Explaining the transnational design of international organizations

Past decades have witnessed a shift in international cooperation toward growing involvement of transnational actors (TNAs), such as non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations, and philanthropic foundations. This article offers a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of TNA access to IOs. The analysis builds on a novel dataset, covering formal TNA access to 298 organizational bodies from 50 IOs over the time period 1950 to 2010. We identify the most profound patterns in TNA access across time, issue areas, policy functions, and world regions, and statistically test competing explanations of the variation in TNA access. The central results are three-fold. First, the empirical data confirm the existence of a far-reaching institutional transformation of IOs over the past sixty years, pervading all issue areas, policy functions, and world regions. Second, variation in TNA access within and across IOs is mainly explained by a combination of three factors: functional demand for the resources of TNAs, domestic democratic standards in the membership of IOs, and state concerns with national sovereignty. Third, existing research suffers from a selection bias that has led it to overestimate the general importance of a new participatory norm in global governance for the openness of IOs

Interactive Gigapixel Prints: Large, Paper-Based Interfaces for Visual Context and Collaboration

For centuries, large paper information graphics such as maps have been important cognitive artifacts in navigation, architecture, engineering, and scientific work. Paper-based practices leverage the reliability, affordability, readability, mobility, and flexibility of paper — yet lack the interactivity afforded by digital technologies. This video introduces Interactive Gigapixel Prints (GIGAprints), computer controlled large-scale paper displays. When combined with a digital pen, these prints enable users to capture handwritten content. When augmented by digital displays, these prints integrate the high spatial resolution of wide-format printing with the high temporal resolution of digital displays. By having paper and digital displays work together as an ensemble, GIGAprints provide the best of both worlds

Iterative Design of a Paper + Digital Toolkit: Supporting Designing, Developing, and Debugging

With advances in digital pens, there has been recent interest in supporting augmented paper in both research and commercial applications. This paper introduces the iterative design of a toolkit for event-driven programming of augmented paper applications. We evaluated the toolkit with 69 students (17 teams) in an external university class, gathering feedback through e-mail, in-person discussions, and analysis of 51,000 lines of source code produced by the teams. This paper describes successes and challenges we discovered in providing an event-driven architecture as the programming model for paper interaction. Informed by this evaluation, we extended the toolkit with visual tools for designing, developing, and debugging, thereby lowering the threshold for exploring paper UI designs, providing informal techniques for specifying UI layouts, and introducing visualizations for event handlers and programming interfaces. These results have implications beyond paper applications — R3 takes steps toward supporting programming by example modification, exploring APIs, and improved visualization of event flow

When reactivity fails: The limited effects of hospital rankings

Dorn C. When reactivity fails: The limited effects of hospital rankings. Social Science Information. 2019;58(2):327-353.Recent research has advanced the idea that modern society is replete with numerous measuring activities that evaluate the performance of individuals and organisations. Both the research and the application of such measures suggest that the scrutinised actors will internalise the expectations associated with these measures and adjust their behaviour accordingly (‘reactivity’). Usually these expectations involve both technical and moral demands aimed at improving the evaluated activities so as to make them more beneficial, efficient, and transparent for the consumer and society in general. However, both research and practice instantaneously equate their widespread presence with their efficacy, i.e. that their implied behaviour-altering capacity is inevitably achieved. This overlooks that the coupling of measurement and behavioural change is mitigated by the sensemaking processes of the examined actors. Using examples from the US hospital sector, this article shows that patients, medical professionals, and hospitals do not simply conform to the expectations created by hospitals rankings but rather show different forms of resistance, such as ignorance or rejection. Thereby, the paper highlights that the conditions under which measures prove inescapable and substantially influence social fields need to be examined more closely