Phillip Agre argues that the central actor in civil society is the “issue entrepreneur.” Civil society is (re)formed by people discussing issues that interest them–you’re not going to join an organization if its mission doesn’t get you excited somehow. For the most part, the battle lines on any particular issue don’t move much (abortion, for example). But when there’s a crisis, the issue entrepreneur can move in and broker power between the different interested groups and lead them to commit to new rules of engagement, probably moving the front line in the process.

But we’re not talking about Nietzsche’s “world historical man” or even Saul Alinsky’s troublesome community organizer. It’s not quite that heroic. The success of the issue entrepreneur depends upon pre-existing networks of social trust, which depend upon people having basic social skills. The social network operates in a four-dimensional lattice structure:

1. in the vertical dimension, individuals who stake out a given issue on the national level will generally network with those who stake out the same issue on either the global or the regional level;
2. in the geographic dimension, individuals who stake out issues in a given geographic jurisdiction will generally network with their counterparts in other jurisdictions;
3. in the institutional dimension, individuals who stake out a given issue within one institutional context will generally network with those who stake out the same issue in other institutions; and
4. in the ideological dimension, individuals who stake out ideological related positions on different issues in similar institutional locations will generally network with one another.

The issue entrepreneur is the one staking out the issues, researching them, and connecting the different points on the lattice structure. When a crisis happens, he is in a position to move and reshape the lattice in his favor–if his networking skills are strong enough.

So two questions come up:
1. Is the blogosphere such a four-dimensional lattice?
2. Are (some) bloggers issue entrepreneurs?

(Hat tip to Mark Woods for the Agre article.)