers on Disboard use overtly white supremacist and hateful tags, often advertising their ‘edgy’ communities as racist, raiding-oriented, and deliberately toxic. These servers exploit Discord’s moderation tools and Disboard’s networked affordances to proliferate within Discord’s distributed ecology. Ultimately, we argue that Discord’s response to hate, as a platform, does not address its reliance on unmoderated third-party services or the networked practices of its toxic communities.

Marketizing Sovereign Prerogatives: How to Sell Citizenship

AbstractHow is a sovereign prerogative brought to market? We know much about how states shape markets and vice versa, but less about the dynamics when states not only set market rules, but are also the sole producer of the good. This article takes up the case of citizenship by investment—“golden passport” programs that offer citizenship in recognition of an investment in a country—to unpack the challenges that appear when states commodify sovereign prerogatives. In these cases, the state holds multiple roles that generate conflicts of interest and a concern for credibility. To address these concerns, states may adopt two strategies: institute a division of labor in issuing the product, and outsource elements of supervision to third-party actors. Empirically, the analysis shows how migration service providers retooled murky discretionary grants of citizenship in peripheral countries into formal citizenship by investment schemes. The conclusion addresses how these strategies apply in markets for other sovereign prerogatives, particularly government debt, and discusses the implications for citizenship and neoliberalism.

Are skilled contingent workers neglected? Evidence from a cross-sector multiple case study on organizational career management practices

The study aims to discover the extent to which organizations support the careers of skilled contingent workers (SCWs) by providing them with organizational career management (OCM) practices. Analyzing three Belgian companies from different sectors, we find that SCWs do benefit from OCM practices. Such practices cover three dimensions: formalization, individual focus, and differentiation. Subsequently, we explain the three dimensions, respectively, through three contextual variables: the legal and regulatory framework, companies’ human resource management (HRM) configurations and the value of human capital, and the roles of third-party actors. The association of the variables with such dimensions enables the development of three research propositions. This study paves the way for additional research on SCWs and their careers as well as incorporating this population in HRM strategies, including that of OCM practices.

School turnaround through network governance: the role of turnaround schools in China’s Shanghai City

ABSTRACT Collaboration and networking have been widely recognized and adopted as strategies for school turnaround. However, most studies focus on external forces’ (particularly governments’) role in promoting collaborative turnaround, paying less attention to turnaround schools’ reactions to external actors. With specific reference to Shanghai, China, this qualitative empirical study examines the complexity of schools’ role in school turnaround through network governance. Drawing on document review and interview data, this study found three patterns of turnaround schools’ interactions with local governments and third-party actors in different school turnaround networks – compliant follower, reserved enforcer, or rational aspirant. Turnaround schools’ differentiated responses to external actors in China’s collaborative turnaround indicated their different awareness and capacity to utilize external resources. This resulted from schools’ different levels of disadvantage and leadership and external actors’ different extents of power exercise and differently impacted schools’ positions and power relations with external actors.

Nudging Children and Adolescents toward Online Privacy: An Ethical Perspective

ABSTRACT The widespread practices of data collection by third-party actors pose challenges to children’s and adolescents’ privacy when they navigate digital environments. Given that the informed-consent paradigm has largely failed in online contexts, nudging seems to be a promising alternative intervention to make internet users more privacy sensitive. At the same time, nudging faces sharp criticism, suggesting it violates various ethical values. In this paper, we present an ethical evaluation of nudges targeting children’s and adolescents’ information privacy. We identify three core ethical values that nudging potentially violates: personal autonomy, human dignity, and sustainable well-being. Focusing on personal autonomy, we then demonstrate that the autonomy of minors cannot be violated by nudging in the same way as that of adults. As a conclusion, practical implications in designing and implementing privacy nudges targeting minors are suggested.

A Privacy-Oriented Local Web Learning Analytics JavaScript Library with a Configurable Schema to Analyze Any Edtech Log: Moodle’s Case Study

Educational institutions are transferring analytics computing to the cloud to reduce costs. Any data transfer and storage outside institutions involve serious privacy concerns, such as student identity exposure, rising untrusted and unnecessary third-party actors, data misuse, and data leakage. Institutions that adopt a “local first” approach instead of a “cloud computing first” approach can minimize these problems. The work aims to foster the use of local analytics computing by offering adequate nonexistent tools. Results are useful for any educational role, even investigators, to conduct data analysis locally. The novelty results are twofold: an open-source JavaScript library to analyze locally any educational log schema from any LMS; a front-end to analyze Moodle logs as proof of work of the library with different educational metrics and indicator visualizations. Nielsen heuristics user experience is executed to reduce possible users’ data literacy barrier. Visualizations are validated by surveying teachers with Likert and open-ended questions, which consider them to be of interest, but more different data sources can be added to improve indicators. The work reinforces that local educational data analysis is feasible, opens up new ways of analyzing data without data transfer to third parties while generating debate around the “local technologies first” approach adoption.

Local Adaptation Without Work Intensification: Experimentalist Governance of Digital Technology for Mutually Beneficial Role Reconfiguration in Organizations

This 1.5-year ethnographic study of a U.S. medical center shows that avoiding loss of autonomy and work intensification for less powerful actors during digital technology introduction and integration presents a multisited collective action challenge. I found that technology-related participation problems, threshold problems, and free rider problems may arise during digital technology introduction and integration that enable loss of autonomy and work intensification for less powerful actors. However, the emergence of new triangles of power allows for novel coalitions between less powerful actors and newly powerful third-party actors that can help mitigate this problem. I extend the political science perspective of experimentalist governance to examine how a digital technology-focused, iterative collective action process of local experimentation followed by central revision can facilitate mutually beneficial role reconfiguration during digital technology introduction and integration. In experimentalist governance of digital technology, local units are given discretion to adapt digital technologies to their specific contexts. A central unit composed of diverse actors then reviews progress across local units integrating similar digital technology to negotiate a new shared understanding of mutually beneficial technology-related tasks for each group of actors. The central unit modifies both local routines and the technology itself in response to problems and possibilities revealed by the central revision process, and the cycle repeats. Here, accomplishing mutually beneficial role reconfiguration occurs through an experimentalist, collective action process rather than through a labor-management bargaining process or a professional-led tuning process.

House of Cards: Informal Housing Markets and Precarious Pathways to Homeownership in Baltimore

Abstract Homeownership is often tied to cultural conceptions of model citizenship, yet African Americans have long faced structural barriers to owning a home. Credit discrimination has often constrained black homeownership. However, missing from accounts of race, credit, and homeownership is how people purchase homes without mortgages. Through an analysis of public deed and mortgage records in Baltimore, I show that informal housing transactions – unregulated transfers outside of the mortgage market – are primarily located within majority-black neighborhoods. Using data from interviews with 336 homeowners, renters, and real estate investors, I show that informal markets put buyers in a uniquely vulnerable position. The exchange process in informal markets often consists of buyer and seller, with no third-party actor providing oversight to the transaction. Consequently, homebuyers face uncertainty over legal title and the value of the home, making it impossible to make informed decisions about the costs and benefits of homeownership at the time of purchase. Those who purchased from out-of-network real estate investors faced the harshest consequences, with sellers often structuring contracts to disadvantage consumers. Recent reports show that millions have purchased homes without institutional credit. It is worth examining how unregulated housing markets in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage contribute to racial inequalities.

What does the PJD learn from the outside? International factors and Islamist politics in Morocco

ABSTRACT This article explores the interaction between international and domestic arenas by studying the mechanisms through which domestic actors incorporate international factors into their strategic decisions. More specifically, it investigates whether and how the international context, regional examples, and third-party actors’ foreign policies impact the process of inclusion of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) into Moroccan political institutions. The main contention is that the PJD selectively incorporates international experiences and insights. This article examines this dynamic by investigating the interplay of two main mechanisms, learning and adaptation, that connect internationally generated experiences and circumstances and the PJD’s strategic decisions. It focuses on three main phases of the PJD’s inclusion process: (a) the party’s first steps in the parliament (1996–1999), (b) the first years of the reign of Mohamed VI (1999–2010), and (c) the PJD’s electoral victories after the 2011 regional anti-authoritarian protests (since 2011–2012).

‘Catalytic nuclear war’ in the age of artificial intelligence & autonomy: Emerging military technology and escalation risk between nuclear-armed states

ABSTRACT This article revisits the Cold War-era concept of ‘catalytic nuclear war,’ considered by many as unworkable, and reconceptualizes it in light of technological change, as well as improved understanding of human psychology and other factors. It argues in the modern digital era, the catalyzing chain of reaction and counter-retaliation dynamics set in motion by the deliberate action of a non-state or third-party actor is fast becoming a more accessible and plausible alternative to acquiring a nuclear weapon or manufacturing an improvised atomic device – or ‘dirty bomb.’ The article concludes that artificial intelligence (AI) technology is creating new – and exacerbating old – escalation pathways that risk catalyzing accidental nuclear confrontation between nuclear-armed powers, particularly under irrational (or sub-rational) conditions. Are existing notions of accidental and inadvertent nuclear escalation still relevant in the age of AI and autonomy?

Why Should We Care About External Workers? Towards Total Workforce Management

The growing use of external skilled workers (or Independent Professionals) by modern organizations raises many unsolved questions in HRM. Who is responsible for managing their careers? What kind of actions can be developed to foster their engagement in lieu of pure transactional contracts? What kind of relations can be organized between client organizations and the third-party actors likely to intervene? In an attempt to answer such questions, the paper explores the conceptual foundations of the new rhetoric on ‘total workforce management’, an emerging concept in the managerial literature, and provides a research agenda on this topic. The proposed research agenda is based on an extensive literature review on the management of external skilled workers. The available empirical evidence however remains scattered: our paper aims at providing an integrated analytical framework around this topic. Three main dimensions are distinguished through which total workforce management may be deployed. For each of them, new partnerships can be developed between HR managers and external and/or internal stakeholders in order to respond to the challenges of managing external skilled workers. Such partnerships offer unexpected learning opportunities to the HR function. In practical terms, the pros and cons of a blended management of workers are discussed and concrete actions are suggested to support the engagement of external skilled workers in the perspective of a ‘high road’ HRM strategy. Thanks to its original analytical framework, the paper goes far beyond the current rhetoric developed by consultants and HR technology vendors around this topic.

Network governance in education: the experiences and struggles of local governments in Chinese school turnaround

ABSTRACT While network governance in education has been widely discussed in the literature, research focusing on the behaviours of and interactions between pluralist actors is rare, and the power exercised by China’s local governments in network governance is under-researched. This study uses school turnaround, a networking process that involves multiple actors, as a research window to explore the complexity of local governments’ role in network governance. With empirical data from document analysis, observation, and interviews, this study found three patterns of local governments’ interactions with schools and third-party actors in school turnaround in Shanghai – acting as dominator, accommodator, or facilitator – in different networks. The analyses of the findings reveal that, different from symmetric and asymmetric power models of network governance, network governance in Chinese school turnaround is a differentiated practice involving local governments’ different extents of power exercise over other network actors and different degrees of unequal power relations among them (i.e., hierarchical, diffused, or democratic), resulting from the interplay of factors related to tripartite actors.

Direct Measurement of Veterinary Student Learning Outcomes for the NAVMEC Professional Competencies in a Multi-User Virtual Learning Environment.

Education in veterinary medicine, as in other allied health care-health science professions and academia in general, has been subject to the public call for accountability for the quality of its student learning outcomes. A principal stakeholder in veterinary medicine is the American Veterinary Medical Association-Council on Education (AVMA-COE). AVMA-COE has adopted program accreditation standards requiring veterinary colleges to provide evidence that they are measuring and assessing the clinical competency of students before graduation and again shortly after graduation. Schools and colleges are required to develop relevant measures to validate scientific knowledge, skills, and values aligned with North American Veterinary Medical Education Consortium (NAVMEC) core competencies. Beginning in May 2012, the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Texas A&M University modified the professional veterinary medical curriculum by including a required clinical rotation centered on veterinary emergency preparedness and response. A distinguishing major component of the instructional design of the clinical rotation includes Second Life, a commercially obtained computer-generated multi-user virtual simulation learning environment. The virtual reality situations require high-volume, mass-casualty medical triage decision making. The interpersonal communications and interactivity among students, faculty, and third-party actors enable faculty and instructor observers and simulation facilitators to evaluate students actively engaged in critical thinking and complex problem solving while demonstrating skill in the NAVMEC professional competencies. The Second Life virtual simulation has been adopted as a primary tool for direct measurement of student learning objectives outcomes achieved in this clinical rotation and is being implemented in other clinical teaching platforms.

Practising innovation in the healthcare ecosystem: the agency of third-party actors

PurposeOver recent years, few industries have seen such dramatic changes as the healthcare industry. The potential connectivity of digital technologies is completely transforming the healthcare ecosystem. This has resulted in companies increasingly investing in digital transformations to exploit data across channels, operations and patient outreach, by building on a practice approach and actor-network theory and being informed by service-dominant logic, this study aims to contribute by advancing the agential role of third-party actors to prompt innovation and shape service ecosystems.Design/methodology/approachThis research is grounded in an epistemological contextualism. To gain situated knowledge and address the role of context in knowledge, understanding and meaning the authors adopted a qualitative methodology to study actors in their different contexts. The empirical research was based on case theory. The authors also took guidance from practice scholars about how to investigate actors’ practices. The unit of analysis moves from dyadic relationships to focus on practices across different networks of actors.FindingsThis study expands on the conceptualization of triad as proposed by Siltaloppi and Vargo (2017) by moving from the form of triadic relationships – brokerage, mediation and coalition – to the agency of e-health third-parties; and their practices to innovate in the healthcare ecosystem. This study focuses on the actors and the performativity of actions and grounding the conceptual view on an empirical base.Practical implicationsThird-party actors bring about innovative ways of doing business in the healthcare ecosystem. Their actions challenge the status quo and run counter to long-time practices. Third-parties support the complex set of interconnections between different healthcare actors for the provision of new service co-creation opportunities. Considering how these e-health third-parties performs has implications for health managers, patients and other actors.Originality/valueThis study focuses on the actors and the performativity of actions and grounding the conceptual view on an empirical base. The agency of third-party actors is their ability to act among others and to connect multiple social and material structures to boost innovation. They prompt innovation and shape service ecosystems by brokering, mediating and coalescing among a great variety of resources, practices and institutions.

Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication

ABSTRACTStrategic social media influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication. However, despite the growing relevance of this new strategic communication instrument, research has paid only limited attention to elaborating its basic concepts. In this article, we adopt a strategic communication perspective to develop a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication. Particularly, we draw on research findings that identify the external resources social media influencers contribute to organization-influencer cooperation. We use these findings to systematically develop functional definitions of social media influencers and of strategic social media influencer communication. We define social media influencers as third-party actors who have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web. Subsequently, we define strategic social media communication as the purposeful use of communication by organizations or social media influencers in which social media influencers are addressed or perform activities with strategic significance to organizational goals. We then situate these definitions within the broader framework of strategic communication by discussing related concepts and by describing the strategic action field that has emerged around strategic social media influencer communication.

Sustainability in Building Construction – A Multilevel Approach

Sustainability in Building Construction – A Multilevel Approach

The ICC indictment against Al-Bashir and its repercussions for peacekeeping and humanitarian operations in Darfur

The impact of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on peace processes has received much scholarly attention. We argue, based on the ICC arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, that ICC indictments against government officials not only can be detrimental to the prospects for peace, but can also negatively affect everyday practices of peacekeepers and humanitarian workers. We draw on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data in order to develop our argument. We interrogate some measurable consequences of the indictment in relation to the work of the United Nations – African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) as well as humanitarian actors in Darfur. We do so using a data set compiled to support the work of UNAMID. We also draw on interviews with UN and UNAMID staff, aid workers, and representatives of the conflict parties. Our analysis shows that the indictment of President al-Bashir was perceived by the Sudanese government as the continuation of a confrontational approach pursued by the international community. We further show that the indictment accelerated patterns of obstruction and intimidation of peacekeeping actors, other third-party actors, and local staff associated with these. This complicated the everyday activities of peacekeepers and humanitarian efforts.

Sex-based harassment and organizational silencing: How women are led to reluctant acquiescence in academia

The #MeToo and the Time’s Up movements have raised the issue of sexual harassment encountered by women to the level of public consciousness. Together, these movements have captured not only the ubiquity of sexual harassment in the everyday functioning of the workplace, but they have also demonstrated how women are silenced about their experiences of it. Inspired by the political and the social currents emerging from these movements, and theoretically informed by ideas of discursive hegemony, rhetorical persuasion and affective practice, this article draws on a qualitative study of early- and mid-career female academics in business schools to answer the following question: How are victims who start to voice their experiences of sex-based harassment silenced within the workplace? Our findings reveal that organizational silence is the product of various third-party actors (e.g. line managers, HR, colleagues) who mobilize myriad discourses to persuade victims not to voice their discontent. We develop the concept of ‘reluctant acquiescence’ to explain the victims’ response to organizational silencing. In terms of its contributions to the extant literature, this article: (i) moves away from explanations of sex-based harassment that focus solely (or predominately) on the actions of individual perpetrators; and (ii) shows how reluctant acquiescence leads to maintaining the status quo in the organization. In highlighting features of academic work that facilitate reluctant acquiescence, we call for more contextualization of the dynamics of sex-based harassment specifically, and other forms of workplace mistreatment broadly.