The European Community as a social configuration, with its complex division of competencies and action capacities between EC institutions and national governments, is still difficult to conceptualize. In this context the authors propose the concept of corporate actor networks in order to...

Visualization is an important aspect of both exploration and communication of categorical as well as relational data. Graphical displays of policy networks are particularly attractive, since they enable authors to display in a compact way the relevant actors in a network, how they are related to...

This book suggests that the scope and breadth of regulatory reforms since the mid-1980s and particularly during the 1990s, are so striking that they necessitate a reappraisal of current approaches to the study of the politics of regulation. The authors call for the adoption of different and...

Die Studie bereichert die Politikanalyse mit neuen institutionellen und evolutionstheoretischen Ansätzen. In einer Untersuchung langfristiger organisationsstruktureller Entwicklungspfade im Telekommunikationssektor werden Konvergenzprozesse zu institutionellen Gleichgewichten herausgearbeitet....

Information exchange in policy networks is usually attributed to preference similarity, influence reputation, social trust and institutional actor roles. We suggest that political opportunity structures and transaction costs play another crucial role and estimate a rich statistical network model...

For more than a decade the Internet was confronted with ignorance and resistance in many European countries. National and European technology policies were unfavorable to not invented here technologies and committed to open networks of a different kind. The incumbent network operators in...

Different sub-disciplines of the social sciences analyse the evolution and diffusion of technical innovations from an institutional perspective. Important contributions are provided by socio-economic studies of national systems of innovation, by politico-economic research on the varieties of...

Technical standards in telecommunications – the central focus of this paper - were traditionally developed by official government accredited or intergovernmental organizations. In the last two decades, however, private forums and consortia of standardization have evolved which initiated a...