This chapter investigates why a competitor would want to become a member of one of the ecumenical synods. What could the associations do for them after they had paid the relatively high entrance fee? A major preoccupation of the synods was obtaining and safeguarding privileges for their members. There were three main types: privileges providing personal security, financial privileges and honorary privileges. A special category were the so-called opsonia, pensions granted to victors in a select category of games. Another aspect was the legal status of synod members. There are indications that synodic lobbying protected their members from the Roman infamia laws that targeted people performing in shows. The second section of this chapter focuses on the support offered by the synods during festivals. They ensured, for instance, that their members were well lodged and fed. This chapter argues that in securing privileges and offering local support, the synods relied on their extensive social networks, which reached out to local elites as well as to Roman administrators and the imperial court.

From the 1880s onward, a vigorous movement inspired by Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist thought developed both within the Russian Empire and internationally. This chapter traces the activity of Tolstoyan communities, publishing houses, societies, and newspapers, and considers the role they played in building and maintaining international Tolstoyan networks. It considers how Tolstoy’s thought was interpreted in different national contexts as well as how and why enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s ideas emerged or revived in specific periods: it also discusses some key debates and challenges that Tolstoyans confronted, and the ways these were debated both within the movement and in interactions with those outside it. Tolstoy’s focus on following one’s own conscience meant that he strongly objected to the idea of a movement in his name. But as this chapter makes clear, while Tolstoyans were always fiercely independent-minded, the ideas and causes around which they united gave them a strong sense of being part of a collective, wherever and whenever they were active.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.

In this chapter, we see how Cicero, as a rising Roman politician, uncovers hidden lines of influence, pinpoints shades of political support, and frames partisan divides in the Roman Republic. Here, Cicero uses voluntas both to analyze politics as he finds it and to argue for its rational improvement. Descriptively, Cicero uses voluntate and summa voluntate to identify subtler shades of opposition or support and to trace lines of unseen influence among Rome’s leading men like Pompey and Caesar. Through his gifted pen, will becomes a measurable force as it had seemingly not been before. To measure will is to rationalize it, and Cicero builds new philosophical arguments for the primacy of voluntas over violence and for a vision of politics that transacts power rationally by the intersecting wills of magistrates and people. I use powermapping, a tool of modern advocacy, as a lens to examine Cicero’s political strategy and use of language. This vision, at once old and new, is upended by the ascent of Caesar, whose sole voluntas undoes Cicero’s rational framework, exerting will by brute force and eliminating the old pluralist order.

Molière’s extraordinary success between 1659 and 1673 was due not only to his virtuosity as a dramatist, his comic talent or his exploitation of current affairs; it was due also to his feeling for an ‘event’ and his ability to capture attention. This contribution studies his unprecedented investment in publicity, which mobilised a multitude of forms and mediums, as well as its reliance on a network of agents with varied motivations. Literary history has long tried to distinguish between Molière’s friends and enemies by relying on their praise or criticism of him. This contribution studies them rather as agents who, depending on the context, opportunity and their own interests, sometimes acted for and sometimes against Molière, without this indicating either personal enmity or ties of affection.

This chapter develops the economics theory of demonstration projects and then investigates the role of one demonstration project – the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design – at lowering information barriers for the adoption of innovative energy and environmental technologies. The KBISD demonstration project allows us to observe the formation of a network around a demonstration project and how attitudes and behaviors relating to environmental technologies permeate and disseminate throughout the network. This section presents results from an industry-wide survey as well as several dozen semi-structured interviews related to the KBISD. The interviews reveal motivations, challenges, innovations, costs, and risks associated with participation in a demonstration project, as well as key differences between this living building approach and design–bid–build approaches often employed in traditional buildings. It finds that, while working on the building was not affiliated with increased levels of technology familiarity prior to building construction, being affiliated with the US Green Building Council is highly correlated with increased knowledge of emergent technologies. This points to professional knowledge networks as having a key role in disseminating information regarding emergent technologies.

This chapter develops a theory to explain how demonstration projects can help facilitate transformation in the marketplace. This theory is based primarily on a single economic concept: The costs of acquiring and utilizing new information. Understanding the role that pilot and demonstration projects can play in disseminating information is crucial to understanding the prospects for market transformation. These information flows occur both on the supply side and demand side of the (building) technologies market. This chapter details how information flows across supply networks and throughout markets can eventually shift standard operating practices, though these results are hardly guaranteed. We speculate that geographic networks and communities of practice are largely responsible for leveraging information spillovers, lowering costs, and facilitating dissemination of innovative technologies.

This chapter provides historical background on Asia, amid talks of an Asian twenty-first century. We show that Asia’s resurgence has been based on models that differ substantively from those of capitalist development in Europe and North America, not least through the heavy reliance on the state. Further, they have had many common features, not least being centred on the pervasive use of connections – familial, commercial and political. We term these networks as the connections world. Whilst this world has been supportive to growth and development, it contains major fallibilities. These include cronyism and its consequences – high inequality and corruption. In addition, the connections world breeds market power which impairs efficiency and innovation. The resulting structure of the economy also holds back the creation of good jobs. Much of the connections world is also associated with autocracy or heavily managed democracies and this introduces risks of instability. As such, the broad model that has helped Asia grow so strongly is less likely to be so supportive in future. Rethinking the connections world will be required – not an easy task given strongly embedded and resilient foundations.

This chapter looks at how Asia’s connections world is configured, highlighting the extraordinarily pervasive nature of ties between business and politics and the networks on which they are based. Most of these relationships are strongly transactional but they also affect how individuals and companies organise themselves. For example, the institutional framework for private companies is often designed to leverage resources and assets, as well as gaining advantage, whether in relation to the regulator or competitors. We use a novel dataset with information on politically-exposed persons and institutions throughout Asia to map the various networks at the level of each country. There are significant differences between countries, mainly resulting from the variation in political systems. The network maps are complemented by detailed cases and examples from across Asia. Whatever the local variation, these webs of connections bind together with common purpose. Leveraging connections for mutual benefit delivers large and enduring benefits that have mostly proven resistant to changes of government or even political regime. Such behaviour also cuts across political systems.

How is legal expertise deployed in an institution such as the Westminster Parliament? The sociology of the legal profession suggests that the client plays a major role in how legal expertise is understood and used. In the case of Westminster, this is somewhat problematic because Parliament as a ‘client’ is not easily pinned down: it is multicentred-institution and parliamentarians; and it is an intensely political arena. The result is that there is a wide variety of sources of legal expertise (this chapter prefers the term ‘legal support’) for Parliament and parliamentarians, and no one source has a monopoly over legal support, save where the issue relates to institutional matters. The ultimate argument of the chapter is that the processes of seeking and making use of legal support is not that different from the way that legal support is sought and made use of in society more broadly. The client determines when they will seek legal support, and what use they make of it. In practice, then, parliamentarians make use of known sources first to understand legal issues (which may come from inside or outside Parliament); only rarely will they seek or need to seek formal ‘legal advice’.