Jun is an urbanist undertaking research surrounding urban innovation from the perspective of urban socio-technical transformation. His key research interests are around smart cities and smart urbanism; citizenship and the right to the contemporary city; and 3) critical theory.
He has recently published 3 new open access journal articles. The first article is about smart cities, Chinese smart government, and multi-level governance. The second is about grassroots digital innovations from a multi-level perspective. The third article explores how social value is created on platform cooperatives using a critical realist approach. You can read more on each below and access the articles via the links.
Nothing but symbolic: Chinese new authoritarianism, smart government, and the challenge of multi-level governance
This study investigates the impact of Chinese new authoritarian principles on the approach to multi-level governance that China has implemented during the national transition to smart government. Employing a analysis, they illustrate the phenomenon of symbolic compliance, where sub-national public and private actors comply with state-level mandates but while being aware that their actions will fall short of achieving the desired improvements. This behavior, hitherto undocumented in the literature, contributes to the implementation of data-driven public service management solutions that inadequately address local governmental issues. Their findings prompt a re-evaluation of multi-level governance theory and practice in new authoritarian settings and underscore the need for a more pragmatic approach to smart government transitions in such contexts.
Friends or enemies? Unraveling niche-regime interactions in grassroots digital innovations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, grassroots (GDIs) have gained traction as innovation niches, providing an alternative to the prevailing mainstream regime dominating smart city transitions. Drawing upon interviews with experts and promoters of GDIs from 12 European countries, they explore the relationships between these initiatives and mainstream regime actors. Five distinct types of niche-regime interactions have emerged from the analysis: inertia, indirect support, antagonism, direct support, and active collaboration. These interactions do not follow a linear and incremental trajectory, but rather represent dynamic configurations that change over time and at different geographic scales. Consequently, their findings contribute to the literature on socio-technical transitions and grassroots innovation by further revealing the multidimensionality and multiscalarity of mainstream regimes. In light of these findings, they urge scholars and practitioners to reconsider how information flows and power imbalances among local and supralocal actors in mainstream regimes influence the development of innovation niches and dictate the pace of socio-technical transitions.
Co-constructing cooperative value ecosystems: A critical realist perspective
This study focuses on digital platform cooperatives (DPCs) and investigates how social value is created within platform cooperativism for fostering a more equitable and inclusive digital landscape. they explore and theorise the outcomes of social value creation by DPCs and identify the generative mechanisms that drive their emergence. They do this by adopting a Critical Realism philosophical stance, in combination with Grounded Theory techniques based on the Straussian version of coding. Their data is drawn from 36 interviews with DPC (co-)founders, members, and experts, alongside an array of documentary data from DPCs across 12 European countries. Their analysis reveals three outcomes of social value creation by DPCs: strengthening community capacities, federating cooperative ventures, and fostering practices for narrative co-creation. Additionally, they identify two generative mechanisms with enduring properties and explanatory power: collective identity and empowerment, and government-community symbiosis. These mechanisms are identified through retroductive theorising, offering plausible explanations for the outcomes of social value creation, situated within relevant contextual conditions, such as grassroots mobilisation and advocacy, institutional commitment and policy support, and legislative frameworks for cooperative integration. This study contributes to the understanding of social value creation in platform cooperativism as an endeavour to co-construct a cooperative value ecosystem, providing valuable insights for both theory and practice.