Jacob Dijkstra
Jacob Dijkstra (University of Groningen)
Jacob Dijkstra is associate professor of sociology at the sociology department of the University of Groningen, and member of the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology. His substantive research interests include social dilemmas, behavioral game theory, social networks, and collective decision making. He is generally interested in formalizing social theory and in experimental research. Apart from continuously working with other ICS members and ICS PhD students, Jacob Dijkstra is involved in collaboration with Marcel van Assen (Tilburg University).
Participation in local renewable energy initiatives: The role of social networks (with Fleur Goedkoop and Andreas Flache)
This paper looks at the role of social networks in facilitating local renewable energy initiatives (LREIs) in the Netherlands. LREIs are bottom-up community initiatives in which communities seek to increase their energetic sustainability through for instance energy saving campaigns or the locally organized production of renewable energy. In the typical LREI, a group of frontrunners sets up an organization to run the project. Thereafter, more members of the wider community should join. A key factor determining the eventual success of LREIs is the extent to which community members beyond the frontrunners can be motivated to join. In the present paper we investigate the role of social networks in this recruitment process. Most existing studies investigating recruitment for LREIs focus on individual characteristics of frontrunners and potential participants. Studies that include social networks often employ qualitative data from small samples. The latter studies suggest that people are indeed often recruited by family, friends, or acquaintances who already joined the LREI. However, in addition to direct ties, indirect ties to (one of) the frontrunners in the broader social network of the community may affect the recruitment process. Indirect social ties channel information about the LREI and the frontrunners through the community, and are indicative of common social foci to which people belong. Thus, community members indirectly linked to (one of) the frontrunners may be likely joiners. At the community level, a socially isolated team of frontrunners may not get the project to expand beyond the social clique to which it is directly linked. A methodological problem of quantitatively investigating indirect links in community networks is the practical infeasibility of mapping complete person-to-person networks in communities comprised of several hundred through several thousand households. We circumvent this problem by (i) drawing a random sample from the community households, (ii) eliciting their direct ties to the frontrunners, and (ii) using affiliation networks (i.e., memberships in (in)formal associations) to map indirect ties. We combine the data on direct ties and associational memberships into one quasi-bipartite network, and use it as an approximation to the underlying community social network structure. Then we estimate the effects of direct and indirect ties to frontrunners on intention to participate in an ordinal regression model. We use quantitative data from ten villages and city neighborhoods in the Netherlands (N=>850), in which an LREI has been recently started.