Journal articles on the topic 'Actor-agency relations'
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1
Somerville, Ian. "Agency versus identity: actor‐network theory meets public relations." Corporate Communications: An International Journal 4, no. 1 (March 1999): 6–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/13563289910254525.
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Braun, Benjamin, Sebastian Schindler, and Tobias Wille. "Rethinking agency in International Relations: performativity, performances and actor-networks." Journal of International Relations and Development 22, no. 4 (April 25, 2018): 787–807. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0147-z.
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Jansen, Till. "Beyond ANT." European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 2 (May 3, 2016): 199–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368431016646506.
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Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) offers an ‘infra-language’ of the social that allows one to trace social relations very dynamically, while at the same time dissolving human agency, thus providing a flat and de-centred way into sociology. However, ANT struggles with its theoretical design that may lead us to reduce agency to causation and to conceptualize actor-networks as homogeneous ontologies of force. This article proposes to regard ANT’s inability to conceptualize reflexivity and the interrelatedness of different ontologies as the fundamental problem of the theory. Drawing on Günther, it offers an ‘infra-language’ of reflexive relations while maintaining ANT’s de-centred approach. This would enable us to conceptualize actor-networks as non-homogeneous, dynamic and connecting different societal rationales while maintaining the main strengths of ANT.
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Lohse, Mikael. "Finnish Defence Intelligence Agency - an Actor in National Security?" Journal of Strategic Security 13, no. 2 (July 2020): 107–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.2.1799.
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One disparate feature between Finnish civilian and military intelligence is their express relationship to national security. The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service prominently declares to be an expert in national security whereas no corresponding public territorial claim has been made by its counterpart – the Finnish Defence Intelligence Agency (FDIA). This observation leads to the question: are the tasks of the FDIA limited solely to the military defence of Finland or has it any more comprehensive role in safeguarding national security. This article aims to examine this question by comparing the provisions governing the purpose of civilian and military intelligence and analysing the provision on the targets of military intelligence. Legal analysis indicate that military intelligence targets are broadly located in the field on national security, both at the core of military activities and in the outer reaches on non-military activities. The FDIA actually has a wide mandate which extends its mission beyond the reaches of civilian intelligence.
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Pyrozhkov, Serhii, and Nazip Khamitov. "Ukraine in the 21st Century: Strengthening Civilisational Agency." Diplomatic Ukraine, no. XXI (2020): 595–604. http://dx.doi.org/10.37837/2707-7683-2020-28.
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The article addresses the issue of Ukraine’s civilisational agency in the modern world. The authors state that a civilisational destiny of a state is determined by geopolitical actors claiming a superpower status, the state’s own choice, people’s will, its political and intellectual elite. Then, a state becomes a unit of international relations and law, world geopolitics, science, art; a civilisational actor of history, the present, and the future. Ukraine strives to become such an actor, have its civilisational project, and implement it. Our country is located between the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian civilisational societies, thus its capacity to be an actor in the modern globalised world is contingent on efficient cooperation with both of the societies. The authors believe that the implementation of the civilisational project of Ukraine as an actor and not as an object of modern world lies in systemic cooperation with the international actors which accept freedom and dignity of a human being as fundamental values. The authors single out the civilisational measures of such a society, which is a society of trust, social and political partnership, and balanced interaction of the rule of law and civil society. In its civilisational project of the 21st century, Ukraine should stand for a society of innovations and information, where a person can live up to her full potential. It is about the worldview transformation of consciousness and relations among people, countries, civilisations, and civilisational worlds. The implementation of this project is a fundamental condition for ensuring the national security and existence of Ukraine as an independent state. That is indeed a noble cause of Ukraine and its people in the multifaceted world of the 21st century. Keywords: Eurasian civilisational society, Euro-Atlantic direction, agency of Ukraine, independent state.
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Epstein, Charlotte. "Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake: The Rational Actor, the Self, or the Speaking Subject?" International Organization 67, no. 2 (April 2013): 287–316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020818313000039.
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AbstractThe rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.” My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speaking subject. Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the discipline's Hobbesian legacy all along.
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Pijović, Nikola. "How States Order the World: A Typology of “Core” and “Peripheral” Foreign Policy." Foreign Policy Analysis 16, no. 3 (August 23, 2019): 504–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fpa/orz022.
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Abstract Every state's foreign policy has to deal with other states, regions, and transnational issues, not all of whom are likely to receive the same level of policy-making interest and attention. States have differing foreign policy priorities, but how do we conceptualize those different priorities? To explain how states order the world and prioritize their foreign policy, I establish an ideal typology of “core” and “peripheral” foreign policy, which categorizes more and less important foreign policy spaces and issues. This typology contributes to foreign policy analysis's “middle-range” theorizing by establishing how and why the determinants, processes, and goals of foreign policy–making in these distinct types differ, and where policy-makers have the greatest ability to influence change in foreign policy. One of the key insights of this research relates to how structure and agency differently influence foreign policy–making: “core” foreign policy tends to be more structurally rigid and obtrusive, allowing less maneuverability for actor agency seeking to change the status quo, while “peripheral” foreign policy is less structurally rigid and obtrusive, allowing for greater actor agency in changing foreign policy direction and priorities. Hence, this typology should aid our understanding and prediction of foreign policy priorities and decisions.
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Ariyani, Nafiah, and Farhat Umar. "Typology of Stakeholders in Perspective of Sustainable Tourism Development Use Mactor Method." Urban Studies and Public Administration 3, no. 4 (November 26, 2020): p20. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/uspa.v3n4p20.
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Tourism represents a complex multi-actor system. The successful sustainable development of tourism areas requires all stakeholders’ support and a map of the strengths, the relations, and the interests of stakeholder actors to determine appropriate institutional policies. This study aims to map stakeholders’ character at the Kedung Ombo tourism area development as a favorite potential destination in Central Java, Indonesia. Data collection used the focused group discussions method. The data analysis used was the Mactor method. This research shows that the Pemalijuana River Flow Management Office, the Indonesian State Forest Company, and the Regional Development Planning Agency were the dominant actors. The Department of Youth, Sports and Tourism, College, village government, the youth organization, and business people are relay actors. College is an autonomous actor; meanwhile, the youth organization, local government, and community are actor-dependent. The Regional Development Planning Agency Department of Youth, Sports and Tourism, college, village government, youth organizations, and business people are convergent actors who can build strong alliances. The support of BBWS Pemali Juana and Perhutani to collaborate is needed to succeed. The research findings are the basis for making a participative institutional design for the Kedung Ombo tourist area’s success and sustainability.
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Seitzl, Lina, and Patrick Emmenegger. "How agents change institutions: Coalitional dynamics and the reform of commercial training in Switzerland." Business and Politics 21, no. 2 (December 17, 2018): 145–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/bap.2018.21.
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AbstractHistorical institutionalist research has long struggled to come to terms with agency. Yet injecting agency into historical-institutionalist accounts is no easy task. If institutions are structuring agents’ actions, while they are simultaneously being structured by these very agents’ behavior, the ontological status of institutions remains unclear. Hence, most historical-institutional accounts, at the conceptual level, tend to downplay the role of agency. However, in this way, they also remain incomplete. Following the “coalitional turn” in historical institutionalism, we develop a new account of institutional change and stability that awards a central role to agency. At the heart of our approach is the notion that both stability and change in institutions presuppose constant coalition building by organized entrepreneurial actors. However, for several reasons, such coalition building is complicated, which ultimately leads to institutional stability. In addition, we argue that relevant state agencies actively shape whether the incumbent coalition or the challenger coalition prevails. We illustrate the potential of our actor-centered approach to institutional change by analyzing the reform of commercial training in Switzerland, tracing developments from the beginning of the 1980s until today.
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Yetim, Mustafa, and Tamer Kaşıkcı. "Re-adapting to Changing Middle Eastern Politics: The Modification in Turkey’s Actor Perception and Turkey-Free Syrian Army (FSA) Relations." Contemporary Review of the Middle East 8, no. 2 (June 2021): 193–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2347798921999178.
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This article investigates the current modification in Turkey’s actor perception according to the Middle East’s changing dynamics. Clarifying the shift in Turkish foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party (JDP) and the emergent structural realities in the Middle East as a result of increasing agency of the violent non-state actors (VNSAs) in the aftermath of several Arab revolutions, the current article scrutinizes the adaption of Turkish foreign policy to these regional realities. In this context, to prove Turkey’s active orientation toward the recent regional environment, its exceptional engagement with one of the important VNSAs, namely the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or Syrian National Army (SNA), has been empirically examined. Within this background, the current resurrection of the VNSAs in the Middle East and regional-global actors’ reactions to this reality will also be analyzed. Afterward, Turkey’s unique and swift compliance with this reality and the consequent modification of its actor perception will be explored.
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Heikinheimo, Marianna. "Paimio Sanatorium under Construction." Arts 7, no. 4 (November 9, 2018): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts7040078.
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Alvar Aalto created innovative architecture in his breakthrough work, Paimio Sanatorium, located in Southwestern Finland and designed between 1928 and 1933. This empirical case study looked at the iconic piece of architecture from a new angle by implementing the actor-network theory (ANT). The focus was on how the architecture of the sanatorium came to be. A detailed description of the chronology and administration of the building process enabled observing on the role of the agency of the architect. The study surveyed the cooperation, collaboration, and decision making of the agency during the construction period. The first part of this paper focused on the relations and conditions of producing the sanatorium and analyzed the building through drawings and archive material; the second part linked to the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and included a discussion on how Aalto managed to bring along the other actors. The study clearly showed the importance of a collaborative effort in a building project. The most special architectural solutions for Paimio Sanatorium, a demanding institutional building project, came into being in circumstances where the architect managed to create a viable network that merged collective competence with material factors.
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Berenskötter, Felix. "Deep theorizing in International Relations." European Journal of International Relations 24, no. 4 (November 13, 2017): 814–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354066117739096.
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This article starts from the observation that International Relations scholars do not agree on what they mean by theory. The declining popularity of grand theory and the celebration of theoretical pluralism are accompanied by the relative absence of a serious conversation about what ‘theory’ is or should be. Taking the view that we need such a conversation, especially given the shallow theorizing of modern scholarship that conflates theory with method, and the postmodern view that abstract narratives must be deconstructed and rejected, this article puts forward the notion of ‘deep theorizing’ as the ground for grand theory. Specifically, it argues that deep theorizing is the conceptual effort of explaining (inter)action by developing a reading of drives/basic motivations and the ontology of its carrier through an account of the human condition, that is, a particular account of how the subject (the political actor) is positioned in social space and time. The article illustrates this angle through a discussion of realist, liberal and postcolonial schools of thought. It basically argues that, through their particular readings of the human condition, these approaches develop distinct conceptions of political agency and, hence of the nature and location of world politics.
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Hornborg, Alf. "Artifacts have consequences, not agency." European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1 (July 24, 2016): 95–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368431016640536.
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This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory.
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Coker, Christopher. "Still ‘the human thing’? Technology, human agency and the future of war." International Relations 32, no. 1 (February 23, 2018): 23–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047117818754640.
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Is war beginning to escape human control? Thucydides tells us the war is one of the things that makes us definitively human; but how long will this continue to be the case as our relationship with technology continues to develop? Kenneth Waltz’s book Man, the State and War affords one way of answering that question. So too does Nikolaas Tinbergen’s framework for understanding human behaviour and Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT). The main focus of this article is the extent to which we will diminish or enhance our own agency as human beings, especially when we come to share the planet with an intelligence higher than our own.
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Fleming, Sean. "The two faces of personhood: Hobbes, corporate agency and the personality of the state." European Journal of Political Theory 20, no. 1 (October 30, 2017): 5–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474885117731941.
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There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.
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Hallenbeck, Sarah. "Toward a Posthuman Perspective: Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies and Everyday Practices." Journal for the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 9–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.5325/jhistrhetoric.15.1.0009.
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ABSTRACT This article considers the emergence of methodological patterns, or “sanctioned narratives,” within feminist rhetorical historiography, arguing that with just a few exceptions these patterns have anchored our work to conceptions of the woman-as-rhetor exercising deliberate, strategic agency against her world, rather than within it. While this conception has been enormously productive in redefining what “counts” in the history of rhetoric, it also constrains our attempts to pursue broader methodological projects that take as their subject the interworkings of rhetoric, power, and gender. After describing the ways that existing methodological patterns have become entrenched, this article offers one method for shifting our commitments, a feminist-materialist methodology. Influenced by theories of posthuman agency and by actor-network theory, this method can help feminist rhetoricians pursue broader conceptions of rhetoric that will allow us to intervene more effectively in the rhetorical production and transformation of gender relations and power dynamics.
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Yao, Song, and Kui Liu. "Actor-Network Theory: Insights into the Study of Social-Ecological Resilience." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 24 (December 13, 2022): 16704. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192416704.
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Actor-network theory, which emerged from science and technology studies in the 1980s, regards everything in the social and ecological systems as a continuous result of the network of relations where they are located. Social-ecological resilience, with its origins in systems ecology, focuses on the non-linear changing dynamics of social-ecological systems and their governance. Among them, social-ecological resilience study integrates different disciplines, backgrounds, and themes, which inevitably leads to the vagueness of its concept. Both actor-network theory and social-ecological resilience emphasize human-nature relationships and view social-ecological systems as dynamic and unpredictable “networks”. Therefore, this paper explored the potential conceptual or theoretical underpinnings that actor-network theory can provide in social-ecological resilience through interdisciplinary research. Specifically, a semi-structured interview was conducted with 30 fishing households from Chang-shan Archipelago in Northeastern China. The obtained interview data were analyzed through thematic analysis, and three main themes were generated, including “heterogeneous networks”, “agency”, and “translation”, which facilitated a reconceptualization of the three components of social-ecological resilience, namely, “linked social-ecological systems”, “changing dynamics” and “the ability to maintain resilience”, and also provided a new theoretical perspective on the adaptive governance of social-ecological systems.
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Fernández-Molina, Irene. "Bottom-up change in frozen conflicts: Transnational struggles and mechanisms of recognition in Western Sahara." Review of International Studies 45, no. 3 (January 25, 2019): 407–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0260210518000578.
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AbstractThis article proposes a typology of causal mechanisms whereby transnational relations of recognition constitute conflict actors in frozen conflicts. While the agency of an emerging conflict actor manifests itself in ‘struggles for recognition’ motivated by experiences of ‘disrespect’, responses from different significant others vary in terms of motivations and pathways (mechanisms of recognition). Adapting Honneth’s tripartite division, the typology distinguishes between four forms of recognition: thin cognitive recognition, ‘respect’/rights, ‘esteem’/difference, and ‘love’/empathy. Three transnational corrections are made in order to include transnational relations of recognition, non-state actors, and unstructured social-relational forms of international/transnational recognition. The typology is applied to the conflict of Western Sahara, which has been reshaped by the rise of internal Sahrawi pro-independence groups (based inside the territory annexed by Morocco) as an increasingly relevant conflict actor, with their identity shifting from victims to human rights activists to activists involved in an unsolved conflict. This identity and social-status formation has been the product of transnational recognition from three significant others: the annexing state (Morocco), the contested state-in-exile (SADR), and the international community. The overall effect of intermingling recognition processes, including various instrumental initiatives deprived of mutuality, has been increased struggle and conflict complexity rather than ‘recognitional peace’.
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Gurnos-Davies, Kitty. "Spatializing material‐corporeal entanglements: A new materialist approach to the agential work of costume in the stage adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2018)." Studies in Costume & Performance 6, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 185–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/scp_00046_1.
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This article argues for the value of conceptualizing the agency of costume in performance when it is not worn directly upon the body. I employ a new materialist framework to examine the spatial dynamics of the shifting corporeal‐material relations established when costume is set apart from an actor onstage and, unworn, asserts its agency as an independent force distinct from the performer. My investigation is supported by a close analysis of Bryony Lavery’s page-to-stage adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), directed by Melly Still and performed at the Royal & Derngate, Northampton in 2018. Drawing upon the observation of rehearsals and performances encountered as an embedded researcher, my discussion centres on the live practices of theatrical production. Employing Bennett’s new materialist thinking laid out in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) and Bill Brown’s ‘Thing Theory’ (2001, 2015), my discussion of The Lovely Bones shows costume to be an active participant in a ‘distributive agency’ enacted between garment and performer, the contours of which are amplified when the two are set apart. The spatial disentanglement of the material and corporeal, evidenced in the performance of costume in The Lovely Bones, thus provides an opportunity to present a fuller understanding of the material agency of the stage.
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Korkut, Umut. "The Discursive Governance of Forced-Migration Management: The Turkish Shift from Reticence to Activism in Asia." Journal of Refugee Studies 32, no. 4 (December 24, 2018): 664–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fey053.
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Abstract This article shows how similar humanitarian narratives of states can travel across different geographies in response to refugee crises. Empirically, it follows Turkey's position vis-à-vis the Syrian and Rohingya refugee crises. Considering Turkey's migration management practices, humanitarian activism narrative, and its political ambition to foster domestic and international audiences for this narrative, this article elaborates on how Turkey has become a humanitarian actor responding both to Syrian and the Rohingya crises. In both cases, the Turkish political discourses have been very resonant of each other, despite Syria and Myanmar being in different geographies and proximities to Turkey. The article also shows how Turkish politicians and the civil servants aspired to enhance visibility and credibility of Turkey as a humanitarian actor. Delineating Turkey's humanitarian narrative shows the role of political agency in forging sympathetic domestic and international audiences. Overall, the Turkish case presents how states operate migration regimes at the cusp of discourses and institutions affecting their forced migration management and humanitarian engagements.
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Iranowska, Joanna. "Greater good, empowerment and democratization? Affordances of the crowdsourcing transcription projects." Museum and Society 17, no. 2 (July 17, 2019): 210–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.29311/mas.v17i2.2758.
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Digital technology and Internet access have created new possibilities for museums and archives for digitization of their collections. Steadily, more museums are experimenting with inviting their audiences to participate in tagging images, annotating, transcribing historical texts or cropping photographs. This article is an exploration of visual and functional aspects of various digital interfaces frequently being used in crowdsourcing projects involving transcribing manuscripts. The empirical material has been collected through interviews with the editors of the projects and systematic technical walkthroughs of MediaWiki platforms (Edvard Munch’s Writings and Transcribe Bentham) and Zooniverse platforms (AnnoTate and Shakespeare’s World). The analysis aims to explore platforms’ affordances (Gibson 1978), in other words the opportunities that the layout and design offer to users interacting with facsimiles of manuscripts (‘digital networked objects’) (Cameron and Mengler 2015). The questions raised are whether and how the interfaces empower users and perform as a democratic actor providing the volunteers with agency. The platforms’ interfaces have emerged as an important and undervalued actor-network of elements which configure heterogeneous relations among actors and influence users’ engagement.
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Murphy, Michael P. A. "The securitization audience in theologico-political perspective: Giorgio Agamben, doxological acclamations, and paraconsistent logic." International Relations 34, no. 1 (April 15, 2019): 67–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047117819842330.
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Over the past two decades, securitization theory has developed into a robust literature of cases and critiques. The vast majority of the attention paid to securitization has been to the securitizing actor and the referent object, leaving the audience – the body that determines the fate of a securitizing move by accepting or rejecting the securitizing actor’s request – undertheorized. The audience is presented as a problematic contradiction, because as a collectivity called by the securitizing actor it appears to be a passive body, critiqued thereby as potentially irrelevant. On the other hand, both the original Copenhagen school formulation of securitization theory and many of its current theorists reaffirm the agency of the audience to actively determine the success or failure of the securitizing move. This article turns to political theology for guidance, and explains the contradiction of the passive/active audience through homology to the ekklesia and the acclamation of ‘amen’ in liturgical doxology. The fact that the congregation is passive recipient of a call does not negate the essential and substantial role that it must actively play, just as the contradiction of the passive/active description of the securitization audience is not a problem of illogic, but a paraconsistent truth.
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Cockburn, Jessica, Eureta Rosenberg, Athina Copteros, Susanna Francina (Ancia) Cornelius, Notiswa Libala, Liz Metcalfe, and Benjamin van der Waal. "A Relational Approach to Landscape Stewardship: Towards a New Perspective for Multi-Actor Collaboration." Land 9, no. 7 (July 10, 2020): 224. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land9070224.
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Landscape stewardship is increasingly understood within the framing of complex social-ecological systems. To consider the implications of this, we focus on one of the key characteristics of complex social-ecological systems: they are relationally constituted, meaning that system characteristics emerge out of dynamic relations between system components. We focus on multi-actor collaboration as a key form of relationality in landscapes, seeking a more textured understanding of the social relations between landscape actors. We draw on a set of ‘gardening tools’ to analyse the boundary-crossing work of multi-actor collaboration. These tools comprise three key concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge, and relational agency. We apply the tools to two cases of landscape stewardship in South Africa: the Langkloof Region and the Tsitsa River catchment. These landscapes are characterised by economically, socio-culturally, and politically diverse groups of actors. Our analysis reveals that history and context strongly influence relational processes, that boundary-crossing work is indeed difficult, and that doing boundary-crossing work in smaller pockets within a landscape is helpful. The tools also helped to identify three key social-relational practices which lend a new perspective on boundary-crossing work: 1. belonging while differing, 2. growing together by interacting regularly and building common knowledge, and 3. learning and adapting together with humility and empathy.
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Schlachter, Monika. "Transnational Temporary Agency Work: How Much Equality Does the Equal Treatment Principle Provide?" International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations 28, Issue 2 (June 1, 2012): 177–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.54648/ijcl2012012.
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The EU Temporary Agency Work Directive establishes an equal pay/equal treatment principle for agency workers that lays down a specific standard of equality, different from the one applied under anti-discrimination law. The aim of this paper is to examine the meaning of this recent equality principle, especially for transnational agency workers. For this purpose the conciliation of the agency work directive with the Posting of Workers Directive (PWD), providing only a minimum level of employment conditions, is examined. In principle the agency directive appears to apply a more far-reaching standard of equality, allowing transnational agency workers to compare their contractual entitlements with what they would have been entitled to had they concluded an employment contract directly with the user undertaking. This seems to be the result of focusing primarily on the factual aspects of work: equal conditions should be provided for co-workers doing roughly the same work in the same place. The legal status of the actor concluding the relevant contract with the worker does not seem to be decisive in these triangular contractual relationships. But this standard will presumably not be applied on a regular basis as the directive allows for various exceptions. Stretched as widely as possible, those exceptions might have a significant impact on the equal treatment principle. The directive might then be rendered incapable of providing more than the minimum standard guaranteed by the posting directive. However, there remains a chance of avoiding this outcome. The exceptions enshrined in the agency directive contain a safeguard clause guaranteeing 'overall protection' of workers, that could be interpreted in such a way as to disallow any reversion to a mere minimum standard. This paper argues that it is necessary to follow this interpretation in order to maintain a meaningful level of protection.
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Zaharna, R. S., and Zhao Alexandre Huang. "Revisiting public diplomacy in a postpandemic world: The need for a humanity-centered communication logic." Communication and the Public 7, no. 1 (February 10, 2022): 7–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20570473221078619.
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Professor R. S. Zaharna is a leading scholar in international communication and public diplomacy. She has witnessed the rapid development of public diplomacy since 2001 and has been committed to researching different communication logics in public diplomacy. In recent years, she has begun to explore the boundaries of public diplomacy theory, aiming to expand the conceptual scope of public diplomacy, advocating a relational shift in conventional public diplomacy studies, and reflecting on the limitations of the actor-centered approach in international communication. In this interview, Professor Zaharna shared her definition of public diplomacy and discussed how relations, connectivity, and interactivity will be indispensable in public diplomacy research and practice. She also analyzed the limitations of the actor-centered public diplomacy research and explained three communication logics in humanity-centered diplomacy. For her, humanity-centered public diplomacy responds to the needs of human societies, harnessing our capacity to collaborate in collective decision-making and problem-solving. In this case, communication is not about agency or control but about navigating the connectivity and interactivity made possible by digitalization, emphasizing horizontal social collaboration, and observing relational constellations and dynamics.
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Pranajaya, I. Kadek, I. Ketut Suda, and I. Wayan Subrata. "Marginalization of Bali traditional architecture principles." International journal of linguistics, literature and culture 6, no. 5 (August 17, 2020): 10–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.21744/ijllc.v6n5.975.
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The traditional Balinese architecture principles have been marginalized and are not following Bali Province Regulation No. 5 of 2005 concerning Building Architecture Requirements. In this study using qualitative analysis with a critical approach or critical/emancipatory knowledge with critical discourse analysis. By using the theory of structure, the theory of power relations of knowledge and the theory of deconstruction, the marginalization of traditional Balinese architecture principles in hotel buildings in Kuta Badung Regency is caused by factors of modernization, rational choice, technology, actor morality, identity, and weak enforcement of the rule of law. The process of marginalization of traditional Balinese architecture principles in hotel buildings in Kuta Badung regency through capital, knowledge-power relations, agency structural action, and political power. The implications of the marginalization of traditional Balinese architecture principles in hotel buildings in Kuta Badung Regency have implications for the development of tourism, professional ethics, city image, economy, and culture of the community as well as for the preservation of traditional Balinese architecture.
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Ferneley, Elaine, and Ben Light. "Unpacking User Relations in an Emerging Ubiquitous Computing Environment: Introducing the Bystander." Journal of Information Technology 23, no. 3 (September 2008): 163–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000123.
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The move towards technological ubiquity is allowing a more idiosyncratic and dynamic working environment to emerge that may result in the restructuring of information communication technologies, and changes in their use through different user groups’ actions. Taking a ‘practice’ lens to human agency, we explore the evolving roles of, and relationships between these user groups and their appropriation of emergent technologies by drawing upon Lamb and Kling's social actor framework. To illustrate our argument, we draw upon a study of a UK Fire Brigade that has introduced a variety of technologies in an attempt to move towards embracing mobile and ubiquitous computing. Our analysis of the enactment of such technologies reveals that Bystanders, a group yet to be taken as the central unit of analysis in information systems research, or considered in practice, are emerging as important actors. The research implications of our work relate to the need to further consider Bystanders in deployments other than those that are mobile and ubiquitous. For practice, we suggest that Bystanders require consideration in the systems development life cycle, particularly in terms of design and education in processes of use.
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Zhao, Jimin, and Leonard Ortolano. "The Chinese Government's Role in Implementing Multilateral Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Montreal Protocol." China Quarterly 175 (September 2003): 708–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305741003000419.
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The Multilateral Fund created by amendments to the Montreal Protocol played a key role in motivating the Chinese government to ratify and comply with the Protocol. Two other factors have affected China's actions in meeting the Protocol's requirements: the nation's desire to appear as a responsible and co-operative actor in solving global environmental problems, and the interest of China's principal implementing agency in expanding its responsibilities and authorities. Three factors have had significant roles in enhancing the national government's ability to implement the Protocol: expanded administrative capacity, participation of local government units with capability to enforce regulations, and the employment of market-based environmental policy instruments.
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Preininger, Ernst Michael, and Robert Hafner. "I have a garden on the Internet! Searching for the farmer in a remotely controlled farming enterprise." Geographica Helvetica 76, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 249–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gh-76-249-2021.
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Abstract. The paper examines the conceptual implications of using Smart Farming Technologies and digitalisation in small-scale food production, exemplified by the Austrian start-up “myAcker”. The company runs a hybrid system of gamified, remote-controlled agriculture, where its customers assume the role of “online gardeners” and take care of their own vegetables. Conceptually, it combines two different logics, namely the technology focus of vertical farming and algorithm-based control over operational processes, and the participatory, values-based elements of Alternative Food Networks like connectivity, sustainability, and ownership developed by online gardeners. Consequently, the dividing lines between producers, customers, and technology, as well as between virtual and physical, become blurred. Thus, the agency of technology becomes a co-constituent of agricultural work, life, and identity, which is itself co-constituted by human actors in a network of social relations. The case study shows the new potential and pitfalls of small-scale smart farming and digitalisation, making it necessary to conceptually revisit human–environment relations in the Actor Network Theory by more explicitly including technology as a bridging element.
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Beresford, Alexander, and Daniel Wand. "Understanding bricolage in norm development: South Africa, the International Criminal Court, and the contested politics of transitional justice." Review of International Studies 46, no. 4 (July 3, 2020): 534–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0260210520000224.
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AbstractWithin international relations the normative agency of African actors is often downplayed or derided. This article develops the concept of bricolage to offer a novel understanding of norm development and contestation in international relations, including the role African actors play in this. We contend that a norm's core hypothesis can be thought of as the nucleus of a norm. In the case of complex international norms, if this core hypothesis is sufficiently vague and malleable, the norm will continue to attract a range of actors who may claim to share a commitment to enacting the core hypothesis even if they simultaneously promote a variety of potentially conflicting and contradictory meanings-in-use of the norm when doing so. Each meaning-in-use, we argue, might be thought of as a product of bricolage: a process of combining and adapting both new and second-hand materials, knowledges, values, and practices by an actor to address a problem in hand. Through a detailed study of the contestation of transitional justice between South Africa and the International Criminal Court, we elucidate how bricolage can help to illuminate the normative agency of African actors in shaping transitional justice. Processes of bricolage add complexity and potentially confusion to a norm's development, but bricolage also offers the potential for a creative and dynamic means by which a range of actors can inject pluralism, dexterity, and vitality into debates about a norm's meaning and operationalisation.
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Amoroso, Daniele, and Guglielmo Tamburrini. "Toward a Normative Model of Meaningful Human Control over Weapons Systems." Ethics & International Affairs 35, no. 2 (2021): 245–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0892679421000241.
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AbstractThe notion of meaningful human control (MHC) has gathered overwhelming consensus and interest in the autonomous weapons systems (AWS) debate. By shifting the focus of this debate to MHC, one sidesteps recalcitrant definitional issues about the autonomy of weapons systems and profitably moves the normative discussion forward. Some delegations participating in discussions at the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems meetings endorsed the notion of MHC with the proviso that one size of human control does not fit all weapons systems and uses thereof. Building on this broad suggestion, we propose a “differentiated”—but also “principled” and “prudential”—framework for MHC over weapons systems. The need for a differentiated approach—namely, an approach acknowledging that the extent of normatively required human control depends on the kind of weapons systems used and contexts of their use—is supported by highlighting major drawbacks of proposed uniform solutions. Within the wide space of differentiated MHC profiles, distinctive ethical and legal reasons are offered for principled solutions that invariably assign to humans the following control roles: (1) “fail-safe actor,” contributing to preventing the weapon's action from resulting in indiscriminate attacks in breach of international humanitarian law; (2) “accountability attractor,” securing legal conditions for international criminal law (ICL) responsibility ascriptions; and (3) “moral agency enactor,” ensuring that decisions affecting the life, physical integrity, and property of people involved in armed conflicts be exclusively taken by moral agents, thereby alleviating the human dignity concerns associated with the autonomous performance of targeting decisions. And the prudential character of our framework is expressed by means of a rule, imposing by default the more stringent levels of human control on weapons targeting. The default rule is motivated by epistemic uncertainties about the behaviors of AWS. Designated exceptions to this rule are admitted only in the framework of an international agreement among states, which expresses the shared conviction that lower levels of human control suffice to preserve the fail-safe actor, accountability attractor, and moral agency enactor requirements on those explicitly listed exceptions. Finally, we maintain that this framework affords an appropriate normative basis for both national arms review policies and binding international regulations on human control of weapons systems.
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Nimmo, Richie. "Biopolitics and Becoming in Animal-Technology Assemblages." HoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology 13, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 118–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/host-2019-0015.
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Abstract This article critically explores Foucauldian approaches to the human-animal-technology nexus central to modern industrialised agriculture, in particular those which draw upon Foucault’s conception of power as productive to posit the reconstitution of animal subjectivities in relation to changing agricultural technologies. This is situated in the context of key recent literature addressing animals and biopolitics, and worked through a historical case study of an emergent dairy technology. On this basis it is argued that such approaches contain important insights but also involve risks for the analyses of human-animal-technology relations, especially the risk of subsuming what is irreducible in animal subjectivity and agency under the shaping power of technologies conceived as disciplinary or biopolitical apparatuses. It is argued that this can be avoided by bringing biopolitical analysis into dialogue with currents from actor-network theory in order to trace the formation of biopolitical collectives as heterogeneous assemblages. Drawing upon documentary archive sources, the article explores this by working these different framings of biopolitics through a historical case study of the development of the first mechanical milking machines for use on dairy farms.
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Rissanen, Mari-Jatta. "Entangled photographers: Agents and actants in preschoolers’ photography talk." International Journal of Education Through Art 16, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 271–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/eta_00031_1.
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Photographs taken by young children have engendered a growing amount of research across diverse academic disciplines. Photographs have been used as visual data for analysing for example children’s social relations and well-being. However, only a few studies have addressed the photographic practices of young children as means for them to explore, imagine and coexist with the surrounding world. In this article, I introduce a case study that draws on research from art education and sociology of childhood. The data were gathered in a photography workshop in a Finnish early childhood education and care centre, where fourteen preschoolers discussed their photographs inspired by contemporary Finnish art photography. In order to expose diverse human and material actors and their interactions in preschoolers’ photography talk, I applied Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory. Thus, preschoolers’ photography is seen as a practice of visual meaning-making wherein agency is distributed among several actors.
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Côté, Adam. "Agents without agency: Assessing the role of the audience in securitization theory." Security Dialogue 47, no. 6 (October 25, 2016): 541–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0967010616672150.
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This article assesses the role of the audience in securitization theory. The main argument is that in order to accurately capture the role of the securitization audience, it must be theorized as an active agent, capable of having a meaningful effect on the intersubjective construction of security values. Through a meta-synthesis of 32 empirical studies of securitization, this article focuses on two central questions: (1) Who is the audience? (2) How does the audience engage in the construction of security? When assessed against the theoretical works on securitization, this analysis reveals that the manner in which the audience is defined and characterized within securitization theory differs with the empirical literature that investigates securitization processes. Where the empirical literature suggests securitization is a highly intersubjective process involving active audiences, securitization theory characterizes audiences as agents without agency, thereby marginalizing the theory’s intersubjective nature. This article sketches a new characterization of the securitization audience and outlines a framework for securitizing actor–audience interaction that better accounts for securitization theory’s linguistic and intersubjective character, addresses this theoretical/empirical conflict, and improves our understanding of how groups select and justify security priorities and costly security policies.
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Polonski, Vyacheslav, and Bernie Hogan. "Assessing the Structural Correlates between Friendship Networks and Conversational Agency in Facebook Groups." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 9, no. 1 (August 3, 2021): 674–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14673.
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To what extent do friendship ties influence the conversation structure in open groups? Openly accessible Facebook groups offer the opportunity to examine how individuals leverage their existing friendship relations when speaking to a large and often heterogeneous audience. For example, those with many friends in the group may receive more positive signals from others and also may have their content validated more easily. Thus, while the group is ostensibly open to all, existing relationships may impede such openness on a practical level. We employ a stratified sample of 30 Facebook groups from UK Russell Group universities. Using multilevel regression, we examine the effects of several structural metrics at both the actor and group level on the magnitude of three conversational metrics: likelihood of initiating a conversation, responding to a conversation and receiving responses for content. We find that aspects of individual network positions, e.g. degree-centrality and eigenvector-centrality, as well as qualities of the group e.g. group-density and modularity, have a consistent and highly significant effect on conversational metrics, while the strength of these relationships clearly varies by group type. We contextualise our findings via Gibson’s notion of “conversational agency”, and point to future directions for designing and managing online communities.
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Xian, Rachel. "Conditioning Constructs: A Psychological Theory of International Negotiated Cooperation." International Negotiation 26, no. 2 (April 5, 2021): 319–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15718069-bja10025.
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Abstract Political psychology and social constructivism exist in an “ideational alliance” against realism; however, both have overlooked behavioral conditioning, the basis of animal learning. Through six stages situated in international negotiation behaviors, the theory of Conditioning Constructs shows how behavioral conditioning can take parties from specific to diffuse reciprocity, rationalist to constructivist cooperation, and crisis to durable peace. In stages 1, 2 and 3, parties use negotiated agreements to exit prisoner’s dilemmas, continuously reinforce cooperation during agreement implementation, and satiate to rewards as initial implementation finalizes. In stages 4, 5 and 6, parties receive fresh rewards with new negotiations, undergo intermittent reinforcement with periodic agreements thereafter, and finally attribute cooperative behavior to actor constructs. Conditioning Constructs demonstrates that agency is possible in socially constructed structures through willful participation in conditioning through negotiation; and that, while Anatol Rapoport’s tit-for-tat strategy is suited to initial cooperation, intermittent reinforcement better preserves late-stage cooperation.
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Momesso, Lara, and Niki J. P. Alsford. "Negotiating Legacies." European Journal of East Asian Studies 19, no. 1 (August 12, 2020): 5–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15700615-01901010.
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Abstract This special issue concerns agency and negotiation in the context of the hierarchical relations between the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a global superpower, and Taiwan, a subordinated actor often relegated to a marginal position in contemporary global geopolitics. By exploring how Taiwan opposes, interrupts and re-creates its subordinate position vis-à-vis China, the authors of this special issue will shed light on the complexities of the ongoing Taiwan experience, shaped by different, often opposing, interests, positions and perspectives regarding its relationship with China. Yet, by exploring the experience of Taiwan with reference to its Chinese legacies, this special issue will also allow important reflections on China, not only in its hegemonic role regionally and globally, but also in its weaknesses when it deals with subordinated actors. This is a timely and important piece, which will allow alternative interpretations of contemporary events not only in Taiwan, for instance the recent national elections and related political developments, but also in the region, such as the protests which have been occurring in Hong Kong during the last four months.
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Taylor-Gooby, Peter. "Assumptive Worlds and Images of Agency: Academic Social Policy in the Twenty-first Century?" Social Policy and Society 7, no. 3 (July 2008): 269–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1474746408004259.
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As many commentators have pointed out, the pressures facing modern welfare states are formidable. One response by government is to place greater emphasis on a policy-making paradigm that rests on an individual rational actor account of agency. This finds its intellectual home in the leading tradition of neo-classical economics, its ideological home in a politics of active citizenry and equality of opportunity and its institutional home in the mechanisms by which the Treasury currently directs social policy.The resulting policies have strengths in delivering productivity improvements and responsiveness to consumer demand, but weaknesses in accommodating the value positions of an increasingly diverse society, in sustaining the social cohesion necessary to the continuance of state welfare and in confronting the structural basis of some social interests. These issues have traditionally been recognised in the sociology of values, the psychology of trust and the political science of power.One strength of academic social policy is that it is a field of study in which a number of disciplines are deployed. The ascendancy of one paradigm may obscure the contribution of others. It is hard for social policy academics to gain recognition when they speak a different language from that of policy making at the highest level.
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Rosin, Christopher J., Katharine A. Legun, Hugh Campbell, and Marion Sautier. "From compliance to co-production: Emergent forms of agency in Sustainable Wine Production in New Zealand." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 12 (October 2, 2017): 2780–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17733747.
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This article engages with non-human agency through the interrogation of the emerging role of metrics in the governance of sustainability in the New Zealand primary sector. In it, we argue that the agency of the metrics builds on previous work that has elaborated the impact of audited best practice on the subjectivities of producers and processors, including the recent examination of the active influence of metrics that engenders unexpected and uncontrolled change in social networks of production. In this case, the analysis of the influence of metrics shifts to those used within a recently introduced ‘learning’ tool (Wine Industry Sustainability Engine) that can be classified as an effort in transition management. The capacity of metrics as agents is already apparent in the perceived interactions and engagements with the Wine Industry Sustainability Engine tool as expressed by likely users during assessments of the usability of initial pilot software. Using their response, we demonstrate that, despite intentions to use the tool to foster particular sets of practices and ethics through benchmarking, the metrics have multiple roles in production worlds—compelling compliance to regulations, creating new ways to communicate complex relations and practices, and generating information for reflexive self-evaluation. Through these roles, we argue, metrics clearly operate as both a material and ontological non-human actor, expressed in different ways in different assemblages. This conclusion has implications for the application of transition management more broadly, and helps us to better understand what we want metrics to accomplish, what they can accomplish, and the possible gap between the two.
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Berkhout, Ezra, Lucie Sovová, and Anne Sonneveld. "The Role of Urban–Rural Connections in Building Food System Resilience." Sustainability 15, no. 3 (January 18, 2023): 1818. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su15031818.
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This paper investigates food system resilience—conceptualized through the four dimensions of agency, buffering, connectivity, and diversification—from the perspective of rural–urban relations. We consider three cases that capture distinct actor and policy foci in the wider literature on urban–rural interactions. These are secondary cities and their development potential as central nodes in urban–rural food systems, the role of digital infrastructure in shaping food systems resilience, and finally, street food vendors as a particularly vulnerable yet crucial group of actors linking rural food supply with urban demand. We review existing literature within these themes, with a particular focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food systems in middle- and low-income countries. This allows us to examine the relationship between rural–urban connectivity and food system resilience and to identify possible trade-offs. We formulate recommendations for research and policy around the notions of new localities (i.e., considering the interconnectedness of rural and urban food systems across administrative boundaries), smart development (i.e., context-specific approaches building on local strengths), and network governance (i.e., inclusive decision making engaging with diverse stakeholders across multiple scales).
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Murray, Gregor, Christian Lévesque, Glenn Morgan, and Nicolas Roby. "Disruption and re-regulation in work and employment: from organisational to institutional experimentation." Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 26, no. 2 (April 28, 2020): 135–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1024258920919346.
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This article proposes experimentation as a framework for understanding actor agency in the changing regulation of work and employment. This involves contrasting institutional change with organisational and institutional experimentation approaches in order to understand how, in the context of uncertainty, actors in the world of work experiment with new ways of organising and seek to institutionalise them into new understandings, norms and rules. The article describes the fault lines of disruption that are generating a vast range of experiments in the world of work. These fault lines invite resilient responses and the development of collective capabilities at two levels: first, organisational experimentation, where social actors seek to modify or renew their organisations, networks and alliances and reflect on, assess and learn from their experiments; second, institutional experimentation, where these responses are scaled up and institutionalised over time through more general understandings, norms and rules. A key challenge for comparative research and strategising is to find the appropriate institutional conditions that will facilitate and enable organisational experiments, whilst overcoming constraining institutional conditions. This challenge is illustrated through the examples of co-working and the development of new forms of collective representation.
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Abdullah, Walid Jumblatt, and Muhammad Haniff Hassan. "The Contextualisation of Islam in a Secular State: A Study of Singapore." ICR Journal 12, no. 1 (June 30, 2021): 133–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.52282/icr.v12i1.821.
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Muslim minority communities throughout the world grapple with the contextualisation of Islam. Islamic religious scholars, or the ‘ulama', have to issue jurisprudential rulings in accordance with the social, political, and religious contexts in which they operate. In doing so, they simultaneously have to deal with matters pertaining to authority and legitimacy. This paper analyses the contextualisation of Islam in secular states, with specific reference to Singapore. A few arguments will be made. Firstly, the paper will tackle the theological justifications for the contextualisation of Islam. At the same time, the paper will highlight the limits of contextualisation. Secondly, the paper will focus on the secular state of Singapore, and the issue of contextualisation in the context of the Muslim minority community there. It is argued that the discourse on contextualisation in Singapore is not novel. We further contend that the socio-political context in Singapore rightly drives the discussion on contextualisation, but suggest areas of contention in such efforts. Even though the state is the most dominant actor in the country, and thus its ideologies and attitudes toward Islam are a key determinant in the faith’s contextualisation, other actors display agency in the process, too. This paper is situated within the literature on state-society and state-Islam relations.
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Frowd, Philippe M. "The field of border control in Mauritania." Security Dialogue 45, no. 3 (March 24, 2014): 226–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0967010614525001.
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Recent work on borders has tended to overlook border control actors, practices and rationalities in West Africa. States in this region are considered origin and transit countries for irregular migration, and the Sahel region that they straddle is widely seen as an emerging haven of terrorist activity. This article discusses one response to these migration and terrorism threats by the Islamic Republic of Mauritania: a programmme to build new border posts with help from global partners that include the European Union and the International Organization for Migration. The article builds on Bourdieusian approaches in critical security studies, but draws on concepts from actor-network theory to account for the heterogeneity of border control actors and the mobility of different knowledges about how to control borders. Drawing on ethnographic research in Mauritania, the article discusses four ‘actants’ of border security: the border posts, the landscape, the biometric entry–exit system and training practices. Throughout, the article highlights field dynamics of competition, cooperation and pedagogy, also emphasizing the role of non-human agency. The article concludes with a reflection on the link between border control and statebuilding, suggesting that this fusion is a broader paradigm of security provision in the global South.
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Yeröz, Huriye. "Manifestations of social class and agency in cultural capital development processes." International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research 25, no. 5 (August 13, 2019): 900–918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijebr-03-2018-0146.
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Purpose While migrant women entrepreneurs (MWE) have been studied extensively through the lenses of gender and ethnicity, social class, as an axis of difference, received scant attention in entrepreneurship and migrant enterprise literature. The purpose of this paper is to make an intersectional analysis on migrant women’s cultural capital development processes on the basis of not only gender and ethnicity, but also class relations. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on empirical insights generated through listening to the life story narratives of 17 women entrepreneurs from Turkey. This is a small, yet diverse group consisting of women who followed their male kin who have migrated to Sweden in the late 1960s as a labour force, and of highly educated political refugee women who have migrated to Sweden following the military coup in Turkey in the 1980s. Findings By linking pre-migration and post-migration lives through Bourdieusian class analysis, the analysis yielded three distinct types of habitus of the women-intersectional identity constructed through interweaving of certain historical and cultural practices and conditions, labelled as women (immigrant) entrepreneurs, migrant (women) entrepreneurs and hybrid entrepreneurs. Life stories demonstrated the ways the MWE relationally defined, and in turn, contested being the right kind of entrepreneur drawing on their type of habitus and forms of cultural capital within the rules of the game in the specific context of entrepreneurship. Originality/value This study shows how MWE generate diverse, yet at times similar, but historically and culturally conditioned responses in actively shaping the relationship between entrepreneurial resources and context-specific structural powers and aspects. This way, the study calls for enriching the extant debate on migrant women entrepreneurship in two ways. First, it suggests that the strategic fit between resources and opportunities does not entail an automatic and arbitrary process. Rather, it takes an effort and contestation carried out by the entrepreneurial actors, among whom the individual entrepreneur is the primary actor. In particular, it draws attention to the conditions of possibilities for agency as a result of struggle and intersectional power relations: social class, ethnicity and gender, which provide a differential degree of powers to the individual entrepreneur.
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Pettrachin, Andrea. "Opening the ‘Black Box’ of asylum governance: decision-making and the politics of asylum policy-making." Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 50, no. 2 (September 13, 2019): 191–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2019.30.
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AbstractComplementing and challenging the existing literature on the Italian asylum crisis, this article develops an actor-centred approach to open the ‘black box’ of asylum governance, showing the constitutive effects of governance on the asylum issue. It then applies this approach to the case of the Veneto region in Italy during the recent ‘refugee crisis’. By doing so, the article, first, investigates the cognitive mechanisms that shape key actors’ asylum policy decisions. Drawing concepts and ideas from framing and sensemaking theories, it shows that, while there is certainly a strategic element that shapes actors' policy preferences, there is also a meaningful cognitive component in asylum governance. Indeed, it argues that actors' strategies are shaped, more than by anti-immigration public attitudes per se (as often assumed), by how political actors make sense of these attitudes. The article then applies SNA to examine how actors' understandings are located within and depend upon network relations and investigate actors' agency, power and interactions. It ultimately shows that local asylum policy outcomes are deeply influenced by the ‘politics of policy-making’, that is by power dynamics and how powerful actors position themselves, behave and mobilize their understandings. Finally, by examining the impact of policy outputs on cognitive micro-level mechanisms, the article sheds light on the interplay between the ‘regulatory’ and the ‘public reaction’ dimensions of the Italian asylum crisis, illustrating the relationship between public attitudes on migration, frame emergence, asylum policy-making, politics and public mobilizations in the active constitution of the Italian asylum crisis.
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Lasyoud, Alhashmi Aboubaker, Jim Haslam, and Robin Roslender. "Management accounting change in developing countries: evidence from Libya." Asian Review of Accounting 26, no. 3 (September 10, 2018): 278–313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ara-03-2017-0057.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the change in management accounting and control systems (MACSs) within two large public manufacturing companies in Libya so-called Trucks and Buses Company (TBC) and National Trailers Company (NTC). Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on semi-structured interviews, an analysis of documents and observations. It draws on New Institutional Sociology (NIS) perspective (DiMaggio and Powell’s 1983) as theoretical framework to provide explanations regarding how the MACS in the two companies were shaped by various factors. Findings The main factors identified in shaping the operations of the MACS were the need to comply with the political pressures, the Libyan Government’s laws and regulations, the instructions imposed by the management committee in both companies, leading organizations’ pressures (ISO), customer satisfaction (coercive isomorphism), the influence of professional associations (normative isomorphism) and the need to imitate efficient organizations in order to be more legitimate and successful (mimetic isomorphism). Research limitations/implications The findings of the study have implications for understanding the operations of MACS in developing countries. Future research could focus on alternative theoretical perspectives for the investigation of the process of change in MACS such as structuration theory, agency theory and actor-network theory. Originality/value The proposed theoretical framework provides insights into the process of change by focusing on the interplay between the institutional forces, market forces and intra – organizational power relationships to overcome the criticism of NIS that it downplays the role of market forces and intra – organizational power relations.
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Pasuni, Afif. "Negotiating Statist Islam: Fatwa and State Policy in Singapore." Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 37, no. 1 (April 2018): 57–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/186810341803700103.
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This article examines how state-linked religious actors negotiate religious demands in a secular authoritarian state. There is a prevalent assumption that such religious actors lack the agency to affect state decisions. I do not seek to challenge that proposition, rather to qualify it by identifying the scope and extent of their authority. Taking the state as an autonomous actor, I examine fatwas or official religious edicts in Singapore through the lens of ‘policy feedback’, which analyses how the bureaucratisation of religious institution created new legal and bureaucratic channels that shape state policies. This paper aims to primarily answer the following question: What role do fatwas play in shaping statist interpretation of religion? I answer this by looking at the historical development of religious bureaucracy in Singapore – which includes the fatwa institution – and analysing the role of fatwas in relation to state policies. I argue that the bureaucratisation of religion not only regulates religious demands, but creates a juncture for religious institutions to inform and contest statist version of Islam though policy feedback, a concept that has thus far been only partially applied to economic issues. Policy feedback explains how religious demands are negotiated at the bureaucratic level and is particularly instructive in clarifying the discourse between the state and the fatwa institutions, which underlines that the policies and programmes of the autonomous state can be influenced by the very demands of religious bureaucrats. This paper also introduces Statist Islam as an original concept with which to conceptualise the amalgamation of statist and religious interests, and considers how the informal authority of fatwas continues to function beyond the legal and bureaucratic restrictions set by the state.
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Martin, Keir. "Subaltern perspectives in post-human theory." Anthropological Theory 20, no. 3 (November 7, 2019): 357–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499618794085.
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Much recent anthropological theory demonstrates a concern to defend indigenous ontologies against allegedly singular and oppressive colonial or modernist settlements. These Western settlements are said to rely upon conceptual separations such as that between nature and culture or between nature and beliefs. Such conceptual separations are held to be at the heart of the malign effects that Western modernity is perceived as creating as they are relentlessly imposed upon non-Western indigenous peoples. De la Cadena, for example, argues that a distinction between (scientific) truth and (cultural) belief has been at the heart of modernist projects to disallow or marginalise the everyday and ritual relations with non-human ‘earth beings’ (such as living sacred mountains) that she describes as being central to Latin American ‘indigenous’ ways of being. The moves to protect the tubuan, a ritual figure and non-human actor held to be of great importance by many of Tolai people in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province, could easily be read through this framing, in which a modern Western ontology imposes a separation between a ‘natural’ order and ‘cultural beliefs’, which are relegated to a secondary order of importance. Although this framing looks very much like the perspective sometimes adopted by certain Tolai, it is far from the only perspective that can be advanced. In particular, this framing tends to most often be strongly rejected by those who are severely critical of the emerging postcolonial indigenous elite in Papua New Guinea. In simply advancing a framing that celebrates non-human agency as a rejection of colonial ontological imperialism, anthropology risks not only deliberately flattening out the ethnographic richness of the shifting perspectives of the people we work with but, in particular, silencing subaltern perspectives in a world of rapidly increasing socio-economic inequality.
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Asuelime, Legend L. E., and Raquel A. Asuelime. "Military legitimacy question in democratic transitions of Zimbabwe and Algeria." IKENGA International Journal of Institute of African Studies 23, no. 3 (September 30, 2022): 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.53836/ijia/2022/23/3/002.
Full textAbstract:
Nation-building is intertwined with certain political agency interactions in conflict-prone regions of the world. Within these conflagrations comes the question of legitimacy in transition processes. It is more so when the military is the main actor. The military variable in these processes, and civilians in the uprisings that led to the fall of the long-term leaders of Zimbabwe and Algeria highlight the vulnerability of the state in search of a sustainable nation-state. The problem under assessment in this paper is interwoven with the following questions: why is the military institution a challenge to democracy or civil rule in both countries (by extension Africa)? Could military coups be associated with civilian misrule? Could it be a case of poor civilian-military relationship? All these questions remain a sub to the question of military legitimacy in Democratic transitions of both countries and by extension Africa. The political leaderships in Zimbabwe and Algeria claim to draw their political legitimacy from the liberation histories of their countries that make them a stakeholder in democratic processes. The establishment of this claim to legitimacy remains a question when viewed from the prism of mass engagement in protest and uprisings. The conclusion here is that the two countries were similar in terms of their prevailing situations and have compromised efforts to legitimize governments in both countries. This paper employs the comparative content analysis of the relations between the military and the civilians in the two countries. It relies on the qualitative research approach and the desk research methodology which are effective in analyzing electronic and non-electronic documentary evidence. The paper recommends that the mechanism that guarantees the restriction of the military to their traditional assignment of defending the state and dissuading them from intruding into politics needs to be instituted in both countries.
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Alhassan Adum-Atta, Rashida. "The Politics of Purity, Disgust, and Contamination: Communal Identity of Trotter (Pig) Sellers in Madina Zongo (Accra)." Religions 11, no. 8 (August 14, 2020): 421. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel11080421.
Full textAbstract:
The interplay of food, people, and market in the multi-religious and multi-ethnic neighborhood of Madina Zongo, Accra, results to some extent in food exchange. In a plural setting like Madina Zongo, an important aspect of their co-existence is the sharing of food; in so doing people claim their identities and mark boundaries; consequently, food in this sense becomes a potential for conflict. My primary aim in this paper is to focus on pig feet (trotter) sellers by drawing attention to their conflicting experiences and encounters in selling trotter. Pig feet (trotter) is a commodity that comes through a global network and is considered haram and unclean by Muslims. Actions by religious practitioners, thereby, play a pivotal role in provoking these experiences and, for this reason, it is prone to triggering tensions. In this paper, I explore the embodied encounters between these traders in the market (inhabited by people of different religious traditions) and, to some extent, the buyers and how this triggers religious sensibilities and at the same time evokes strong responses among those frequenting the space (e.g., market women and customers) and those (trotter sellers) who live in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods. In my analysis on tensions and pollution, I take into consideration groundworks by authors such as Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, Sara Ahmed’s and Deborah Durham’s notion of disgust and the anthropology of imagination, and inspired works on materiality such as the Latourian Actor-Network Theory (ANT) which draws attention to the agency of the non-human. This paper studies how religiously contested and so-called “contaminated” foodstuffs such as pig feet (trotter) result in boundary-making practices among members of the market and Zongo community. I argue that ideas of purity are influenced largely by cultural and religious convictions which seems not to be compromised by religious practitioners. The paper also investigates strategies people/sellers develop to negotiate these social relations.