Coordinator: Christopher Bartlett (CYBartlett@gmail.com)
The Applied Theory Working Group (ATWG) is an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the application of institutional theory to address complex problems outside the laboratory. The group is interested in cases from around the world where ideas drawn from IAD/DOSES have been applied (successfully or not) by communities, NGOs, government agencies and others. Based on these global experiences, ATWG seeks to identify tools and methods to better support end users who are trying to apply theory to their real-world situations/dilemmas. ATWG meets weekly, often features a guest speaker, and is open to participants from all theoretical and applied backgrounds.
Coordinator: Ursula Kreitmar (ukreitma@indiana.edu)
This working group will focus on further development of the ontological framework originally presented by Elinor Ostrom in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Ostrom, Elinor. 2007. “A Diagnostic Approach for Going Beyond Panaceas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(39): 15181–15187). The group will be developing a software platform to record key definitions of nested terms. It will apply the framework to forestry, water, and perhaps fishery resources. One goal of the group will be to participate in crafting a working paper which will be the foundation for a report to a interuniversity group in Europe that is working on the expansion of this framework and as a foundation for an application to the National Science Foundation in January 2010.
Coordinator: Prof. James Walker (walkerj@indiana.edu)
The Workshop has an active group of students, visiting scholars, and affiliated faculty currently involved in conducting experiments that focus on the role of institutions in shaping behavior. These experiments range in scope from basic settings related to evaluating levels of trust to voting institutions in common-pool resource settings. This past spring semester the group met weekly with participants (faculty, visiting scholars, and students) from numerous disciplines to discuss and further develop the use of experimental approaches—both in the lab and in the field—as a way of complementing social science research.
Coordinators: Regina Smyth (rsmyth@indiana.edu) and William Bianco (wbianco@indiana.edu)
The PEDS Working Group conducts and sponsors research on the microfoundations of sustainable democracy, defined as a commitment to democratic processes, respect for election outcomes, and linkages that engender responsiveness and accountability. The overarching goal is to move towards interdisciplinary studies of democratic decision making in different contexts, from new or consolidating systems to established democracies and self-governing systems, by characterizing factors that shape processes and outcomes in a wide range of working democracies. An equally important goal is the development of graduate and undergraduate training programs that draw on and contribute to the research program.
Coordinator: Norbert Chan (kwannok.c@gmail.com)
The working group on Social Network Analysis (SNA) will devote most of its time to exploring the literature and major tools of SNA. One of the primary goals of this group is to obtain a working knowledge of popular SNA tools (e.g., Pajek, UCINET, SoNia) in addition to evaluating the suitability of these different tools in highlighting specific spatial and temporal features of social networks. Apart from technical proficiency, members are interested in becoming more acquainted with the theoretical foundations of SNA through regular consultation and discussion of a sample of the major publications in this field.
