There are many important societal issues facing the US and the world. There are also policy initiatives intended to deal with the problems raised by these issues. We couple some of the social issues ...and the policy initiatives to address them to the efforts of the Koch Brothers who created a powerful network of allies mobilized to support their libertarian ideas and ambitions. The relevant theoretical domain concerns the operation of social movements as the network of their allies forms a social movement. The mobilization includes obstructing many of the constructive policy initiatives discussed in the literature. This network has a diverse array of actors, each with their own core interests. A total of 443 Koch Brothers allies were identified. Their URLs were visited repeatedly to identify their core interests, for which a set of 47 keywords were established. A network for these keywords was constructed in which the links are the number of times they were shared by allies of the Koch Brothers. A variant of community detection was used to determine six communities of interests, all of which are very coherent. These communities are discussed in terms of the issues they raise for the US and the world. The implication for theory construction is to more fully understand the organization of actors opposing policy proposals for solving important societal problems and find effective ways for countering their destructive efforts.
Transformability is one of the essential attributes of social systems. To improve transformability, one should create the preconditions for strategic intervention on the underlying social structures. ...This paper proposes a design-driven conflict (DDC) methodology in response to the limitation of the systemic design approach by aggregating a network of allies essential for the paradigmatic shifts. The proposed methodology has more strategic implications. It starts with unfolding the actors and shared resources (phase one context mapping). It continues with defining the power relations between them, drivers, and spillovers that cause conflicts and disagreements (phase two analysis). After this, it shows how one can synthesize the commonalities and the core narratives of actors in the form of boundary objects (phase three synthesis). By using the existing narratives and the commonalities between actors as inputs for the translation phase, DDC creates the preconditions for a network of allies construction. Next, the methodology uses translation as a method, in relation to the four moments of a ‘sociology of translation’, problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization, in order to gradually change the learning paradigm of the system. In the scaling-up phase (phase five), DDC proposes ways of creating a narrative platform, shedding light on how to mobilize the results of translation from the community level onto a broader social scale. The framework for the design methodology has been evaluated based on a method content analysis and by a group of experts from diverse backgrounds and disciplines. The results show, except for the efficiency of the method, which requires additional investigation in a real-life context, the efficacy and effectiveness of the method have been elaborated in a sufficient way.
