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This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.

Russia's attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, marked a very historic turning point in European security architecture. With enlarged Western aid in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Ukraine could have overcome somehow the crisis, yet many of its cities and infrastructure were largely destroyed and one-quarter of its citizens are now refugees and displaced. What is even more serious is that it remains unclear if and how a diplomatic solution could emerge between the parties. Russia's war against Ukraine is not an overnight event, it is a part of the story of the gradual escalation of Russian aggression on Ukraine since the beginning of the 2000s. Indeed, it is not just the result of the ideological or geopolitical competition between the West/European Union (EU) and Russia regarding their mutually exclusive or even antagonistic integration policies in the shared neighborhood. It is a more dynamic process including the agency of Ukraine with all aspects of its domestic politics and societal features, ideology, the role of energy, business links as well as the impact of regional and global dimensions. This chapter aims to overview the interlinked relationship between the EU, Ukraine, and Russia in a triadic manner within key aspects including ideology, geopolitics, energy, and integration projects and by specifically focusing on the underlying factors that have triggered the emergence of the Russia–Ukraine war of 2022 and further implications for the EU politics.

This paper explores the emergence and coordination of synchrony in networked groups like those that develop integrated product platforms in collaborative ecosystems. While synchronized actions are an important objective for many groups, interorganizational network theory has yet to explore synchrony in depth perhaps because it does not fit the typical diffusion models this research relies upon. By adding organizationally realistic features – sparse network structure and intentional coordination – to the firefly model from theoretical biology, I take some first steps in understanding synchrony in organizational groups. Like diffusion, synchrony is more effective in denser networks, but unlike diffusion clustering decelerates synchrony’s emergence. Coordination by a few group members accelerates group-wide synchrony, and benefits the coordinating organizations with a higher likelihood that it converges to the coordinating organization’s preferred rhythm. This likelihood of convergence to an organization’s preferred rhythm – what I term synchrony performance – increases in denser networks, but is not dependent on tie strength and clustering.

The social and cultural duality perspective suggests dual ordering of interpersonal ties and cultural similarities. Studies to date primarily focus on cultural similarities in interpersonal dyads driven by principles such as homophily and contagion. We aim to extend these principles for sociocultural networks and investigate potentially competing micro-principles that generate these networks, taking into account not only direct dyadic overlap between interpersonal ties and cultural structures, but also the indirect interplay between the social and the cultural.

The empirical analysis utilizes social and semantic network data gathered through ethnographic studies of five creative organizations around Europe. We apply exponential random graph models (ERGMs) for multiplex networks to model the simultaneous operation of several generative principles of sociocultural structuring yielding multiplex dyads and triads that combine interpersonal ties with meaning sharing links.

The results suggest that in addition to the direct overlap of shared meanings and interpersonal ties, sociocultural structure formation is also affected by extra-dyadic links. Namely, expressive interpersonal ties with common third persons condition meaning sharing between individuals, while meaning sharing with common alters leads to interpersonal collaborations. Beyond dyads, the dual ordering of the social and the cultural thus operates as asymmetrical with regard to different types of interpersonal ties.

The paper shows that in addition to direct dyadic overlap, network ties with third parties play an important role for the co-constitution of the social and the cultural. Moreover, we highlight that the concept of network multiplexity can be extended beyond social networks to investigate competing micro-principles guiding the interplay of social and cultural structures.

Purpose – This essay attempts to answer the question, “What distinguishes inter-human influence from other forms of influence?”

Design/methodology/approach – Specifying the micro-foundations of social structures in terms of communicative inferences necessitates a revision of the concept of social structures (and institutions) as distributed, and hence, uncertain, structures of expectation. Institutional realities are generated in linguistic interaction through the indirect communication of generic references. The generalizing function of language – in particular, abstraction and memory – coupled with its reflexive function, to turn references into things, are sufficient to generate both social structures and institutions as collective inferences.

Findings – Social relations are fundamentally communicative relations. The communicative relation is triadic, implying an enunciator, an audience, and some referential content. Through linguistic communication, humans are capable of communicating locally with others about others nonlocally. Institutions exist only as expectations concerning the expectations of others. These expectations, however, are not only in the mind, and they are not exclusively psychological entities. Linguistically, these expectations appear as the reported statement within the reporting statement, that is, they are constituted through indirect discourse.

Research limitations/implications – An important implication for current sociological theory is that, from the point of view of a sociology defined as communication about communication from within communication, institutional realities should not be reified as existing naturalistically or objectively above or behind the communications through which they are instantiated.

Originality value – This approach, then, is decidedly anti-“realist.” The goal of such research is to examine the inadequacy of nonreflexive models of social order. Accounts of how sets of social relationships emerge will remain inadequate if they do not reflect upon the cognitive and communicative processes which make possible the consideration of such structures.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive analysis of how sentiments may be a part of, or adjacent to, status generalization. We demonstrate why this problem is so difficult to solve definitively, as many resolutions may exist. Sentiments may present the properties of graded status characteristics but may also be disrupted by processes of the self. Sentiments may have status properties enacted within dyadic interactions. However, sentiments may also be status elements during triadic constellations of actors. Finally, we discuss current research that is underway to provide more empirical evidence to offer confirmation or disconfirmation for some of our proposed models.

We provide a synthesis of literatures, including pieces from group processes, neuroscience, psychology, and network scholarship, to address the relation between sentiment and status processes. Accordingly, this is a conceptual chapter.

We attempt to motivate future research by exploring the many complications of examining these issues.

Understanding how social inequalities may emerge during group interaction allows researchers to address their deleterious effects. Positive sentiments (in other words, “liking”) should bring actors closer together to complete tasks successfully. Ironically, when paired with negative sentiments within task groups, inequalities in group opportunities may result. To address these social inequalities, a thorough understanding of how they develop is necessary, so that efficacious interventions can be adopted.

This deep dive into the relation between sentiment and status processes joins the 25-year quest to understand the issues surrounding this relationship.

My main point is that the 1920s Chicago School got its scholastic or school-like quality primarily from its notion of what a human being is, from its social psychology, and only secondarily from its sociology. These sociologists developed the novel idea that humans are constituted by symbolic or cultural elements, not biological forces or instincts. They applied Franz Boas's discovery of culture to human nature and the self. In particular, they showed that ethnic groups and their subcultures are not biologically determined or driven by fixed instincts. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Americanization movement held that ethnic groups could be ranked on how intelligent, how criminal, and therefore how fit for democracy they were. This powerful movement, the extreme wing of which was lead by the Northern Ku Klux Klan, advocated different levels of citizenship for different ethnic groups. The Chicago sociologists spear-headed the idea that humans have a universal nature, are all the same ontologically, and therefore all the same morally and legally. In this way, they strengthened the foundations of civil liberties. The Chicago professors advanced their position in a quiet, low-keyed manner, the avoidance of open political controversy being the academic style of the time. Their position was nevertheless quite potent and effective. The actual sociology of the school, also quite important, was largely an expression of the democratic social psychology. In addition, the sociology was dignified and elevated by the moral capital of their theory of human nature.

Existing models of gift applied to religious charities are either abstract or sometimes very limited in their applicability to understand the reciprocal relationships throughout the interconnected chain of giving and receiving charities. The paper contributes to this debate by asking: How gift economy explains the circulation of charities across interconnected spheres of local governance? And what are the implications of these inter-linkages for social welfare provisions where states are ineffective in the provision of these services? To answer these questions, the study presents the case of Zakat in Islam and Dasvandh in Sikhism in the northwest of Pakistan. In both the cases, charity is an important element of the social welfare provision within local governance structure. The findings suggest that conceptualizations of the religious charities as a triad including God, the rich and the poor are unsuitable gift models for grasping the role of charities in the local governance of social welfare provision.