Social mechanisms are essential processes within a social system (Bunge, 2004) that emerge as responses to the various challenges actors face in their daily practices (Gross, 2009). The significance of social mechanisms in relation to social reproduction and change (Lazega, Snijders & Wittek, 2022) can be more effectively examined at the meso level (Lazega, 2022; Fine, 2006).

This paper adopts an agent-based approach to understand the social mechanisms that account for the price formation of fish catches in an artisanal fishing cove in Chile. Based on previous ethnographic research (Pulgar, Gómez & Molina, 2024), we identify two interconnected domains of social practice: the ecological landscape (the sea) and the harbor fish market.

In the ecological domain, fishers employ three strategies to gather information about navigation conditions and the localization of their catches: returning to the location where they fished the previous day, following trusted fishers, or exploring new areas. These strategies have resulted in the formation of close-knit cliques among fishers at sea, centered around productive catches. However, resource decline may strain these connections and encourage more individualistic strategies.

The market domain operates on a concatenation principle: the first fisher to arrive establishes the price, known as the “reference price.” Later, fishers observe this price and add it to their margins and costs to determine their own prices, creating a price chain in which every price formation influences the next one. This mechanism, shaped by the sequence of arrivals and the observation of established prices, illustrates how economic information disseminates and mediates the interactions between buyers and sellers.

The combination of two social mechanisms –the actual fishing strategy and the price chain in the market—account for the social production of new value, marketed fish catches in this case.

Educational technology companies (Edtech) develop digital educational resources such as educational video games, learning platforms, and interactive textbooks for teachers and students. This study, conducted among Edtech entrepreneurs operating in primary education, explores the conditions underpinning the emergence of an Edtech market shaped by public policy.

Public support for the French Edtech sector is closely tied to the state's prerogative in education, acting as an intermediary between Edtech firms (supply) and the teaching community (demand). Unlike traditional market mechanisms, teachers cannot directly purchase digital educational resources; acquisitions are mediated by local authorities. This structural constraint has led the French Edtech sector to form a dense network of collaborations, partnerships, consortia, and subcontracting arrangements. After addressing network boundary definition, this presentation explores relational interdependence and its effects on market structuring.

To establish a comprehensive interorganizational network (Eloire et al., 2011), the study expanded its scope beyond Edtech firms to include actors from professional associations, incubators, foundations, and investment funds. This qualitative empirical approach—combining netnography, interviews, and observations at trade fairs and summer schools—has identified 78 individuals involved in primary-level digital resource development or the broader Edtech ecosystem. The findings underscore how information exchange (technical skills, funding opportunities, commercial prospects) and informal relationships among competitors mitigate market uncertainty and contribute to structuring the sector. In this competitive landscape, collaboration among competitors depends on their social capital (Lazega, 2008).

Additionally, interviews (16) with Edtech entrepreneurs (14) and officials from the Ministry of National Education's Digital Directorate (2) provide insights into entrepreneurial trajectories, sectoral dynamics, network segmentations based on social capital, and public-private collaboration.

Bibliography

Aspers, Patrik, Asaf Darr. « Le rôle des salons professionnels dans la création de marchés et d’industries : » Terrains & travaux, vol. N° 44, no 1, juillet 2024, p. 147 74.

Eloire, Fabien., et al. « Application de l'analyse des réseaux complets à l'échelle interorganisationnelle : Apports et limites ». Terrains & travaux, 2011/2 n° 19, 2011. p.77-98.

Lazega, Emmanuel. « Théorie de la coopération entre concurrents : interdépendances, discipline sociale et processus sociaux », Le Libellio d’Aegis, volume 4, n° 3, hiver 2008-2009, pp. 1-5.

This presentation examines the collective mechanisms that sustain the functioning and expansion of multi-level marketing (MLM) networks. Adopted by companies such as Tupperware, Vorwerk, and Travorium, this business model relies on the mobilization of an independent sales force to distribute products and services. Its specificity lies in its recruitment-based development structure, which gives it both a reticular and hierarchical organization, where income levels and status depend on the breadth and depth of a member’s downline. By combining interviews, digital and in-person ethnography, and social network analysis, this study highlights the relational work performed by individuals who join such structures. It reveals the ambivalence of these relational infrastructures, where members are simultaneously micro-entrepreneurs – often engaging in MLM alongside another professional activity – while being subjected to a rigid hierarchy that guides, or even prescribes, their practices. Particular attention is given to the role of members with significant social and relational capital (those positioned at the upper levels of the hierarchy and compensation structure) and their ability to influence both individual and collective dynamics. The key issue is to understand how these actors, by establishing interdependent relationships and leveraging collective learning mechanisms (such as the transmission of sales and recruitment techniques) and social control (through sponsor and peer monitoring), organize the work of lower-ranking members to extract both economic and symbolic gains.

The current literature on comparisons of networks is often based on a broad network science perspective, with the assumption that general local mechanisms drive, on their own, the emergence of global patterns. In this presentation, we extend a neo-structural approach to social mechanisms by comparing networks. We use stochastic blockmodels (SBMs) to find variations in similar social processes of collective agency across different organizational contexts. SBMs help us understand and compare how actors manage cooperation dilemmas in these contexts. As an empirical illustration of our approach, we focus on processes of collective learning as measured by advice networks in three different organizational settings, i.e. among lawyers, among priests, and among scientists. Analyses reveal differences in role systems and strategic uses of acceptable homophily across these settings, skilfully mitigating the divisive effects of rigid status differences in efforts to construct common bodies of knowledge.

Collective action refers to the coordinated efforts of individuals toward a shared objective. Understanding the social determinants of large-scale collective action is crucial for addressing pressing societal challenges, such as pandemics. However, the structural conditions that foster large-scale collective action remain insufficiently understood.

This study examines whether social capital facilitates large-scale cooperation by leveraging the onset of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions in the United States as a natural experiment. I investigate how three dimensions of social capital within counties shape the community’s collective response to these interventions: (i) inter-class friendship ties between individuals from different income levels, (ii) network interconnectedness—the clustering of local social networks, and (iii) civic engagement—the prevalence of voluntary associations and civic organizations.

Employing a difference-in-differences design and causal forests to study effect heterogeneity, I analyze fine-grained geolocation and mobility data and social media friendship networks in 2020-2021. My findings indicate that ZIP code areas (N = 23,028) with a higher prevalence of inter-class friendship ties exhibited greater compliance with shelter-in-place directives, as measured by reductions in geographic mobility. The other two forms of social capital have no effects on collective action.

This suggests that economic diversity in social networks, rather than network interconnectedness or civic engagement, enhances cooperation at scale in an emergency. These results underscore the potential of inter-class social integration for facilitating collective action—an insight of increasing relevance as societies face challenges that require urgent and widespread cooperation, especially where economic inequality has been rising.

Networks serve as important enabling conditions for individual actors to pursue and implement changes to organizational models that diverge from existing institutions (i.e. institutional entrepreneurship). While much work on institutional entrepreneurship has considered the organizational-level of analysis, lesser attention has been paid to the role of individual actors’ embeddedness in local geographic communities as a facilitator of divergent institutional change. I examine this domain by drawing upon Obstfeld et al.’s (2020) network assembly perspective of entrepreneurial action. I leverage archival documents (e.g., correspondence, newspapers, etc.), oral histories, and secondary sources to examine a historical case of a public downtown college in the Southern United States. Largely catering to a non-traditional working adult population, institutional entrepreneurship efforts were challenged by strong political and institutional resistance to the divergent organizational form. Nonetheless, these change efforts succeeded, ultimately elevating the college’s designated status from a junior to senior institution. I argue the enterprising spirit and personal popularity of the college’s director, and later president, played a critical role in ensuring internal and community-level network resources could be mobilized, ultimately securing political and institutional legitimacy for the college. This work contributes to the literature by using a process approach to examine Obstfeld et al.’s (2020) model within the context of institutional entrepreneurship (as opposed to new ventures/start-ups). At the same time, this study considers the crucial role networks embedded within local geographic communities played in institutional change efforts, while considering how individual characteristics (e.g., personal popularity) contributed to successful network mobilization efforts.

Scientific collaboration between academia and industry is now commonplace, particularly in technical fields of research [8,6,9] such as AI [4,1]. While many sociological, economical and research policy studies highlight the motivation, profile, and impact of scientists and institutions involved in such research [8], only a few focus on the various forms of cooperation between academics and industrials.

Among the latter, we can cite the notable work by Shinn and Lamy [10], who proposed a categorization of collaboration regimes. The authors contrast the “Academic” ethos, characterized by punctual, limited, and strategic involvement, with “Pioneers” who develop long-lasting and synergetic working relationships.

However, the field of AI challenges this partition. Authors such as Ahmed et al. [1] or Jurowetzki et al. [5] show that industrials dominate the field, with scientific and technical productions centered around a few companies, and Garousi [3] highlights the difficulties of collaboration in software development.

These facts may contribute to reinforce boundaries between academia and industry.

Through an in-depth analysis of collaborative project within GitHub repositories, our study questions the relevance of the aforementioned categories in the production AI technoscientific objects and provides new insight in the way academic and industrial actors organize their collaboration.

For our initial investigations, we focus on two deep learning repositories authored by both academics and industrials: Scikit-Learn [7] and Apache-MXNet [2].

To conduct our research, we have collected extensive information on users and commit’s and issue’s history. In addition, we have retrieved institutions using the users’ profiles and a manual retrieval for the most active committers. We then have classified users as belonging to either academia, industry or a mixture of institution types. Finally, based on the commits, we have constructed time-aggregated co-modification networks for the repositories, which constitute proxies for collaboration networks.

Our analysis reveals two distinct collaboration regimes among programmers involved in the two projects.

First, the development of Scikit-Learn is almost equally shared between academicians (39%) and industrials (43%). This is shown by the inter-commit time, which follows very similar trends between the two groups, as well as the response time in issues’ discussions. Moreover, the collaboration network of the repository exhibits a significantly high probability of collaborations between users’ types. These observations testify to an equal division of technical labor in the repository.

This mixed regime contrasts with that of MXNet, which is mostly invested by industrials (70% with 27% coming from Amazon). Initially developed with an uneven distribution of collaborations since 2015, the repository experienced the withdrawal of academic contributors in 2020, resulting in full industrial management that have reinforced this asymmetry.

Overall, Scikit-Learn shows a strong academic-industrial synergy, with users embracing the “Pionners” ethos, whereas MXNet seems more fragmented in the labor distribution over the course of its development.

Although this initial research shows significant differences in collaboration regimes, further research is needed, focusing on issue discussion threads and committer diversity across files/modules. Finally, we plan to extend our investigation to other repositories to get a broader view of possible collaboration regimes.

The paper deals with the problem of interaction between conflicting orders of worth in organizations. When multiple orders of worth interface in the same setting, this state of organizational dissonance leads to situations of friction-based conflict. Friction constitutes a double-edged sword for organizations, as status competition can be. If well channelled, it can foster reflexivity and innovation enhancing corporate social capital; if mishandled, it can cause structural distress, jeopardizing corporate social capital. This research has the dual aim of exploring the relational emergence of dissonance and the collective mechanisms that mediate its impact on organizations. To this end, the paper presents an explorative case study of a non-profit organization. Using a qualitative research strategy, the interacting orders of worth are reconstructed visualizing, in a two-modes network, their links to the structural positions of their bearers while analysing the dynamics of friction within the hieratic style of the organization under investigation. Drawing on Harrison White, we conceive ties as bearing prisms of meaning as identities’ efforts at control entail their footing in specific angles of perception. Thus, the partition of organizations’ relational infrastructure in specialized substructures is linked to the emergence of differentiated orders of worth in the identities coexisting in different relational positions. Moreover, the quality of the orders of worth is reconnected to higher-level social formations addressing the organization’s embeddedness within its operational environment. Finally, the relational infrastructure is hypothesised to have a mediating role for the outcomes of dissonance through the mechanisms activated by strategic interdependence between specialised compartments.

Transitivity as a structural property of social networks reflects cohesion and can relate to the formation of social capital. In the context of migrant organizational networks, transitivity provides insight into collaborative structures, advocacy potential, and the distribution of resources. This paper explores transitivity within migrant organizational networks across five European cities -Zurich, Budapest, Barcelona, Madrid, and Athens- using binary and weighted networks to investigate cohesion and tie strength. Findings show variation among cities in terms of global cohesion, with both Athens' and Madrid's networks having higher binary transitivity, thus denoting higher levels of cohesion. In contrast, the networks in Zurich and Budapest are characterized by lower binary transitivity, suggesting more fragmented, less cohesive networks that possibly do not develop strong integrating structures. The measurement of weighted transitivity focuses on strong ties, as observed in Budapest, where fewer triads exist, nevertheless potentially fostering social capital. The results relate to the role of network structures in shaping migrant organizations’ capacity for information exchange, resource mobilization, collective and political action, and civic engagement. Thus while a high level of transitivity reflects higher levels of cohesion, the differences between binary and weighted measures suggest that it might be the strength of the ties that matters for the effectiveness of the networks. This comparative study contributes to discussions about connectivity, bonding and bridging ties, and their role in political participation. It also underlines the need for future research into how network cohesion influences the long-term sustainability and advocacy strategies of migrant voluntary organizations.

La question de la sécurité alimentaire liée au commerce des ressources halieutiques en Côte d’Ivoire demeure une problématique d’actualité. Dans le pays, la principale source de protéine d’origine animale consommée par les populations est le poisson. Dans la Sous-préfecture de Béoumi, la disponibilité de cette protéine animale est liée à la présence de cours d’eau que sont le Bandaman blanc et le kan. Le dynamisme des activités de pêche dans cette circonscription administrative suggère de s’intéresser à la contribution du commerce des ressources halieutiques à la sécurité alimentaire des populations riveraines. Cette étude vise à expliquer la contribution du commerce des ressources halieutiques à la sécurité alimentaire dans la Sous-préfecture de Béoumi. Pour y parvenir, la méthodologie déployée s’est appuyée sur l’exploitation des données issues de l’observation, la recherche documentaire, des entretiens avec les populations et les acteurs du commerce des ressources halieutiques. Il ressort de cette étude que le commerce des ressources halieutiques dans la Sous-préfecture de Béoumi contribue faiblement à la sécurité alimentaire des populations. Aussi, dans le but de réaliser un maximum de profit, les poissons sont vendus hors de ladite circonscription administrative et coûtent excessivement chers au regard des revenus faibles des populations.