RECONSTRUCTING MESOLITHIC SOCIAL NETWORKS ON THE IBERIAN PENINSULA USING ORNAMENTS

Archaeologists have been reconstructing interactions among hunter-gatherer populations for a long time. These exchanges are reflected in the movements of raw materials and symbolic objects which are found far from their original sources. A social network, i.e., the structure constituted by these interactions, is a well-established concept in archaeology that is used to estimate the connectivity of hunter-gatherer populations. The heuristic potential of formal network analysis, however, has been scarcely exploited in prehistoric hunter-gatherer archaeology. In this work, we use Social Network Analysis to analyse the interactions among hunter-gatherers on the Iberian Peninsula in the Early and Late Mesolithic (10.200 to 7600 cal BP). Ornaments are accepted markers of non-utilitarian mobility and exchange. We thus used ornaments as proxies for social interaction and constructed one network for each phase of the Iberian Mesolithic. We applied three levels of analysis: first, we characterised the overall structure of the networks. Second, we performed node-level analysis to uncover the most relevant nodes in each network. Finally, we conducted an exploratory analysis of the networks’ spatial characteristics. No significant differences were found between the overall network topology of the Early and Late Mesolithic. This suggests that the interaction patterns among human groups did not change significantly on the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, the spatial analysis showed that most interactions between human groups took place over distances under 300 km, but that specific ornament types such as C. rustica and Trivia sp. were distributed over more extensive distances. To summarise, our findings suggest that Iberian Mesolithic social networks were maintained through a period of environmental, demographic, and cultural transformation. In addition, the interactions took place at different scales of social integration.

Research on Mechanism Materials of Innovation Performance of Makerspaces

The researches of existing makerspaces mainly focus on external factors (policies, resources, etc.) or internal subjects (operating subjects, makers, etc.), but pay little attention to the sustainability and self-running ability of makerspaces themself. In view of this, through theoretical research, this paper combs four operational mechanisms of makerspaces, including platform service, resource aggregation, network connection and endogenous cultural guarantee, and thesemechanisms are regarded as the key materials for the innovation output of makerspaces.By empirical analysis to verify the impact of each operational mechanism on the innovation performance, we explore feasible designs of mechanism that is conducive to the sustainable innovation of makerspaces. The result shows that autonomy of service selection, formal network connection and fault-tolerant culture have significant positive effects on the innovation performance of makerspaces, but it will change with the development stage of makerspaces.

Accurate by Being Noisy: A Formal Network Model of Implicit Measures of Attitudes

In this article, we model implicit attitude measures using our network theory of attitudes. The model rests on the assumption that implicit measures limit attitudinal entropy reduction, because implicit measures represent a measurement outcome that is the result of evaluating the attitude object in a quick and effortless manner. Implicit measures therefore assess attitudes in high entropy states (i.e., inconsistent and unstable states). In a simulation, we illustrate the implications of our network theory for implicit measures. The results of this simulation show a paradoxical result: Implicit measures can provide a more accurate assessment of conflicting evaluative reactions to an attitude object (e.g., evaluative reactions not in line with the dominant evaluative reactions) than explicit measures, because they assess these properties in a noisier and less reliable manner. We conclude that our network theory of attitudes increases the connection between substantive theorizing on attitudes and psychometric properties of implicit measures.

The Sustainability Dimensions: A Territorialized Approach to Sustainable Development

The paper proposes the territory as the fourth dimension of sustainable development. Research starting from three dimensions of sustainable development - economic, social, environmental - highlights the difference between the spatial approach and the territorial approach in sustainable development practices. The paper shows that to include in the development approach the morphological (hilly, mountain, plain), functional (metropolitan or non-metropolitan city, cross border region), traditional (port city, financial city, industrial city), government (National strategy, special laws, etc.), governance (formal and not formal network, institutional/ noninstitutional body) aspects, leads to different development results than not including them. This evidence shows to distinguish development practices from sustainable development practices as emerged from recent Territorial Impact Assessment studies in which policies, through the territorialization of the results, guide planning actions: (local) planning actions selected on (general) policy objectives create the conditions for adaptation (about planning) and mitigation (about policies) of human actions on the environment, thus being able to speak of sustainable development.

Making Markets

This chapter examines the process of market-building on the western frontier, focusing in particular on the process through which the expansion of the railroad network in the late 19th century linked towns to the grain buyers who owned and operated the elevators used to load grain on to railcars. It begins by describing western market-building as part of a larger transcontinental project designed to link the agrarian periphery to existing urban centers, leading to the creation of a vast market network. Rail lines played a unique role in this context, serving as a venue for the creation of distinct market communities defined by the relationship between towns and elevator owners. Using formal network analysis, it is shown that market communities differed in terms of not only in terms of their size and geographic structure, but in the centrality of the elevator owners with which the lines partnered.

Using policy network analysis to understand ideological convergence and change in educational subsystems

In recent years, education policy scholars have begun to utilize social network concepts and methods to describe contemporary policy changes across P-16 levels. While many insights have emerged from this growing literature base, we argue that a more formal network approach rooted in policy network analysis (PNA) is needed to fulfill its conceptual and analytical ambitions. Policy network analysis integrates concepts from social network analysis with theoretical assumptions developed in the field of political science. Toward this end, we first argue that a more rigorous treatment of policy beliefs is needed to analyze the impact of ideas on the policy agenda. Existing literature on the ideological dimensions of market-based reform movements tends to define them largely within the bounds of neo-liberalism and thus far has failed to systematically explain how policy beliefs emerge and converge in this context. Second, we contend that previous work has generally lacked theoretical grounding in formal policy network analysis (PNA). Although there are clear links between the concepts and findings in traditional PNA literature and educational research – particularly the use of networked governance as a concept for understanding the interconnectedness of educational reform networks – a more diligent application of PNA theory and methods would enable educational policy scholars to gain deeper insights into the explanatory processes of policy change. We pay particular attention to the usefulness of these approaches for examining two-mode network data and for modeling ideological policy change.

Community-Based Tourism in Ecuador: Community Ventures of the Provincial and Cantonal Networks

The aim of this work is to identify community the initiatives anchored to community-based tourism (CBT) in Ecuador with the aim of providing an overview of the current reality of community tourism in the country, in addition to publicizing the product lines under development within community initiatives. The methodology used is a descriptive analysis based on the review of secondary sources, which reflect the reality of the different tourism initiatives related to the Plurinational Federation of Community Tourism of Ecuador (FEPTCE) at the level of continental Ecuador. FEPTCE groups indigenous, Afro–Ecuadorian, Montubian and mestizo communities, who depend on their territory and have identified tourism as a mechanism to continue living with dignity within these territories, due to the option of economic diversification that is generated. Within the communities that belong to the FEPTCE, living with dignity implies achieving a good quality of life, which is not based on satisfying a series of basic needs, but implies going further, achieving the idea of “Good Living”, that is to say, reaching an appreciation of well-being, based on the conception of the full set of what culture is, in order to generate comprehensive sustainability of its spaces. Among the main results, the distribution and coverage that the FEPTCE has within continental Ecuador regarding community tourism is shown and analyzed. As a formal network of community-based tourism, it is made up of five networks at the regional level and nine at the provincial or cantonal level, which are analyzed in this study. The consolidation of the initiatives launched has been difficult with only 83 of the initial 121 being active and only 18 registered as community tourist centers. This case study shows that in Ecuador the network approach as the first step in the development of the CBT worked. Therefore, the development of the CBT must be approached from a network approach in which indigenous peoples (indigenous, mestizo, Afro-descendant, etc.) participate, administrations, the private sector, civil society, NGOs and tourist destinations, to which they must to join academic institutions by contributing solid data obtained through research that helps tourism development.

Challenges and Solutions for Non-Timber Forest Product Businesses in Finland–An Application of the SODA Analysis

This study aims to present a holistic image of the strategic development needs and potential solutions within the Finnish non-timber forest product (NTFP) business sector and demonstrate a new hybrid methodology for collaborative strategy formulation. The perceived challenges and solutions were collected with the 635 group-working method in a nationwide series of NTFP actor workshops. The analysis applied the Strategic Option Development and Analysis (SODA) approach and the formal network analysis. Business actors emphasised two complex and interrelated aims of development at the core of the business activity: (1) to improve the profitability of the NTFP business and (2) to facilitate the growth of the sector. The present bottleneck is perceived in the raw material acquisition and productising, and many wider development themes, such as business logic and sustainability, received little attention.