The interest the Open Source Software Development Model has recently raised amongst social scientists has resulted in an accumulation of relevant research concerned with explaining and describing the motivations of Open Source developers and the advantages the Open Source methodology has over traditional proprietary software development models. However, existing literature has often examined th...

The problems encountered in the scientific, industrial and engineering fields entail sophisticated processes across widely distributed communities. The Grid emerged as a platform that has a goal enabling coordinated resources sharing and problem resolving in dynamic multi-institutional Virtual Organizations (VO). Though the multi-institutional aspect is considered in the grid definition, there ...

The central assumption in the literature on collaborative networks and policy networks is that political outcomes are affected by a variety of state and nonstate actors. Some of these actors are more powerful than others and can therefore have a considerable effect on decision making. In this article, we seek to provide a structural and institutional explanation for these power differentials in...

On May 3, 2011, under authority of Clean Air Act (CAA) sections 111 and 112, the EPA proposed both national emission standards for hazardous air pollutants (NESHAP) from coaland oil-fired electric utility steam generating units (EGUs) and standards of performance for fossil-fuelfired electric utility, industrialcommercial-institutional, and small industrial-commercial-institutional steam genera...

This paper examines the symbolic use of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in an Egyptian state-owned company (AQF Co.) that is partially privatised by drawing on new institutional sociology and its extensions. It explains how the ceremonial use of IFRS is shaped by the interplay between institutionalised accounting practices, conflicting institutions, power relations and the us...

Using comparative case studies, this paper shows how institutional contexts influence the process of diffusion of a complex technology by determining the pattern of material resources and authority available to actors in their struggles to control the technology, and by constituting the discursive resources that may be mobilized in their struggles to shape its meaning in preferred ways. The pap...

A growing body of discourse-analytic studies demonstrates that within the legal system, spoken language that undergoes entextualization is transformed in a variety of sociopolitically consequential ways. Through the analysis of a legal case involving the institutional entextualization of incriminating language—an FBI summary log of wiretapped telephone calls between suspected drug dealers—the a...

This article is part of a series of papers examining ethical issues in cluster randomized trials (CRTs) in health research. In the introductory paper in this series, we set out six areas of inquiry that must be addressed if the CRT is to be set on a firm ethical foundation. This paper addresses the sixth of the questions posed, namely, what is the role and authority of gatekeepers in CRTs in he...

The pursuit of global democratic governance cannot be confined to global institutions; national state institutions and nation-based citizens need to be part of this project. In this lecture, I want to map a variety of mechanisms and dynamics that can be seen as part of an architecture for democratic participation by state institutions and citizens in global governance. Crucial to my analysis is...