Twelve years ago, in their influential article, James Mahoney and Richard Snyder (1999) reviewed contemporary research on regime change. They focused on problems of methodology and methods preference, and on the ‘chicken-egg’ controversy between the proponents of voluntarism on one side (Di Palma 1990; Przeworski 1991) and structuralism on the other (Luebbert 1991; Rueschmeyer et al. 1992) and ...

Assuming symmetry between human and nonhuman actors is a tenet of actor-network theory (ANT), i.e., an actor, anyone or anything that modifies a state of affairs. This symmetric perspective entails granting agency attributes to both human and nonhuman actors, an approach that has been often criticised. By means of a combination of research observation and participation, the use of electronic ma...

We present a semantic framework for actor systems based on rewriting logic. This framework accounts for fairness and provides a variety of semantics for actor system components that have good composability properties.

the main purpose of this research is the presentation of some prerequisites of educational theorizing with regard to ontologic components of complexity paradigm. for this purpose, by using the philosophical methods, after making mention of how ontologic components of simplicity paradigm (naive realism, linear causation, determinism) influence contemporary educational theories, ontologic compone...

Present information systems studies focus on technology from developed countries. Little is known about the standardization of indigenous technology in the developing world. Drawing upon actornetwork theory, this paper investigates China’s experience of developing and deploying wireless local-area network (WLAN) standards. We demonstrate that counter-network is a useful concept to analyze the m...

Actor–actor communication is an important part of the functioning of wireless sensor–actor networks and enables the actor nodes to take coordinated action on a given event. Owing to various reasons such as actor mobility and low actor density, the actor network tends to get partitioned. The authors propose to use the underlying sensor nodes, which are more densely deployed, to heal these partit...