Securing the Environmental Water Requirements of Seasonally Ponding Wetlands: Partnering Science and Management Through Benefit Sharing

Although environmental flow regime assessments are becoming increasingly holistic, they rarely provoke water managers to enact the adaptive water reallocation mechanisms required to secure environmental water for wetlands. The conditions that cause science-based environmental flow assessments to succeed or fail in informing the management of environmental water requirements remain unclear. To begin to resolve these conditions, we used process tracing to deconstruct the sequence of activities required to manage environmental water in four case studies of seasonally ponding wetlands in Mediterranean and Mesoamerican watersheds. We hypothesized that, when the flexibility and equitability of the socioeconomic system do not match the complexity of the biophysical system, this leads to a failure of managers to integrate scientific guidance in their allocation of environmental water. Diagnostic evidence gathered indicates that science-management partnerships are essential to align institutional flexibility and socioeconomic equitability with the system’s ecohydrological complexity, and thus move from determination to reallocation of environmental water. These results confirm that institutions e.g., river basin organizations need to be supplemented by motivated actors with experience and skill to negotiate allocation and adaptive management of environmental water. These institutional-actor synergies are likely to be especially important in water scarce regions when the need to accommodate extreme hydrological conditions is not met by national governance capacity. We conclude by focusing on benefit sharing as a means to better describe the conditions for successful science-based environmental flow assessments that realize productive efficiency in environmental water allocation i.e., recognition of multiple values for both people and ecosystems.

A Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in Information Technology Creation

<p>The purpose of this study was to examine how entrepreneurs act to bring an Information Technology-based innovation into being. Successful realisation of such innovations requires collective effort, involving resources and actors both internal and external to the entrepreneur‘s own venture (Van de Ven, 1993a, 2005; Lavie, 2006). The study is qualitative in nature and uses the Glaserian variant of the grounded theory method to collect and analyse data obtained from interviewing entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and collective agents involved in creating IT innovation. Through undertaking open, selective, and theoretical coding and the process of constant comparative analysis, the research produces a substantive theory for explaining: A Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation. The Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation accounts for the actions of both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who are jointly called ―preneurs‖ within this study, and their interaction with collective agents to create IT innovation. The process of preneurial agency, the actions the preneur undertakes to create the innovative idea and make it a tangible reality, is shown as a triality involving the combined agency of the preneur and collective agents interacting within social structures established by the preneur. To support this abstracted view of entrepreneurship, the study develops and defines a family of terms to describe the process of preneurship, the preneur, preneurial agency, and the preneurial ba within which the actors interact to create IT-based innovation. The value of the research lies in its view of the preneur‘s process of transition from entrepreneur to intrapreneur and to institutional actor; and how the actions of both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur to create IT innovation can be shown in an abstracted process of preneurial agency. It is expected that through the application of a specific set of actions, presented in The Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation as six theoretical propositions, practitioners will be better able to inform their practice, and enhance the self management of their preneurial agency and interaction with collective agents.</p>

A Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in Information Technology Creation

<p>The purpose of this study was to examine how entrepreneurs act to bring an Information Technology-based innovation into being. Successful realisation of such innovations requires collective effort, involving resources and actors both internal and external to the entrepreneur‘s own venture (Van de Ven, 1993a, 2005; Lavie, 2006). The study is qualitative in nature and uses the Glaserian variant of the grounded theory method to collect and analyse data obtained from interviewing entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and collective agents involved in creating IT innovation. Through undertaking open, selective, and theoretical coding and the process of constant comparative analysis, the research produces a substantive theory for explaining: A Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation. The Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation accounts for the actions of both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who are jointly called ―preneurs‖ within this study, and their interaction with collective agents to create IT innovation. The process of preneurial agency, the actions the preneur undertakes to create the innovative idea and make it a tangible reality, is shown as a triality involving the combined agency of the preneur and collective agents interacting within social structures established by the preneur. To support this abstracted view of entrepreneurship, the study develops and defines a family of terms to describe the process of preneurship, the preneur, preneurial agency, and the preneurial ba within which the actors interact to create IT-based innovation. The value of the research lies in its view of the preneur‘s process of transition from entrepreneur to intrapreneur and to institutional actor; and how the actions of both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur to create IT innovation can be shown in an abstracted process of preneurial agency. It is expected that through the application of a specific set of actions, presented in The Grounded Theory of Preneurial Agency in IT Creation as six theoretical propositions, practitioners will be better able to inform their practice, and enhance the self management of their preneurial agency and interaction with collective agents.</p>

Family Responsibilities and Silence of Rural Migrant Workers in China: The Role of Town-Fellow Organizations

Employee voice in China remains an under-researched topic from an industrial relations perspective. We investigated the relationship between family dependents (children and elderly) and migrant worker silence, with town-fellow organizations as a moderator, based on the data of the 2014 Guangdong Migrant Workers Survey. The findings reveal that migrant workers with dependent children are more likely to keep silent when their labour rights and interests are violated at the workplace, while family responsibilities for dependent elderly family members do not have significant impacts on migrant workers’ silence. In addition, town-fellow organizations weaken the association between family responsibilities for elderly dependents and silence. Our study contributes to the existing literature on employee voice and provides evidence on the role of town-fellow organizations in China as an informal, emerging institutional actor that regulates labour relations through their involvement in dispute resolution.

Tool for Surveillance or Spotlight on Inequality? Big Data and the Law

The rise of big data and machine learning is a polarizing force among those studying inequality and the law. Big data and tools like predictive modeling may amplify inequalities in the law, subjecting vulnerable individuals to enhanced surveillance. But these data and tools may also serve an opposite function, shining a spotlight on inequality and subjecting powerful institutions to enhanced oversight. We begin with a typology of the role of big data in inequality and the law. The typology asks questions—Which type of individual or institutional actor holds the data? What problem is the actor trying to use the data to solve?—that help situate the use of big data within existing scholarship on law and inequality. We then highlight the dual uses of big data and computational methods—data for surveillance and data as a spotlight—in three areas of law: rental housing, child welfare, and opioid prescribing. Our review highlights asymmetries where the lack of data infrastructure to measure basic facts about inequality within the law has impeded the spotlight function.

What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union

Research on issue attention in the European Union has focused on the prominence of EU integration in domestic politics and media and, at EU level, on the salience of individual issues and legislative files, often in relation to lobbying. Existing EU-level measures of issue saliency, though, are limited in scope and periodicity and tend to reflect the policy priorities of a single institutional actor rather than that of the broader EU elite sphere. We present an alternative measure of issue attention leveraging the quasi-institutional nature of the Agence Europe daily bulletin which provides comprehensive but independent news coverage of EU affairs. We use text-mining techniques, including dynamic topic modelling, in combination with manual classification to map issue prevalence between 1979 and 2018. In addition to reporting validation results, we illustrate how our measure relates to other indicators of EU agenda formation and explain how researchers can make use of our new dataset.

The National Institute for Scientific Research (INIC): Pathway and Influence in Portuguese Science Policy (1976-1992)

My Ph.D research project aims at writing the history of the Portuguese National Institute for Scientific Research (Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, INIC) (1976-92). Although INIC is an important institutional actor in the development of the Portuguese scientific system, it has been mostly absent from the history of the Portuguese institutions of science policy. INIC was founded after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 in a context in which institutional coordination of scientific research had already become a priority. The political instability of the post-revolutionary period, together with the expansion of the scientific system, resulted in institutional tensions and conflicts involving the scientific community, the higher education community, and other institutions tangent to INIC, that led to its extinction in 1992. Based on INIC’s archive and complemented by secondary sources and interviews, this project proposes to bring this institution into the historical narrative of the Portuguese institutions of science policy.

Screen production on the ‘biggest set in the world’: Northern Ireland Screen and the case of Game of Thrones

The publicly funded screen development agency, Northern Ireland Screen, has been the key institutional actor in the exponential growth of the screen industries in Northern Ireland. The most prominent production to be based in Northern Ireland has been Home Box Office’s Game of Thrones, which had much of its eight seasons filmed in the region. Significant amounts of public finance have been offered to the screen industries, with direct funding provided to augment United Kingdom-wide tax breaks. However, there has been a lack of critical analysis of the recipients of this finance, on the precarious nature of many of the jobs that have been created, or on the stated benefits to the economy. This article subjects the role of Northern Ireland Screen to policy analysis to attempt to fill this scholarly gap. Setting the subject into the context of public support for film and television across the United Kingdom, it is argued that the economic argument for providing direct financial support to the screen industries needs to be viewed in the context of the overall impact on society.

Conclusion

This chapter sums up the meaning, forms, roles and definitions of care is at the crux of proposing multidirectional care as a model of transnational care. The different actors contributing care work in the transnational family urge us to decenter the lone migrant family member as the sole provider; rather it values the care work that many people involved in transnational family arrangements contribute to sustaining familial relationships while separated and shifting gender ideologies. It urges us to think about families with an expanded view, to include biological kin and fictive kin, both at home and abroad, as care workers. Although the multidirectional care model illuminates elaborate exchanges of care work, the conclusion critically examines the invisible, institutional actor--the Philippine labor brokerage state--reified in the discussions of reorganized care work in the Filipino transnational family. Finally, the chapter ends with a call to action for the support of migrant workers globally.