Regime
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As used in the Wikipedia article Transition Management (Governance).

Regime is a meso-level concept that refers to the dominant practices, rules and technologies that provide stability and reinforcement to the prevailing socio-technical systems employed by micro-level actors and pico-level actors.

A regime is a set of rules embedded in a community’s institutions and infrastructure (its Sociotope ) which shape its innovations. This web of inter-linking actors, following a set of rules has been called a ‘socio-technical regime’, in effect, the established practices of a given system. Drawing on evolutionary economics; socio-technical regimes act as a selection and retention mechanism, filtering out the unsuccessful while incorporating more worthy innovations in to the existing regime. (More details and full references in the Wikipedia article.)

In the global society-wide activity system it is practical to identify regimes in the sector map (in the Actor Atlas) for each ISIC class (as listed under the structure of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities, Rev.4 or Economic activities (#isic)).

One example of such a class-level sector map is that of Class: 9101 - Library and archives activities (in the Actor Atlas). Here one can recognize several regimes:

  • No library (a Zero regime, common in most municipalities of developing countries);
  • A library with printed (and written) materials (usually on paper), available for local consultation or borrowing on a fixed location. For a large collection, indexing and physical ordering are important.
  • A mobile library with printed materials, with scheduled visits to municipalities or schools in a region.
  • A library which also provides access to online materials (type telekiosk)
  • An online-library which everyone can access via mobile terminals (smartphone, laptop, desktop at home or in the office,…)
  • A #2030library…