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Purpose: New ventures often encounter legitimation challenges due to their liability of newness and foreignness. This particularly applies to the legitimacy beyond the local entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). The present study examines how new ventures' local legitimacy influences legitimacy diffusion beyond the local EEs. It considers both the direct relationship between new venture local legitimacy and its diffusion beyond the EE and the moderating effects of legitimacy brokerage and network activities on this relationship. Design/methodology/approach: A hierarchical multiple linear regression is employed to test a series of hypotheses using the data of 228 Finnish firms which was collected with an online survey. Findings: Firms that garner active local legitimacy have a greater chance to diffuse that legitimacy beyond an existing ecosystem. Results also reveal that network activities and legitimacy brokerage enhance (positively moderate) the association between (passive and active) local legitimacy and its diffusion. Originality/value: The present study contributes to and extends the literature at the intersection of new venture legitimacy and legitimacy diffusion beyond the existing EE – an aspect which has not been sufficiently studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reconstruct the networks of Babylonian urban dwellers during the reign of Darius I (522–486 BCE) based on 803 tablets from 10 private archives in Babylon. The main aim is to examine the structure and connectivity of the network that connected different urban families and groups of individuals outside the families. I focus on the positions individuals occupied within the network that yielded them the power to connect smaller parts of the network. The first approach used to identify and analyze these positions is the betweenness centrality measure. The second approach is the analytic concept of brokerage, the role of mediating between two or more individuals or communities that would otherwise have no connection to each other. I identify differences in the ways that the intermediate position of brokers affected the formation of the network. These brokerage roles resulted from families' strategies to increase their household wealth by constructing and optimizing marriage, prebendary, and business relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does position in the friendship network affect social status in early adolescence? Previous research shows that friendship relations are not equivalent to popularity hierarchies, but favorable positions in the friendship network should allow students to gain status. We use four waves of longitudinal network data and dynamic panel models with fixed effects to estimate the impact of network position on social status. Degree centrality and brokerage opportunity both exert large impacts on status, even compared against the effect of prior status. The results suggest future research on friendship across social identities, as well as network structure and hierarchy in adolescent social systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investments in the digital welfare state are often driven by the promise of removing intermediaries between the state and citizens, yet they continue to play a key role in the last mile delivery of state services. By intermediaries, I mean people who interface between bureaucrats and citizens. Their work, often as proxies for citizens, is not only to simplify bureaucratic procedures for them, but also help insulate them from bureaucratic apathy. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe the work of intermediaries around government offices, who (in)visibly support citizens in navigating the bureaucratic procedures of enrolling into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based national identity number. Building on Julia Elyachar's conception of "phatic labor," I position such intermediaries themselves as infrastructure and illustrate how their affective networks can be leveraged to orchestrate a form of distributive justice to ensure that being marginal does not preclude a citizen's access to welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how weak countries deflect systemic pressure towards change and even succeed in preserving old institutions to their advantage. By expanding Goddard's theory of embedded revisionism to smaller powers, the study identifies strategies these states deploy to improve access and brokerage. We use the UN General Assembly Sponsorship Dataset to locate multilateral brokers and, after detecting Cuba's centrality in this arena, we proceed to a heuristic case study. Havana's maneuvers to offset its vulnerability during and after the Cold War reveal a mix of structural, institutional, and compulsory power. Specifically, its renewal of the Non-Aligned Movement even after the end of bipolarity, its maintenance of autocracy amidst the pressures for democratization, and later support of radicalized Latin American leaders provide insight regarding unexpected sources of network power available to a resilient rogue state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This research studies circularity brokers, the economic actors facilitating the transition of companies towards circular operations. The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of "circular brokerage", deriving from the concept of brokerage existing in network theory and applied to the specific context of the circular supply network. Recent papers have been devoted to particular facets of circular brokerage, with studies dedicated to circular incubators or platforms. This study proposes how these new actors can have a significant role in facilitating circular economy in general. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology is qualitative using 17 semi-directed interviews with circularity brokers. The theoretical approach draws on the network view and builds on recent developments of the theory in the context of circular economy. Findings: Circularity brokers support organisations and their networks, helping them to overcome the problems that stand in their way of adopting circular economy at different levels (micro, meso and macro). To do this, circularity brokers deploy a wide range of activities involving technical, methodological and relational skills. The study extends previous research by elaborating on the relationship between the position these actors occupy within their network and the benefits they can bring in terms of circularity. Originality/value: This research provides evidence on the role of circularity brokers and moves the state of knowledge from a specific sector or cases to other sectors and a broader role beyond network position specifics. Network theory, with the constructs of broker exchanges and the influence of embeddedness, is used to develop theoretical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the phenomenon of global warming, the transportation sector aims to mitigate carbon emissions by promoting the use of public transportation. This study employs social network analysis to propose effective improvements to the public transportation system, focusing on bus stop locations and route networks in Hwaseong City, South Korea. Two networks were constructed based on existing public transportation routes and usage data at each bus stop. The findings and implications are as follows: Analyzing the public transportation network from a network perspective can effectively contribute to improving the public transportation network route system. By evaluating centrality and brokerage for the existing routes, it is possible to identify inefficient routes and develop efficient route modification plans. Based on actual usage patterns, excessive bus supply and unnecessary bus stop locations can be identified, allowing for the establishment of appropriate operational plans. This can lead to improved operational efficiency and cost savings. Rational route design and operational planning can enhance public transportation services and promote increased use of public transportation. Ultimately, this contributes to sustainable development through carbon reduction in the transportation sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some relational mechanisms that may facilitate strong inter-organizational alliances, and the associated trust, in collective action fields. It departs from mainstream research on trust by focusing on organizations rather than individuals. The article focuses in particular on three mechanisms: embeddedness (i.e. the role of individual members' multiple involvements as facilitators of sustained inter-organizational exchanges), familiarity (the role of previous interactions in facilitating cooperation and thus generating trust), and brokerage (the role of trusted leaders in bringing different organizations together). These mechanisms may affect trust creation in two different ways: by facilitating dyadic alliances between pairs of actors and by facilitating actors' incumbency of the same network position, regardless of being directly connected. Illustrations come from data on environmental groups in Milan in the mid 1980s, civic organizations active on various public issues in Glasgow and Bristol in the early 2000s, and organizations active on the urban environment in Cape Town in the early 2010s. While the exercise is exploratory in nature, the relational mechanisms identified may represent some of the building blocks for a systematic explanation of alliance building and trust emergence. Moreover, data from urban polities with different levels of democratic consolidation and cleavage pacification illustrate the importance of adding a comparative element to our explorations of the relationship between trust and collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the role of brokers in the regional innovation network and its influence on innovative and collaborative outcomes. For this purpose, we make use of data from the European Patent Office and Eurostat in the period 1986–2015. We first build the regional collaboration network based on co-inventorship ties, and then we identify the brokerage roles played by each region, using the original taxonomy proposed by Gould and Fernandez (1989), to disentangle their impact on innovation and collaboration. Finally, we investigate regional collaboration intensity and how it interacts with brokerage roles, highlighting its mediating effect. Our findings indicate that brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration networks, but also that they are not efficient for the creation of innovation. Collaboration intensity, on the other hand, enhances both innovation and collaborative outcomes and shows how a region can benefit from being a broker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bridging gaps between educational stakeholders at the classroom, school, and system levels is essential to achieve sustainable change in primary and secondary education. However, transferring knowledge or building capacity within this network of loosely coupled stakeholders is demanding. The brokerage concept holds promise for studying these complex patterns of interaction, as it refers to how specific actors (brokers) link loosely coupled or disconnected individuals (brokering). However, different research traditions, in terms of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, and various stakeholders examined in their role as bridge builders make understanding the role of brokers, brokering, and brokerage in changing educational practice challenging. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the current literature on these concepts in educational change research. In a systematic literature review based on 42 studies, we analyzed each study's theoretical assumptions, methodological approach, scope in terms of stakeholders involved, and empirical findings. First, the literature review revealed that research on educational change refers to four different theoretical frameworks when focusing on brokers, brokering, or brokerage. Second, our results indicate that predominantly qualitative approaches have been applied. Third, using content network graphs, we identified teachers and principals as among the most frequently analyzed brokers. Fourth, four relevant aspects of the empirical findings are presented: brokers' personal characteristics, conditions that enable brokering, successful brokering strategies, and outcomes of brokerage. Finally, we outline a future research agenda based on the empirical evidence base and shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many organizational settings, individuals make evaluations in the context of affect-based negative relationships, in which an evaluator personally dislikes the evaluated individual. However, these dislikes are often held in check by norms of professionalism that preclude the use of personal preferences in objective evaluations. In this article, we draw from social network theory to suggest that only individuals that are network brokers—those who have the cognitive freedom to flout organizational norms—act to down-evaluate the peers they dislike. We evaluate our theory using two complementary studies: one field site study and an experiment. Our results, consistent across two different methodologies, suggest that overlooking an evaluator's negative relationships as well as the network positions that constrain or enable an individual's actions may lead to distortions in ubiquitous organizational peer evaluations processes and outcomes.

How and why does brokerage become pivotal to guest work governance? While research on intermediaries in temporary migrant labor programs has proliferated in the last decade, there is limited analysis of the conditions that create regulatory roles for brokers and shape their policy and social impacts in host states. By analyzing the causes and consequences of documentation brokerage in Thailand's guest work formalization process, I link sociological work on brokerage with relational conceptions of state power. Drawing from 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, I argue that gaps in the state's regulatory infrastructure amid heightened coercive policy enforcement create profitable opportunities for brokers to act as intermediaries between migrants, employers, and state offices to facilitate policy implementation. The informality and opportunism of such brokerage, however, can also generate activities that undermine official policy, with varying consequences for state control. Comparing brokerage between two sites, I show that brokers in each location improve the state's capacity to formalize migrant labor, but the added social/regulatory dimension of the border in the second site creates brokerage opportunities that push the boundaries of official policy. In both sites, documentation brokerage imposes adverse economic effects on migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee‐migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state‐subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation are underrecognized. Immigration officers' strategies of mediation, such as intermittently acknowledging typists, implicate brokerage as both part of and distinct from the everyday bureaucratic workings of the state. I argue that through their acts of mediation, brokers are essential to bureaucratic work and have come to embody the fuzziness surrounding where the state begins and ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in feeding and arming European armies from 1500 to 1800. Yet they have ignored the problems these merchants faced when they cast outside national borders to urban centres far from the battlefield, a multi-national mobilisation of resources known as the 'fiscal-military system'. This article uses a case-study of one Jewish merchant, Jacob Levi, from the port of Genoa to explore the essential brokerage role of ethnic-religious minorities in the early modern fiscal-military system. With knowhow built through his private businesses as well as a network of his co-religious, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as Levi's records show, other war matériel accompanied grain, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that Levi transited through the port in these years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When COVID-19 struck India in March 2020 the central government announced a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the virus. In Delhi, the suspension of normal economic and social life precipitated a crisis of hunger for the thousands who depend on daily wage labour to feed their families. Many of these workers were unable to access the city's Public Distribution System for subsidised food supplies because they lacked the correct paperwork. In response, the Delhi government implemented an online system, known as E-Coupons, through which those affected could apply for emergency rations. However, this digital system proved complicated to navigate for the marginalised people that it was aimed at. In the east Delhi neighbourhood in which this research took place brokers offering digital connections and online form-filling services proliferated in the crisis, but often provided unreliable or incomplete support to those in need. Recognising the need for digital mediation and support for the marginalised we argue that networks of reliable community advocates are required if welfare bureaucracies are to be digitised through mobile governance projects such as E-Coupons. The human mediation and advocacy, which underpins these schemes should be acknowledged and included in system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As trade and economic activities expand and spread in this era, the brokerage contract plays an important role in wealth trading and the exchange of goods and services in various trade, industrial, and other fields. A professional acquires the status of a merchant for this work, whether a natural person or a legal entity. The need for brokers and intermediaries continues to increase constantly due to their skills and expertise in bridging views and narrowing the gap between contractors, facilitating the conclusion of transactions. This underscores the impact of the broker's role on commercial and economic life and the necessity to develop laws governing their business, especially given the ambiguity in regulating this topic. From this perspective, the present research examines the broker's role and responsibility by adopting a comparative and analytical descriptive approach. The research is structured into three chapters, aiming to investigate the broker's role and responsibility in performing the functions of the brokerage contract, preserving documents, ensuring implementation, and refraining from prohibited practices. The goal is to draw the most important findings and recommendations, which include recommending the standardization of brokering and real estate brokering procedures, harmonization between the business transaction system project and the real estate brokerage system, recommending the establishment of a private center for trade brokerage with independence and legal person status, and suggesting the addition of some important provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across various markets, consumers rely on brokers to help them select goods. How do brokers shape consumers' valuation? We address this question by drawing from two independent but analogous ethnographies of brokerage and purchasing in the New York housing market and the New York art market. Building upon the relational turn in economic sociology, we identify the interlocking mechanisms by which brokers influence valuation in face-to-face interaction: Brokers (1) build trust by establishing rapport and displaying expertise, (2) prepare consumers to purchase by priming the consumption setting so that consumers compare a specified set of goods and experience urgency, and (3) posit matches between consumers and products, relying on demographic and cultural characteristics of consumers to complete transactions. Our novel theorization of brokerage has broader implications for understanding valuation and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retail trading platforms have gained popularity in recent years as brokers for ordinary people to trade speculative assets such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. These platforms earn revenue from their users’ risky trading and through derivative products, where the platform benefits as the traders lose. The platforms thus operate with conflicts of interest: what is good for the platform and its users are not necessarily the same. We explore how retail trading platforms navigate these conflicts of interest in a case study of the global and multi-asset broker eToro. Through an analysis of three different types of brokerage — financial, informational, and social — we show how the platform obfuscates its roles and operations to mask underlying conflicts of interest. In the end, we argue that the interweaving of brokerage roles compounds platform power as platforms can exploit their gatekeeping position and information asymmetry to promote their preferred transactions at the expense of users and complementors. The analysis thus contributes both to the specific understanding of retail trading platforms and to the general discussion of conflicts of interest in platform power.

Within the realm of commercial contracts, a specific group of contracts can be classified as permissive contracts. This category includes brokerages, agency contracts, employment contracts, and commercial representation. The rules and consequences associated with permissive contracts have far-reaching implications for legislative processes, court judgments, quasi-judicial bodies, and executive authorities. The authorized status of the obligated party and the presence of a trust description are two crucial factors determining the nature of these contracts. If the fulfillment of the permissive obligation lacks a trust description or occurs outside the boundaries of authentic consent, it constitutes a breach of contract or, at the very least, renders the contract non-binding. The findings of this comparative research reveal that within the legal system of England, such contracts are recognized as forms of agency contracts or representation. In Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, although no specific discussion has emerged regarding commercial permissive contracts due to their novelty, based on the general principles established in Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, these types of commercial transactions can be classified as permissive contracts. In the legal system of Iran, considering the challenges addressed in legal doctrine, there is overall compatibility between commercial permissive contracts, Imamiyyah Jurisprudence, and the legal system of England.

Building on the notion of the migration state, this article introduces the concepts of 'migration rent' and 'immigration rentier states' to describe how states that rely heavily on immigration for their wealth derive unearned income from immigration. Both concepts contribute to better understand of the role of migration in the historical transformation of states and the relationship between state, market and society in rentier monarchies and non-rentier states. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, I show that the Gulf monarchies, and Saudi Arabia in particular, progressively governmentalized direct and indirect forms of migration rent through migration control and taxation of migrants, both of which were initially brokered by private actors, notably through the kafala or sponsorship system. In doing so, states institutionalise labour market segmentation and differential exclusion of migrants intersecting class, race, nationality, gender, and age. This produces a 'skill-based order of things'. Rather than outliers, Saudi Arabia offers a magnifying glass that reveals global dynamics of state-led migration control and class-based differential exclusion. Beyond empirical findings, this article thus demonstrates the potential for theoretical innovation in the social sciences based on non-Western polities calling to test the notions of 'migration rent' and 'immigration rentier states' across contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the processes and politics of slum demolitions in the megacity of Mumbai. Scholars of subaltern urbanism have celebrated the political agency and entrepreneurial ability of the metonymic slums in Mumbai. This article argues instead that paying close attention to the dynamics of the lived realities within informal settlements directs us to the limits of ethnographic and archival imagination where fixers operating within the 'para-legal' are practicing a new subaltern urbanism, one that is attentive to the complexity of community within the metonymic slum. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of two fixers, this article shows how, by placing themselves at crucial nodes in the demolition and rehabilitation process, the fixers, on the one hand, were able to delay the displacement of residents; on the other, they created hierarchies in the distribution of resettlement benefits. Focusing on the quotidian practices of fixers operating within the demolished informal settlement brings forth a complicated and contradictory politics that ensure the existence of diverse non-privatized land tenures in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how networks for entrepreneurial activities evolve and change during an institutional transition at the macro level. For this purpose, we present the historical case study of Meliá, a pioneering company in the development of the Spanish tourism industry during Franco´s Regime (1939–1975), when the country evolved from interventionism and isolation toward an increasingly market-oriented economy. Our study shows how Meliá's networks co-evolved with their institutional framework, resulting in a transformation in their composition, purpose, and outcomes. Through historical contextualization, our paper allows us to capture the nuances of an institutional transition as well as to better understand the change processes of networks, the significance of strong and weak ties as the firm matures, and the dynamics of network brokerage over time. Therefore, our research contributes to the literature on networks and institutional transitions showing the value of a history-in theory perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Characteristics of real estate agents and brokerage firms have been shown to impact home sales prices. This paper extends the literature by exploring the heterogeneous effects of these brokerage characteristics under different market conditions and market pricing segments. Using the Multiple Listing Service of Chatham County, Georgia, this study finds that agent and firm characteristics are more impactful in cold markets, when homes are presumably more difficult to sell, and for lower priced homes, which are more likely to be purchased and sold by younger and/or less experienced homebuyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of iBuyer's use of PropTech to major housing markets raises a series of questions for both buyers and sellers when making instant, all-cash offers. This study uses a sequence of experiments to identify the proper implementation of existing behavioral real estate concepts to improve the iBuying process, a burgeoning area of residential real estate. We find strong evidence of anchoring for all-cash offers in that sellers are nearly twice as likely to transact when they are first presented with the net proceeds offer price (market value minus costs) rather than starting with the higher gross market value offer price. After the sale, seller regret aversion becomes strong when the seller's house is subsequently sold for 10% or more than the all-cash buyer paid, but regret aversion is mitigated with communication of the improvements made to enhance the selling price. We further find that sellers do not know which all-cash buyer's Automated Valuation Model (AVM) is the most accurate and are therefore much more influenced by brand awareness than model sophistication. Finally, while the extant literature has examined offer price strategies for home sellers, this is the first investigation of buyer offer price strategies. In stark contrast to selling strategies, pricing strategies do not matter when making an offer to buy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-ethnic brokerage between friends, i.e. having friends with different ethnic backgrounds who are not friends with each other, is essential to social integration processes in multi-ethnic societies. This study examines the relation between inter-ethnic brokerage in adolescent friendship networks and individual mental wellbeing in the school context. Using data on friendship networks from a large-scale study of more than 2,700 seventh-graders in German secondary schools, I analyse the interplay between triadic brokerage structures and ethnicity, combining network analytical methods with linear regression techniques. The results show that brokerage in general is associated with lower mental wellbeing. This negative association is stronger for brokerage between friends with different ethnic backgrounds than for brokerage between friends with the same ethnic background. Furthermore, the negative association is not stronger for inter-ethnic brokerage, where the broker has the same ethnic background as one friend, than for inter-ethnic brokerage, where all actors belong to distinct ethnic groups. The results indicate no differences between ethnic majority and minority students. Though inter-ethnic brokerage is vital to bridge ethnic divides, this study highlights the psychological challenges inter-ethnic brokers may face. It emphasises the relevance of investigating brokerage in inter-ethnic friendships and going beyond dyadic perspectives on inter-ethnic contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected most organizations' working environment and productivity. Organizations have had to make arrangements for staff to operate remotely following the implementation of lockdown regulations around the world, as the pandemic has led to restrictions on movement and the temporary closure of workplace premises. The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of the effect of this transition on productivity during the pandemic, by studying a distributed network of research who collaborate remotely. We examine how the productivity of researchers is affected by the distributed collaborative networks in which they are embedded. Our goal is to understand the effects of brokerage and closure on the researchers' publication rate, which is interpreted as an indicator of their productivity. We analyze researchers' communication networks, focusing on structural holes and diversity. We take into account the individual qualities of the focal researcher such as seniority. We find that disciplinary diversity among researchers' peers increases the researchers' productivity, lending support to the brokerage argument. In addition, we find support for two statistical interaction effects. First, structural holes moderate diversity so that researchers with diverse networks are more productive when their networks also have a less redundant structure. Diversity and structural holes, when combined, further researchers' productivity. Second, seniority moderates diversity such that senior researchers are more productive than junior researchers in less diverse networks. In more diverse networks, junior researchers perform as well as senior researchers. Social capital and human capital are complementary. We conclude that the benefits of diversity on researchers' productivity are contingent on the qualities of the researchers and on network structure. The brokerage/closure debate thus needs a more nuanced understanding of causal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: We examine how crisis conditions affect the link between structural holes and organizational performance. Since brokerage offers early access to diverse perspectives and autonomy in exchange relations, the benefits of brokerage should rise when crises erupt. However, evidence on the subject has been inconclusive, raising the question of whether crisis actually imposes a boundary condition on structural hole theory. Using longitudinal data on investment banks, and exploiting the 2000 dot.com crisis as well as the 2008 financial crisis, we explore whether crises moderate the favorable effect of brokerage on performance. Our results reveal that only exclusive, and not shared, structural holes are advantageous for performance, as they facilitate ambidextrous responses to crisis. Implications for brokerage theory and new research on crisis are discussed. Managerial Summary: Crises, in the form of pandemics, wars, or market crashes, affect the relationship between a firm's position in collaboration networks and its future performance. Our analyses bring into focus a finding of interest to managers of firms operating as brokers in these networks: when a crisis erupts, a firm that serves as the sole bridge between its otherwise disconnected collaborators performs especially well. Uncontested by other intermediaries, such firms achieve a better mix of search and stability, and thus higher performance, amidst crisis. These advantages disappear when other intermediaries are present. This implies that firms frequently exposed to crisis may benefit from constructing entry barriers around their bridging positions in collaboration networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Localized interactions allow access to external knowledge flows, contributing to the dynamic increase of knowledge complexity. We analyse the knowledge complexity of cities, as a proxy of their knowledge capabilities, and the extent to which capabilities are determined by the interactions between cities. We address this issue studying the evolution of knowledge complexity and the inter-city network in Latin America. We find uneven evolutions of knowledge complexity of cities, which are integrated into sparse and highly outward-oriented networks. Using panel data regression models, we show that cities' knowledge complexity can be explained by the city's position in the network. In particular, we find two determining factors: on the one hand, playing a broker role, i.e. intermediating between disconnected cities, is associated with the level of complexity. On the other hand, network brokerage shows a sort of externality, due to which cities that maintain connections with broker cities also achieve higher levels of knowledge complexity. This evidence contributes to understanding the current changes and challenges in the main Latin American urban agglomerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the concept of brokerage to analyse the systems of borderland governance that have underpinned processes of state formation and capitalist development in the conflict-affected Myanmar-China borderland region of northern Shan State since the late 1980s. It focuses on the brokerage arrangements that have developed between the Myanmar Army and local militias, and how the illegal drug trade has become integral to these systems of brokered rule. This article draws particular attention to the inherent tensions and contradictions surrounding brokerage. In the short term, deploying militias as borderland brokers has provided an expedient mechanism through which the Myanmar Army has sought to extend and embed state authority, and has also provided the stability and coercive muscle needed to attract capital, expand trade, and intensify resource extraction. However, at the same time, militias have sought to use their position as brokers to aggrandise their own power and counter the extension of central state control. In the longer term, brokerage arrangements have thus had the effect of reinvigorating systems of strongman borderland governance, further fragmenting the means of violence and the proliferation of drugs and disempowering non-militarised forms of political negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With recent research emphasizing different leadership roles that characterize networked social movements, brokerage has received renewed attention as one of the key responsibilities of networked movement leadership. However, in limiting the role of brokering to creating horizontal connections among decentralized actors, previous research is missing an account of grassroots movements that were able to make vertical connections with the power structures and grow to have a significant political impact. By comparing two cases of feminist networked social movements from South Korea, I examine brokerage and conditions that enabled brokerage through the lens of leadership. I argue that brokerage is a crucial dimension of movement leadership and propose the concept of meso-level leadership to elaborate how some grassroots leaders could facilitate grassroots representation in mainstream legislative agenda-setting by forming relationships with actors across a broad organizational and institutional spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Brokers are said to be the oiling chain of illicit networks, facilitating the efficient flow of illicit products to destination. Yet, most of the available brokerage measures focus on local or individual networks, missing the brokers who connect others across communities, such as market levels. This study introduces a robust measure that uncovers, scores, and positions these community brokers. Methods: We used network data aggregated from numerous investigations related to 1,800 criminal entrepreneurs operating in Western Canada. After uncovering the communities using the Leiden algorithm, we developed a community brokerage score that assesses individual potential reach and control at the meso level, and that accounts for individual position changes due to different community structures. We examined how the score relates to brokerage and structural hole measures as well as seriousness of involvement in criminality. Results: We found that the illicit network studied has a strong and stable community structure, and community brokers form about 9% of the population. The score developed is statistically robust and is not strongly related to network and structural hole measures, which confirms the need for a novel measure that captures this strategic position in illicit and other networks. Conclusions: Community brokers are especially important in illicit networks where large-scale covert coordination among criminal entrepreneurs is risky. The measure we propose is not overlapping with currently existing brokerage measures and has the potential to contribute to our understanding of how products and information flow beyond local networks, in criminology and other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global spread of online work opportunities has inspired a new generation of market-based aid that connects forcibly displaced people to a transnational internet economy. Because refugees face barriers to making a livelihood online, aid organisations and private enterprises support them by building bridges across digital divides, connectivity problems or skill gaps. They thereby become intermediaries and brokers that facilitate connections between refugees and online income opportunities, which often lack decent working conditions and adequate protections. Because digital livelihood initiatives lack the power to reshape these conditions and the value of work in the internet economy, they fail to become mediators with a transformative impact. The result is that the internet economy reshapes livelihoods provision far more than aid can reshape its disempowering effects, despite successes in driving forward refugees’ digital inclusion. Based on more than three years of research including interviews, field visits and surveys, this article foregrounds the current risks that result from the inclusion of refugees into precarious forms of online gig work. To ensure a decent future of work for refugees in the internet economy, the current push for digital livelihoods will require an equally strong push for stronger protections, inclusive regulations and rights.

Based on an in-depth, qualitative case study about a conflict between governmental authorities from the United States and Switzerland over the regulation of Swiss banks, we introduce indirect compellence as a novel triadic and indirect mechanism through which coercion leads to institutional change. Hostage-taking being a prototypical example, indirect compellence is typified by a coercive actor who takes a third party hostage to gain influence over a targeted actor. In our case, it meant that U.S. authorities (coercers) compelled Swiss policy makers (targets) to erode the famed Swiss banking secrecy rules by threatening the targets to otherwise enforce U.S. law extraterritorially against Swiss banks and bankers (hostages). Our constructivist and target-centered perspective explains this type of coercive pressure in detail, and it also suggests that targeted policy makers judge and respond to it contingent on their political ideologies. Our study contributes to research on power and influence in institutional environments and to research on global business regulation and transnational governance. Most generally, it also expands scholarly understanding of triadic relationships. In contrast to Simmelian perspectives' focus on triads in which the third party is in a powerful brokerage position and frequently benefits as a tertius gaudens, our study suggests that the third party can also become a rather powerless tertius miserabilis who suffers rather than benefits from others' conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]