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Taking into account the progress of community mobility, increased motorization of private vehicles, congestion, and poor urban transportation services, the Bandung City Government seeks to provide mass public transport services Trans Metro Bandung (TMB). What policies should be established to achieve the successful implementation of the TMB program?. This study aims to provide recommendations to TMB management to achieve the success of services that prioritize reliability, comfort, and humanity. The analysis was carried out on stakeholder opinion using actor analysis method software, namely Dynamic Actor-Network Analysis (DANA). The involvement of all stakeholders is needed to get their views, perceptions, and opinions about the implementation of the TMB program. From the interview processing, the results obtained from the perception diagram and identified 19 different factors in one arena. The factors for reducing traffic congestion and improving services for mass public transport are defined as “goals”. The analysis of relevance and centrality identifies the limitations of infrastructure, facilities, and financing which are the main causes of the problem so that TMB services cannot be implemented optimally. In the strategy analysis, four actions were analyzed. The most ideal solution strategy that has the maximum utility value, the highest satisfaction, and lowest frustration score is the formation of a consortium and socialization.

‘Cultured’ meat has attracted a considerable amount of investor and media interest as an early-stage technology. Despite uncertainties about its future impact, news media may be contributing to promissory discourses, by stressing the potential benefits from cultured meat to the environment, health, animal welfare, and feeding a growing population. The results from a content analysis of 255 articles from 12 US and UK traditional media from 2013 to 2019 show that much of the coverage is prompted by the industry sector, whose representatives are also the most quoted. Positive narratives about cultured meat are much more prominent than cautionary ones. Our findings support previous scholarship on other emerging technologies which concluded that with important variations, media treatments are largely positive.

This study investigates how the lemmas woman, girl, man and guy are used to discursively represent and construct gender identities in an anti-feminist forum on the discussion website Reddit. The lemmas were analysed using corpus-assisted social actor analysis and appraisal theory. Similarities and differences within three sub-communities of the TRP subreddit were considered: Men’s Rights (activists who believe that men are systemically disadvantaged in society), Men Going Their Own Way (who abstain from relationships with women), and Red Pill Theory (primarily pick-up artists). The corpus was characterised by bare assertions about gendered behaviour, although the masculine gender role was less well-defined than the feminine one. Women and girls were dehumanised and sexually objectified, negatively judged for morality and veracity, and constructed as desiring hostile behaviour from male social actors. Conversely, men were constructed as victims of female social actors and external institutions and, as a result, as unhappy and insecure.

In 2013 the European Commission launched its new green infrastructure strategy to make another attempt to stop and possibly reverse the loss of biodiversity until 2020, by connecting habitats in the wider landscape. This means that conservation would go beyond current practices to include landscapes that are dominated by conventional agriculture, where biodiversity conservation plays a minor role at best. The green infrastructure strategy aims at bottom-up rather than top-down implementation, and suggests including local and regional stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to know which stakeholders influence land-use decisions concerning green infrastructure at the local and regional level. The research presented in this paper served to select stakeholders in preparation for a participatory scenario development process to analyze consequences of different implementation options of the European green infrastructure strategy. We used a mix of qualitative and quantitative social network analysis (SNA) methods to combine actors’ attributes, especially concerning their perceived influence, with structural and relational measures. Further, our analysis provides information on institutional backgrounds and governance settings for green infrastructure and agricultural policy. The investigation started with key informant interviews at the regional level in administrative units responsible for relevant policies and procedures such as regional planners, representatives of federal ministries, and continued at the local level with farmers and other members of the community. The analysis revealed the importance of information flows and regulations but also of social pressure, considerably influencing biodiversity governance with respect to green infrastructure and biodiversity.

Background The prevention of health goods smuggling requires the involvement of stakeholders from various sectors, including the executive, judicial, and legislative bodies. This may increase numerous challenges in designing, formulating, implementing, and evaluating any corrective interventions. The aim of this study is therefore to identify and analyze the network of stakeholders and actors having a likely voice and part in preventing the smuggling of health goods (PSHG) in Iran. Method We conducted actor network analysis in three phases: actor identification, actor classification, and actor relationship analysis. The participants were selected using purposive sampling from the executive, judiciary, and legislature bodies. We categorized the qualitative data using thematic analysis, and analyzed quantitative data using matrix drawing and actor-network analysis, facilitated by Gephi (version 0.9.7) and Excel (2013) software. Results The study identified 60 actors with different levels of status, power, interest, and awareness. The most powerful and supportive actors were the security and judicial institutions and the Central Headquarters to Combat the Smuggling of Goods and Currency (CHCSGC). Despite their significant influence, neither citizens nor the private sector showed a willingness to take steps toward preventing the smuggling of medical goods. Other actors had moderate or low levels of support and power in policies to prevent the smuggling of health goods. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) showed that the density of social networks was low, indicating a lack of cooperation and adequate interaction among those actors. Conclusion Given the complex and multi-faceted nature of smuggling phenomenon, the policy makers and managers should take cognizance of the all actors’ diversity, roles and interactions. Subsequently, uncovering the reasons behind the players’ reluctance to participate, especially for such a critical issue, could strengthen the preventive actions towards smuggling, followed by a framework for meaningful stakeholder engagement, and appropriate support and incentive mechanisms.

Objectives Comorbidities, as components of these heterogeneous features, often coexist with knee osteoarthritis, and are particularly prevalent in end-stage knee osteoarthritis. Here, we attempted to identify the different clinical phenotypes of comorbidities in patients with end-stage knee osteoarthritis by cluster analysis. Methods A total of 421 inpatients diagnosed with end-stage knee osteoarthritis who underwent inpatient surgery were included in this cross-sectional study. 23 demographic, comorbidity, inflammatory immune and evaluation scale variables were collected. Systematic clustering after factor analysis and separate two-step cluster analysis were performed for individual comorbidity variables and all variables, respectively, to objectively identify the different clinical phenotypes of the study patients. Results Four clusters were finally identified. Cluster 1 had the largest proportion of obese patients (93.8%) and hypertension was common (71.2%). Almost all patients in cluster 2 were depressed (95.8%) and anxiety disorders (94.7%). Cluster 3 combined patients with isolated end-stage knee osteoarthritis and a few comorbidities. Cluster 4 had the highest proportion of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (58.8%). Conclusions Patients with end-stage knee osteoarthritis may be classified into four different clinical phenotypes: \"isolated end-stage knee osteoarthritis\"; \"obesity + hypertension\"; \"depression + anxiety\"; and \"rheumatoid arthritis\", which may help guide individualized patient care and treatment strategies.

This article analyses actors in the storage niche during the German electricity transition. Thus, we develop a more differentiated understanding of actors and their storage activities. For that, we employ the analytical multi-level-perspective (MLP) framework to focus on interactions between old and new storage technologies. Using data from expert interviews, we investigate whether the storage pathway resembles any of the four ideal types of transition pathways for interactions between niche and regime. Through our interviews, we identify five types of actor in the storage market: Big 4 (EnBW, RWE, E.ON, Vattenfall), project developers, innovative municipal utilities, small rural municipal utilities and independent green electricity providers. For each actor, we analyse four main aspects (1) previous orientation and motivation, (2) structural strategies, (3) institutional strategies, and (4) product-related strategies. Parallel to the classification of actors, we also classify available storage technologies according to their primary field of application. We conclude that interactions between regime and niche actors are cooperative, but weak, and no specific actor type currently dominates the niche activities. Hence, applications in the storage niche are not yet ready for a larger market. In sum, our results point to a future system that is characterized by reconfiguration, not substitution or transformation of current market actors.

The purpose of this study is to investigate which dry port services generate the greatest positive impact on stakeholders and their objectives. Stakeholders identified from the literature are the dry ports, the dry port’s municipality/region, the seaport, shippers, shipping lines, rail operators, and road operators. A method based on multi-actor multi-criteria analysis is applied to allow the evaluation of different scenarios considering the objectives and opinions of multiple stakeholders. The findings show that the basic services of the dry ports studied are crucial to establishing initial operations. Expanding the service portfolio by adding a wider range of customer-oriented value-added services generates extra economic and environmental benefits for stakeholders. The results expand the understanding on stakeholder benefits from the diversified range of dry port services, while the inclusion of multiple stakeholders in the analysis acknowledges the heterogeneity in stakeholder perceptions. Finally, this methodology enables the creation of an extensive set of criteria and indicators for dry port evaluations.

This study is a critical appraisal of official knowledge about: (1) Amazigh ethnic groups in Morocco; (2) the socio-semantic resources for representing them; and (3) the interaction between Amazigh ethnic groups and the dominant Arab group in 33 EFL textbooks which have been developed, approved, and distributed by the Moroccan Ministry of Education, and have been required to be used in every school, public or private from the early 1980s up to the present. Examined though an integrated CDA model which is inspired by Van Leeuwen's (1996) social actor analysis, Scott's (2018) sociology of the (un)marked, and Bank's (1989) Ethnic Content Integration model, the findings demonstrated that Amazighs have received varying degrees of discursive representation, ranging from suppression, fixation, cataloguing and backgrounding to partial inclusion and fractional participation. The analyzed EFL textbooks were also found to promote an official stance that can be lexicalized in five main discourses about Amazighs. Such a stance, I argue here, is a clear instance of an exclusionary discourse whose impacts, the study recommends, should be well-adjusted by integrating more precise and wide-ranging ethnic knowledge in Moroccan EFL textbooks.

In Australia, access to high-quality migration advice can often be crucial to obtaining a visa, and migration advisors have attracted ongoing scrutiny from policymakers, leading to successive inquiries and reviews. Such inquiries and the recommendations they produce are used to justify policy design and reform that can have significant impacts on a range of stakeholders, including of course, migration advisors and their clients. This article explores one such recent inquiry, completed in 2018. It adopts a critical discourse analysis to examine the way the inquiry’s official report presents migration advisors, and how it frames the inquiry process itself. Finding that the report presents its recommendations as being based on evidence created by external stakeholder submissions, the examination goes on to explore to what extent this is actually the case. Through an examination of the ‘textual travels’ submissions undergo when incorporated in the report, the article finds that these texts are either transformed to support dominant discourses, or simply excluded. The article concludes that decision-making is inaccurately presented as a participatory, evidence-based process, thus legitimising particular policy decisions, and unfairly continuing to present migration advisors as problems requiring fixing.