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The majority of households without grid electricity in South Africa are located in low-income rural and urban areas. Being located in the remote rural areas makes it expensive to extend the grid and often locks such households into energy poverty where they are forced to use traditional fuels which expose them to unhealthy and difficult living conditions. The Free Basic Alternative Energy (FBAE) policy is aimed at providing alternative energy service to households without grid electricity with the hope of alleviating their energy poverty burden. This study examines how the FBAE policy is implemented in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape by the five local municipalities under the jurisdiction of the OR Tambo District. Through the use of the Contextual Interaction Theory (CIT) this study analyses how the three-actor groups (implementing actors, target actors and linking actors) and their characteristics (motivations, cognitions, capacity and power) influence the FBAE policy implementation process. Through this analysis, the complexity of policy implementation processes is revealed by highlighting the influence of the dynamic actor-interaction. By focusing on several actors and the influencing factors, this study moves away from the often accepted assumption that policy implementation processes mainly fail due to lack of resources. The analysis shows that actor motivations in terms of goals, their cognitions in terms of information as well as their capacity and power all play an important role in the success and failure of a policy implementation process.

This paper focuses on how digital innovation develops in ecologies of distributed heterogeneous actors with contesting logics, diverse technologies, and various forms of orchestrations. Drawing on the insights from emerging theories of digital innovation augmented by an institutional logics perspective, we examine a case study of how residential internet infrastructure was shaped over 20 years by the interplay of self-organized residential communities, corporate internet service providers (ISPs), and a state ISP. Our analysis of this case leads to the identification of four types of interactions that shape the trajectories of digital infrastructure development beyond direct actor interplays and competitive or collaborative relationships. We label these interactions symbiotic generative, symbiotic mutualistic, parasitic complementary, and parasitic competitive and explain the processes and conditions of their development and their innovation outcomes. Drawing on these findings, we develop a model of symbiotic and parasitic interactions shaping digital infrastructure development and identify key characteristics of the ecologies where these emerge. The case study and the model that emerged aim to contribute to the growing field of research on complex and nonlinear paths of digital innovation development constituted by the dynamics of its distributed agency. The article concludes by highlighting avenues for future research.

AbstractManaging environmental problems requires cross‐sectoral and cross‐level collaboration among actors. Scholars of institutional arrangements investigate how rules shape such collaboration. Scholars of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) look for explanations for collaboration in actors' values and beliefs. Rarely have these two factors been considered together when studying collaborative behavior. This paper considers institutional arrangements and actor values to examine the structure and potential drivers of actor collaboration. The study combines the Institutional Analysis and Development framework and the ACF, applying social network analysis to explore an interaction network prescribed by rules and a surveyed collaboration network. It tests the influence of actor beliefs, reputation, and institutional arrangements on collaboration investigating water management in the German Ruhr catchment. The study finds that perceived power and actor beliefs explain actor collaboration better than institutional arrangements and that perceived interactions are more diverse and denser than hierarchically structured networks of prescribed interactions.

Managing environmental problems requires cross-sectoral and cross-level collaboration among actors. Scholars of institutional arrangements investigate how rules shape such collaboration. Scholars of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) look for explanations for collaboration in actors' values and beliefs. Rarely have these two factors been considered together when studying collaborative behavior. This paper considers institutional arrangements and actor values to examine the structure and potential drivers of actor collaboration. The study combines the Institutional Analysis and Development framework and the ACF, applying social network analysis to explore an interaction network prescribed by rules and a surveyed collaboration network. It tests the influence of actor beliefs, reputation, and institutional arrangements on collaboration investigating water management in the German Ruhr catchment. The study finds that perceived power and actor beliefs explain actor collaboration better than institutional arrangements and that perceived interactions are more diverse and denser than hierarchically structured networks of prescribed interactions.

In a book titled Le retour de l'acteur (The Return of the Actor), French sociologist, Alain Touraine, writes that "the object of sociology is to explain the behavior of actors by the social relations in which they are placed … . It is the relation, not the actor, that we must study." In this paper, I follow up on the prescriptions of that view of sociology's mission. I illustrate the empirical results of statistical analyses based on network models of event data for the years of high working-class mobilization (1919-20, the "red years") and Fascist counter-mobilization (1921-22, the "black years") in Italy. The data were collected from a newspaper on the basis of a "semantic grammar," the simple linguistic structure centered around subjects, actions, objects and their attributes. That structure, which has at its core Touraine's concern with social actors and relations, allows investigators to go "from words to numbers." The analysis of those numbers confirms the historians' view of that period, the dramatic shift in patterns of collective behavior from the "red years" to the "black years." The analyses also provide some preliminary evidence on the explanatory power of various social science theories of mobilization and of Fascism. More broadly, the paper explores some of the epistemological consequences of relying on story grammars and network models as tools for the collection and analysis of narrative data.

In Le Retour de l'acteur (The Return of the Actor), French sociologist Alain Touraine writes that "the object of sociology is to explain the behavior of actors by the social relations in which they are placed." Presented here are the empirical results of statistical analyses based on network models of event data for the years of high working-class mobilization (1919/20, the "red years") & fascist countermobilization (1921/22, the "black years") in Italy. Data were collected from a newspaper on the basis of a "semantic grammar," the simple linguistic structure, which has as its core Touraine's concern with social actors & relations, allowing investigators to go "from words to numbers." The analysis of those numbers confirms the historians' view of that period, the dramatic shift in patterns of collective behavior from the "red years" to the "black years." The analyses also provide some preliminary evidence on the explanatory power of various social science theories of mobilization & of fascism. More broadly, some of the epistemological consequences of relying on story grammars & network models as tools for the collection & analysis of narrative data are explored. 6 Figures, 46 References. Adapted from the source document.

When individuals apply social rules and social expectations while working on a computer, are they directly interacting with the computer as an independent social actor or source (the CAS model), or are they orienting to an unseen programmer or imagined person in another room (the CAM model)? Two studies provide critical tests of these competing models. In Study 1, all participants were exposed to an identical interaction with computers. In one condition, participants were told that they were dealing with computers; in another, they were told that they were interacting with the software programmers. Consistent with the CAS model, there were significant differences between the two conditions. Study 2 performed a constructive replication of Study 1 by replacing the programmer with a hypothetical networker. Again, differences between the two conditions provide evidence that people respond to the computer as an independent source of information.

Using a process-oriented theoretical model I explain why some revolutions are violent while others are velvet. Velvet revolutions (those with little or no violence) occur because of a peculiar interaction between dissidents and the state. A dynamic model illustrates how dissidents, the state, and the mass public interact in revolution, emphasizing each group's decisions and the impact this has on the other groups. Successful velvet revolutions occur when (1) dissidents committed to nonviolence are (2) sufficiently organized to successfully provoke the state into (3) ineffectively repressing dissidents or inadequately implementing reform. I utilize the 1986 Philippines revolution to test this model and hypothesis. Tables, Figures, 2, References. Adapted from the source document.

Biofuel production is not cost competitive and thus requires governmental intervention. The effect of the institutional framework on the development of the biofuel sector is not yet well understood. This paper aims to analyze how biofuel production and production capacity could have evolved in Germany in the period 1992-2014. The effects of an agricultural policy intervention (liberalization of the agricultural market) and a bioenergy policy intervention (a tax on biodiesel after an initial exemption) are explored. Elements of the Modeling Agent systems based on Institutional Analysis (MAIA) framework, complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory, and Neo Institutional Economics (NIE) theory were used to conceptualize and formalize the system in an agent-based model. It was found that an early liberalization of the agricultural market led to an under-production of biodiesel; a late liberalization led to the collapse of biodiesel production. An early introduction of the biodiesel tax led to stagnation in biodiesel production and production capacity; a late introduction led to an increase in sunk costs provided that the biofuel quota is binding. Also, a lack of agents' adaptation mechanism to forecast prices led to a decrease in patterns of biodiesel production when an external shock was introduced in the system. In sum, we argue that system behavior is influenced by individual behavior which is shaped by institutions. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.