Building Programmatic Linkages in the Periphery: The Case of the TRT Party in Thailand

Did the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party of Thailand, the first party in the country’s history to gain parliamentary dominance in 2001, represent a departure from traditional clientelistic Thai parties or was it old wine in a new bottle? This article argues that the TRT represented a new hybrid party that successfully established programmatic linkages in rural parts of the country by systematizing its use of informal social networks in local communities. By routinizing recruitment, training, and evaluation of its parliamentary candidates and their vote-canvassing networks, the TRT imparted midlevel politicians with the incentives and ability to promote the party’s policy agenda to rural voters and to cultivate new policy-oriented linkages alongside traditional clientelistic ones. By identifying specific organizational mechanisms by which the TRT combined programmatic and clientelistic linkages with rural voters, this study contributes to literature that examines hybrid party strategies as well as informal party organization.

Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.

Promoting academic engagement in regions: How individual and contextual factors shape engagement activities

The need to harness knowledge to improve the innovativeness and economic development of regions has brought the regional role of universities to the fore of academic and policy discourses. Being producers and disseminators of knowledge, policymakers and societal actors expect universities to contribute to the knowledge needs of the regions in which they are located. These include exchanging knowledge with regional partners, provision of requisite human capital for local industries as well as offering place leadership. Even though universities are located in regions, they nonetheless engage with diverse stakeholders in several activities at multiple territories. Hence, universities balance a variety of roles to provide benefits to all their stakeholders. While trying to meet the needs of their multiple stakeholders, most universities — perhaps in response to policy pressures — have developed strategies and policies aimed at deepening engagement in their regions. Although universities, as institutions, are expected to lead regional engagement, academics remain the agents that engage with external actors in practice. Academics need to perform other work roles in addition to engaging with regional actors. These competing demands make the effective fulfilling of the regional engagement role challenging. Amidst these tensions, there is a need to understand whether and how academics engage with regional actors and the factors that influence such engagement. However, most prior studies on the topic have focused on the university and have largely ignored the individual academic. This limits understanding of the behavior of academics toward regional engagement and affects the design of effective policies. Accordingly, the overall goal of this thesis is to provide new insights on the role of individual and contextual factors in academics’ regional engagement. This thesis is a synthesis of four papers that together contribute to answering the overall research question. It uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate regional engagement from the perspective of academics and firms in different empirical contexts. These variety of methods enrich the analyses and provide deeper insights into the phenomenon. The findings generally demonstrate that both individual and firm-related factors remain important drivers of regional engagement, while university-related factors matter less. Specifically, individual motivations are important for the external engagement of academics. However, different motivations become more salient at specific career stages. Career motivation is more important at the early career stage, while pecuniary motivation matters most at the late career stage. Prosocial motivation remains more important at the midcareer stage. Also, the embeddedness of academics in both formal and informal social networks facilitates knowledge transfer and regional engagement. Moreover, academics’ attachment to place tends to increase their engagement activities with regional actors. However, there are some variations in the effect of place attachment and informal social networks on regional engagement between native and non-native academics. Place attachment is important for both groups, while informal social networks matter only for native academics. Furthermore, the findings show that regional firms’ knowledge strategies increase the likelihood of firms to collaborate with university partners. Lastly, the perception of organizational fairness has a limited or no effect on the external engagement of academics. The findings from the thesis contribute primarily to the academic engagement and the university-industry collaboration literatures with new insights on the factors driving academic engagement. The study extends place attachment and organizational justice theories to explain the underlying mechanisms of the external engagement behavior of academics. Besides the theoretical contribution, the findings also provide insights to guide practitioners and policymakers in designing policies to promote regional engagement. In particular, university managers should pay attention to career development policies. Because academics’ external engagement is chiefly influenced by career motivations, rewards and incentives for external engagement should be geared towards helping academics progress in their careers. Also, policies seeking to promote university-industry collaboration should target firms more than universities. Policymakers need to provide incentives that motivate firms to develop cooperative partnerships with universities.

The impact of social capital on the market access of coffee farmer house holds in Lam Dong province

The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of social capital and other factors that affect the market access of coffee farmer households. The study synthesized theories, as well as previous studies, to provide criteria for measuring social capital of coffee farmers' households: including formal social networks, informal social networks, and trust. Besides, the study uses descriptive statistics, logistic regression, two t-average tests to analyze and assess the difference in social capital between poor and non-poor households of 235 coffee farmer households in Lam Dong Province. The results show that Agricultural Extension Associations, Association Organizations (proxy for official social networks), Agents at all levels, Colleagues - Friends (informal social networks), age, years of living in the locality, and labor have an impact on the market access of coffee farmer households. Some recommendations to improve market access of coffee farmers in the province have been proposed, based on the previous theories as well as the results of the research model The research, however, is yet to clarify the impact of social capital on each market of finance, land, labor, extension services, material, and output markets.

Informal Social Networks as Intermediaries in Foreign Markets

ABSTRACTWe investigate how informal social networks can assist multinational firms in their internationalization strategy. We propose a refinement of the Uppsala internalization model (Johanson & Vahne, 2009) grounded in network theory, by developing an intermediate position between an ‘insider’ and an ‘outsider’ for conditions when the transformation of an outsider into an insider is limited by institutional constraints. An intermediary position represents one of the sides of ‘patron-client’ informal networks (Denoeux, 1993) whereby the other side is represented by the ‘insider’. We argue that this setup would help mitigate the Liability of Outsidership (Johanson & Vahne, 2009), a replacement of the Liability of Foreignness (Hymer, 1976; Zaheer, 1995), in the modern networked business world. We contextualize our proposition for the case of Iran, a large rising West-Asian economy with known institutional limitations, and suggest that the informal network of local merchants (bazaaries) could play an important intermediary role in Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) internationalization process. We review the history of bazaaries and make a series of propositions exemplifying possible ways informal networks could influence the internationalization process. In addition to re-affirming the importance of the MNE country of origin (emerging markets, and low psychic distance with Iran), we propose that an intermediary of the Iranian bazaaries will have a positive impact on performance and survival of the MNE's subsidiary in Iran, especially in the case of incongruence of MNE's leadership with Shi'a Islam. Additionally, we suggest that employing the Iranian diaspora may also improve subsidiary performance and survival.