Christopher Chapman, Wai-Fong Chua and Habib Mahama discuss the varieties of points of contact between Actor–Network theory and strategy as practice research. They review the origins of Actor–Network theory and discuss three of its foundational principles: generalized symmetry, recursivity and radical indeterminacy. The authors describe how various streams of preoccupations related to strategic decision making, planning, accounting and control have dealt with these principles over time. By showing how these principles have been drawn on in empirical studies, Chapman, Chua and Mahama elaborate on how SAP researchers can draw on Actor–Network theorizing to fruitfully advance our understanding of the dispersed, complex and non-linear trajectory of strategy-making.

It is shown how the highest levels of prosodic phrasing, φ-phrase and ι-phrase, are mapped to syntactic structure. The interface between the two is driven by the Match model, which requires an isomorphic correspondence between syntactic and prosodic constituents and assigns prosodic boundaries at both edges of syntactic constituents at once. When the syntactic structure is recursive, the prosodic structure is recursive as well. This perfect mapping can be disturbed by well-formedness conditions, a special kind of markedness constraint that bears on the prosodic constituents themselves. Constituents must have a head, be non-recursive, have a minimal weight, etc. In some cases (e.g., when syntactic constituents are too light to be matched by a φ-phrase), they even restructure the matching between syntax and prosody. Information structure is a further factor that influences prosody: Focus may require a different location for the nuclear accent, and givenness may have a deaccenting effect in the postnuclear region of the sentence. As a result, the phonological correlates of φ-phrase and ι-phrase include relative prominence of the prosodic constituents represented on metrical grids.

Today we face a long-run crisis of democratic legitimacy. Our increasing human interdependence is steadily increasing the numbers of “collective action,” or “free-rider” problems. Those problems in turn require increasing amounts of state coercion. Yet, in part precisely because state coercion is growing, that coercion is becoming less legitimate. As the demand for legitimacy increases and the supply decreases, every ounce of legitimacy becomes more precious.

A long-run response to this crisis requires many changes, including major restructuring to decrease inequality.

A relatively modest, but perhaps practicable and far-reaching, change in our thinking would make recursivity, meaning mutually responsive and iterated communication between representatives and constituents, more central to both the ideals and the practices of the representative system. In the aspirational ideal of recursive representation, representatives in the legislative, administrative, and societal realms engage in ongoing back-and-forth communication with their constituents. That recursivity allows each party to listen and learn, facilitating mutual influence and mutual adjustment. Because the process is more respectful of each citizen than the current system, the outcomes are more likely to reflect citizens’ needs. The resulting coercion should be both more defensible normatively and experienced as more legitimate.