Dimitrios C Christopoulos

Edinburgh Business School Herriot-Watt University & MU Vienna

Political entrepreneurs are identified by personal characteristics similar to economic entrepreneurs, i.e. intellectual ability, good knowledge of their domain, team building skills, reputation, extensive networks, strategic vision and tenacity. Political entrepreneurs differ from economic agents by having a different incentive structure in attempt...

The ongoing financial turmoil has brought into sharp relief the importance of financial services regulation. Yet, we still know relatively little about how financial regulation is negotiated within the EU, in particular which policy actors are most influential and what are the mechanisms that allow them to exercise influence. This paper addresses t...

Rachel Parker, in her article ‘Networked Governance or Just Networks?’ in this journal, has dealt with a very challenging question on the relevance of network interaction to governance outcomes. Her use of network concepts, however, appears to employ networks as a heuristic device. Her article employs terms that describe social network properties t...

This paper draws on network analysis to examine the impact of Global Value Chain (GVC) embeddedness on carbon emissions from 2000 to 2014. A country network of value added is constructed, and a Temporal Network Autocorrelation Model (TNAM) is applied to examine the impact of network position in the GVC and emissions of network partners on the CO2 e...

Industrial decarbonisation has become an increasingly important policy issue in recent years, as governments and nations aim to tackle the climate crisis. This study makes use of UK research council and Horizon 2020 data to map the research landscape for industrial decarbonisation. This includes an analysis of 435 projects funded by various UK rese...

A greenium is the yield discount of a green bond compared to a similar non-green bond. Here we challenge implicit assumptions of a conventional estimator of greenium, which takes the difference between yield spreads of green and non-green bonds. We propose that the greenium should be estimated as a function of non-green bond yield spread. We find t...

This paper provides an examination of inter-organizational collaboration in the UK research system. Data are collected on organizational collaboration on projects funded by four key UK research councils: Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and Biotechnology...

This study investigates the phenomenon of syndication in the venture capital industry. Investments conducted by syndicates are believed to have a better chance of being successful, which can be measured by the survival probability of portfolio companies or by successful exits. Using a novel and large dataset covering several countries, our analysis...

One of the defining features of the home credit sector is the role played by its agents—workers who act as intermediaries between lending companies and borrowers to facilitate lending and collect repayments. There is a prevailing and pervasive narrative in the sector that women make superior agents, largely based on the belief that female agents ca...

Environmental resource management requires negotiation among state and non-state actors with conflicting goals and different levels of influence. In northwestern Argentina, forest policy implementation is described as weak, due to governance structure and ambiguities in the law. We studied how policy actors’ attitudes and their positions in the...

Deforestation causes biodiversity loss and the eviction of small-scale ranchers and indigenous people. Accordingly, it is a global issue in environmental politics. This article analyzes a participatory governance system associated with the implementation of Argentina’s forest law in a hotspot of deforestation: the province of Salta in the Gran Chac...

Purpose Corporate success depends partially on the quality of knowledge accessible to the executive board. One route of access to such knowledge is the appointment of directors who already hold directorships with prominent other corporate actors. Such director appointments provide interlocks to a corporate knowledge ecosystem (Haunschild and Beckma...

Purpose The relationship between interlocking directorates and firm performance has been increasingly debated, with a focus on whether firm's centrality in interlock networks is associated with performance. The purpose of this study is to examine not only how a firm's position in this network is associated with performance but also how the performa...

Research on social networks has become a significant area of investigation in the social sciences, and social network concepts and tools are widely employed across many subfields within the field. This volume introduces political theorists and researchers to new theoretical, methodological, and substantive tools for extending political network rese...

Centralities are a widely studied phenomenon in network science. In policy networks, central actors are of interest because they are assumed to control information flows, to link opposing coalitions and to directly impact decision-making. First, we study what type of actor (e.g., state authorities or interest groups) is able to occupy central posit...

Purpose The paper refers to the drivers of social entrepreneurship and critically explores the notion that it is prompted by a personal mission to enable some social or ideologically motivated altruism. It refers to Shapero's Entrepreneurial Event Theory and the adaptation of it for social entrepreneurship in Mair and Noboa (2006) and develops thes...

Changes to the labour process in the home credit sector have exposed the industry’s agency workforce to increased levels of digital managerial control through the introduction of digital lending applications and algorithmic decision-making techniques. This article highlights the heterogeneous nature of the impact of digitalisation on the labour pro...

The present paper examines the importance of integrating geographical effects into the analysis of social networks. Specifically, we study the impacts of spatial distance and territorial borders on information exchange within two European cross‐border regions where there is evidence of extensive cross‐border political interaction in the domain of p...

This article contributes to our understanding of the formation of policy networks. Research suggests that organisations collaborate with those that are perceived to be influential in order to access scarce political resources. Other studies show that organisations prefer to interact with those that share core policy beliefs on the basis of trust. T...

In this chapter Dimitris Christopoulos provides an overview of governance networks in politics. Governance is examined both as a generative process to political structure as well as the product of political relations. The author outlines key parameters for capturing network properties of political action with a particular focus on political power a...

Flood events have become more frequent in Europe, and the adaptation to the increasing flood risks is needed. The Flood Directive set up a series of measures to increase European resilience, establishing Flood Risk Management Plans (FRMPs) at the level of the river basin district as one relevant action. In order to efficiently fulfil this objective...

Dominant streams in leadership literature conceptualise it either as a role within sociopolitical structure or as a behavioural predisposition of agents. Leadership roles are determined by decisional power, most typically related to the hierarchical and structural position of agents within sociopolitical networks. Limitations in attaining meaningfu...

This study explores investor strategies in the greater Vienna region. The spotlight here is on, broadly defined, venture capital aimed at early stage entrepreneurial ventures. This study has been generously supported by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce (WKW). Findings include: 1. suggestions to align the regulatory framework with main competitor stat...

Executive Summary This report provides a brief overview of the survey instrument employed for conducting a study of the implementation of EC directive 2007/60 on flood management in Austria. The data collected has allowed us to map the structure of information exchange among actors as well as evaluate the resilience of the governance structure amon...

Do the networks of political actors cause governance or are such networks a mere epiphenomenon of political action? In this chapter we review the extant scholarship and outline the key parameters to the empirical challenge of capturing the effect of political actions and the theoretical challenge of associating these to debates on structure and age...

This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of power within political networks. It sets out to explain why organisations collaborate in the lobbying process and how they attempt to use this to leverage their influence. This necessitates an analysis that locates strategic agents within strategically-selective contexts (Hay 1998; Hay and Winc...

Policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs are assumed to have a decisive impact on policy outcomes. Their access to social and political resources is contingent on their influence on other agents. In social network analysis (SNA), entrepreneurs are often closely associated with brokers, because both are agents presumed to benefit from bridging struct...

The receipt of knowledge is a key ingredient by which the tourism sector can adjust and adapt to its dynamic environment. However although its importance has long been recognised the fragmentation within the sector, largely as a result of it being comprised of small and medium sized businesses, makes understanding knowledge management challenging....

Social entrepreneurs present a contradiction if one accepts that economic motivation is premised on personal gain alone. The economic activity of social entrepreneurs is presumed altruistic, their actions intending to primarily benefit others. The theoretical and actual motivations, social networks and values of these actors are compared in this ar...

This article examines elite interaction and its potential to affect local development. A theoretical discussion sets the stage for a systematic exploration of the social capital of regional elites in a comparative study of 12 European Union regions. The working assumption is that elite social capital and trust between elite groups reflect on the re...

Using Social Network Analysis, this article illuminates the relationship between the Islamists and rebels involved in the Malian conflict. We use publicly available data to demonstrate that the connection between Islamists and rebels depends on brokers who defected from the Tuareg rebellion to radical groups. Our work also details the internal rela...

Using social network analysis, our first aim is to illuminate the relationships between the Islamists and the rebels involved in the Malian conflict. We use a selection of newspaper articles to demonstrate that the connection between Islamists and rebels depends on brokers who passed from the Tuareg rebellion to radical groups. Our second objective...

This article examines elite interaction and its potential to affect local development. A theoretical discussion sets the stage for a systematic exploration of the social capital of regional elites in a comparative study of 12 European Union regions. The working assumption is that elite social capital and trust between elite groups reflect on the re...

How can we distinguish between political brokers and political entrepreneurs within political space? Examining the role of individual agents, we can identify a number of definitional weaknesses in the entrepreneurship and leadership literature. This leads us to consider the agency determinants of broadly defined exceptional actors. We argue that ac...

This article attempts to measure the effect of ‘public sector brokerage’ in facilitating the interaction between enterprises in Bristol. In particular we examine the effectiveness of a public sector project through formal social network analysis. The data originates from a publicly funded consulting project measuring interaction between actors as a...

The analysis of social networks in management and organizations has become mainstream. Research has focused on actors within networks (i.e. nodes) and the relationships between these actors (i.e. ties). The position taken in this paper is that an inter-organisational collaboration is not about merging and creating new organizational settings, and m...

Entrepreneurship is recognised as a driving force of a competitive market system. The social economy is a growing segment of local economies and is increasingly entrusted with welfare provision for some of the most vulnerable sections of society. Very little attention is given on the role of actors that have been broadly termed social entrepreneurs...

A consistent problem with key informant, elite and expert interviewing is the representativeness of sample populations. Studies that employ expert data typically depend on a small number of respondents, selected through purposeful selection. The opportunity of going beyond the arbitrary selection of experts arises by utilizing methodologies develop...

Interest intermediation is integral to the consultation process of most EU legislative acts. On occasion, the agenda is not set by the most prominent political actors but by peripheral political entrepreneurs, exploiting opportunities to exercise brokerage. Attribute based case studies of the exchanges among such actors are deficient for failing to...

Political entrepreneurs differ from economic entrepreneurs because of their distinct incentive structure and discrete structural constraints. In order to understand these agents' actions a model that would describe their decision making is not enough. We would require a model of their interactions. We can only understand these exceptional actors in...

A consistent problem with key informant, elite and expert interviewing is the representativeness of sample populations. Since studies that employ such techniques depend on a small number of respondents, they are often classed as qualitative. The possibility of going beyond these classic approaches arises by employing methods developed to explore hi...

The debate on the effects of regionalism and European integration on European nation states has been prominent for more than a decade. Regionalization of EU states has not brought with it genuine regional autonomy and regionalism has not emerged as a bottom-up public demand in European regions. It is contended here that to determine the future of r...

The debate on the effects of regionalism and European integration on European nation states has been prominent for more than a decade. Regionalisation of EU states has not brought with it genuine regional autonomy and regionalism has not emerged as a bottom-up public demand in European regions. I contend here that to determine the future of regiona...

The debate on the effects of regionalism and European integration on European nation states is currently at an all time peak. Sub-state government is examined with fascination maybe for the first time. A Europe of the Regions has been prematurely hailed on the assumption that the Committee of the Regions would have implied some enhanced status for...

In this article, the attitudes and interaction of local political and business elites in western Crete are examined by means of an attitudinal survey, triangulated with data from in-depth interviews, conducted between July and October 1991. The data examined indicate that the endemic prevalence of clientelistic networks creates the background for c...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Glasgow, 1996.