Risk regulation at transnational level: understanding the role of non-state actors

by Judy van der Graaf, [email protected] Risk, and how it can be managed or regulated, has become a very prominent issue in contemporary society. The financial crisis and the responses to it serve as good illustrations of that. And at a very different level it is visible in our department with the establishment of the new MSc programme Economies, Risk and Society that, amongst various other topics, looks at questions of risk and regulation in economic life. In my PhD research I am especially interested in the challenges that globalization poses to the regulation of risks. In a globalized world with markets spanning multiple nation-states and even continents, risks can transfer quickly and easily. This poses an additional layer of complexity with regard to how risks can be controlled and who can play a role in their control. In my thesis I aim to add to a growing regulation and governance scholarship which argues that regulation should no longer be considered as the prerogative of the state and that we need to develop a greater understanding of sources of control beyond the state

Electoral participation in the Netherlands: Individual and contextual influences

AbstractResearch into electoral participation has produced two traditions, one focusing mainly on individual level explanations while the second concentrates primarily on aggregate level explanations. By bringing these two research approaches together, we are not only able to explain individual electoral participation more thoroughly, but we also gain additional insight into the influence of aggregate level characteristics on individual behavior. We combine eight National Election Studies held in the Netherlands between 1971 and 1994 enabling us to study variation on the individual and the contextual (aggregate) level, including interactions between these two levels. Findings show that the addition of contextual characteristics form a significant improvement to an individual level model predicting electoral participation. Findings also confirm our expectation that the influence of individual characteristics such as education or political interest is dependent upon contextual characteristics describing for instance the salience of the election

Designing for mod development: user creativity as product development strategy on the firm-hosted 3D software platform

The thesis is designed to improve our understanding of user participation in Web-based development practices in the commercial setting of the 3D software industry. It aims to investigate whether the creative capacities of users and their contributions to the online firm-hosted 3D platform are indicative of a novel configuration of production that influences the processes of product development across firm boundaries. The thesis mobilizes the user participation literature developing in media research as its main theoretical framework. It builds on insights derived from work on user participation in media sites as seen through a cultural lens, in particular, as developed in Henry Jenkins' notions of 'participatory' and 'convergence culture'. The user participation literature is supported by a combination of insights drawn from work on communities of practice and user-centred innovation so as to offer a more robust approach to examine and appreciate the firm-hosted 3D platform as a site of user participation. More specifically, the conceptual framework for the study provides a basis for an examination of the ways a software developer finn encourages user participation in a market and of how this enables and facilitâtes particular modes of user creativity. These are shown to shape and maintain a firm-hosted platform that aids product development efforts that are expected to benefit the developer fimi. An empirical study of the platform, Second Life, provides the basis for the analysis of finn-user interactions which are shown to underpin a distinctive finn leaming process in the context of product development that occurs across permeable fimi boundaries. The thesis yields insight into the way a developer firm invites its user base to partner with it in product development, indicating how aspects of user participation associated with non-market dynamics are embedded in commercial activity and professionalism. The pivotal role of users is revealed in the design, development and sustainability of a firm-hosted 3D product. The findings point to interesting relationships between the distinctive creative capacities of users and the range of capabilities afforded by the firm-provided design space. Variations in user participation and contributions to product development suggest that particular patterns of learning opportunities occur. The analysis yields several new concepts including a 'modification effect market' which are used to extend existing conceptualizations of user participation in digitai development practices in the commercial setting of the 3D software industry

Observational causality from -omics

Some human traits like disease are heritable, which means that they run in families. This indicates that there must be something on the DNA that affects an individual’s susceptibility to developing a trait. In the last 15 years, scientists from around the world have been very successful in mapping the locations on the DNA that are associated to traits like disease, finding thousands of loci, and hundreds of DNA locations per trait, making them truly complex traits. So, we have a very good understanding about which locations on the DNA are important for developing complex traits like disease. Unfortunately, it’s still unclear how these locations on the DNA affect an individual’s trait. In this thesis I investigate how we can best understand the DNA locations that affect trait susceptibility and in doing so, identify the causes for human traits like disease. One important technique that we have used to test for finding these causal relationships is called Mendelian randomization. Mendelian randomization identifies naturally occurring experiments that have happened in observational data. In principle, Mendelian randomization can conclude the same things from observational data as from an experimental study. So called `observational causality` has many benefits as it’s cheaper than an experiment, and is less burdensome on the subjects, as they are not subjected to any intervention. The causes that I’m interested in are so called `-omics` traits. -omics traits are molecular measurements that are usually strongly regulated by the DNA. This strong DNA regulation makes -omics traits interesting candidates to understand the mechanism behind the genetic loci of other traits. In this thesis we have investigated gene expression, protein levels and microbiome measurements as our -omics traits of interest for a wide variety of traits including celiac disease and LDL-cholesterol levels