Stability and change in strategic action fields: Municipal solid waste incineration in China, 1988–2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The theory of strategic action fields (SAFs) is a perspective from which to better understand the emergence, stability, and change of the meso-level social order. However, the transferability of this theoretical perspective requires additional empirical evidence. Therefore, this study regards municipal solid waste (MSW) incineration in China as a SAF, in which various forces vie for the dominant position around the construction and operation of incineration plants. Given that all fields are embedded in a shifting social and cultural context, I analyze the interactions and competitions between incumbents and challengers. I then examine a series of consecutive events in the SAF, such as the emergence of the waste crisis, the development of MSW incineration, and consequential episodes of contention. I also investigate other factors that may affect the prospects for stability and change of the SAF, including actions of the state, influences of other related fields, and large-scale crises. By tracing the developmental trajectory of the SAF of MSW incineration, I discuss the applicability of the theory of SAFs to understanding an underexplored field in China.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".