Understanding Potential Cyber-Armies in Elections: A Study of Taiwan

Currently, online social networks are essential platforms for political organizations to monitor public opinion, disseminate information, argue with the opposition, and even achieve spin control. However, once such purposeful/aggressive articles flood social sites, it would be more difficult for users to distinguish which messages to read or to trust. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by identifying potential “cyber-armies/professional users” during election campaigns on social platforms. We focus on human-operated accounts who try to influence public discussions, for instance, by publishing hundreds/thousands of comments to show their support or rejection of particular candidates. To achieve our objectives, we collected activity data over six months from a prominent Taiwan-based social forum before the 2018 national election and applied a series of statistical analyses to screen out potential targets. From the results, we successfully identified several accounts according to distinctive characteristics that corresponded to professional users. According to the findings, users and platforms could realize potential information manipulation and increase the transparency of the online society

Learning to be authentic. Religious Practices of German and Dutch Muslims following the Salafiyya in forums and chat rooms

In the last decades the Salafiyya as one current within a long history within Islam has come to Europe and become increasingly popular among young Muslims looking for an “authentic” Islam. It is therefore not surprising, that they have taken their interest in religion to the internet and, more specifically, to the computer-mediated environments of social media like chat rooms and online forums. This leads to a series of central questions for the dynamics within the Salafiyya: How do Salafi Muslims approach and use the religious sources (Quran and hadith) in these environments? What kind of religious practices occur in these spaces and how do they relate to offline practices? How are Muslim identities within the Salafiyya formed and maintained in computer-mediated environments? What does this mean for the subjectivity of the individual believer? And how is the religious authority within the Salafiyya affected by these developments? This study answers these questions by employing an innovative methodological approach grounded in practice theory and online ethnography. The data was collected online and offline during extensive and intensive fieldwork in Germany, the Netherlands, and in computer-mediated environement of Muslims inspired by the Salafiya from 2008 until 2011. The study shows how technical and socio-cultural affordances as well as practices reproduce Islam as understood by Salafi Muslims in the specific settings of computer-mediated environments.Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek/Open competitie - programmatisch onderzoek/360-63-040/E

"Don't Sell Things, Sell Effects": Overseas Influences in New Zealand Department Stores, 1909-1956

In the years before World War II, New Zealand department stores became increasingly influenced by American ideas about salesmanship. This involved a shift away from British precepts about retailing, which discouraged initative by salespeople and emphasized service. Stores that adopted American ideas were trying to become more competitive and began to appeal to working-and middle class consumers. They imported the concept of "suggestion selling" and the idea of pushing complementary goods. New Zealand mercants modified American methods by relying on the use of manuals and bulletins to train salespeople and, unlike American stores, did not introduce commission payment schemes

Prédiction de la détérioration du comportement à l’aide de l’apprentissage automatique

Les plateformes de médias sociaux rassemblent des individus pour interagir de manière amicale et civilisée tout en ayant des convictions et des croyances diversifiées. Certaines personnes adoptent des comportements répréhensibles qui nuisent à la sérénité et affectent négativement l’équanimité des autres utilisateurs. Certains cas de mauvaise conduite peuvent initialement avoir de petits effets statistiques, mais leur accumulation persistante pourrait entraîner des conséquences majeures et dévastatrices. L’accumulation persistante des mauvais comportements peut être un prédicteur valide des facteurs de risque de détérioration du comportement. Le problème de la détérioration du comportement n’a pas été largement étudié dans le contexte des médias sociaux. La détection précoce de la détérioration du comportement peut être d’une importance cruciale pour éviter que le mauvais comportement des individus ne s’aggrave. Cette thèse aborde le problème de la détérioration du comportement dans le contexte des médias sociaux. Nous proposons de nouvelles méthodes basées sur l’apprentissage automatique qui (1) explorent les séquences comportementales et leurs motifs temporels pour faciliter la compréhension des comportements manifestés par les individus et (2) prédisent la détérioration du comportement à partir de combinaisons consécutives de motifs séquentiels correspondant à des comportements inappropriés. Nous menons des expériences approfondies à l’aide d’ensembles de données du monde réel et démontrons la capacité de nos modèles à prédire la détérioration du comportement avec un haut degré de précision, c’est-à-dire des scores F-1 supérieurs à 0,8. En outre, nous examinons la trajectoire de détérioration du comportement afin de découvrir les états émotionnels que les individus présentent progressivement et d’évaluer si ces états émotionnels conduisent à la détérioration du comportement au fil du temps. Nos résultats suggèrent que la colère pourrait être un état émotionnel potentiel qui pourrait contribuer substantiellement à la détérioration du comportement

Social Network Data Collection : Principles and Modalities

Relational questions require relational data and methods. That may seem like a truism that is unnecessary to make explicit, but the social and behavioral sciences are replete with relational theories (Borgatti and Halgin, 2011) and questions that have repeatedly been examined with data that make essentializing assumptions (Emirbayer, 1997); that is, relying on non-relational data

The Challenges of Integrating New Technology into an Organization

To remain competitive in a global economy, businesses need to adapt to an ever changing environment to meet their customer’s needs. Staying competitive means continuing to evolve as an organization and making changes to both process and technology to gain a competitive edge over their competition. Organizations must become adept in bringing in new technology and managing the challenges that go along with implementing the change. Changes of this nature can provide significant benefits to an organization but can also present many challenges that need to be managed to yield a positive outcome. Problems arise when organizations attempt to bring in a new technology without proper management and training for their employees’. Using case studies from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (NJDGE) and ALMAC Clinical Technologies (CT) along with peer reviewed research, this paper will assist in describing the benefits and challenges of managing technological change, training considerations and the impact that it can have to an organization’s staff

Social Capital of Political Leaders: The Third Dimension of Political Power, Committee of Foreign Affairs in Parliament of Finland

Recently, theories on social capital have received growing attention in public policy making due to the benefits social capital is claimed to aggregate to goups of people. Emerged critics, however, challenge this comprehension: social capital also restricts performance. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), social capital is a metaphor for power that defines individuals’ positions in social hierarchies. Forms of this influential power are relational to different fields, within which social interactions are embedded. Further, distribution of social authority is a growing trend in political leadership—who decides what is decided? Drawing on Bourdieu, this thesis defends the third dimension of power, as introduced by Steven Lukes (2005), as the dominant component of social capital. The purpose is to extend past social capital research to parliamentary context in order to explain differences in political leaders’ performance. In particular, the study sets forth political leaders’ resources for power and deepens understanding on the social regularities, power distribution, and unwritten rules in the Parliament of Finland. The qualitative case research samples 15 political leaders working in the Committee of Foreign Affairs at the time the research data was gathered in year 2015. Method for the study is qualitative case research. Primary data was gathered via semi-structured interviews, the average duration of which were 60 minutes. Findings reveal that social relationships contribute to dominate social positions that equal with political power. Power is distributed proportionally to quality and amount of individual resources with ability to advertise them, hence, Members of Parliament (MPs) are pre-evaluated based on age and gender. MPs with shared interests tend to form reciprocal sub-groups which strengthen their influence. First term MPs are positioned low in the power hierarchy. The most valued resources for power are status, substance, seniority and experience, social capabilities, and charm including persuasion skills. Social sensitivity together with parliamentary regularities constitutes political habitus, or the eye for the game. Power relations shape individual identity and judgement, which have considerable effect on MPs’ ability to utilize available strategies for political influence as well as on the collective benefits of social capital. In this case, power distances are narrow and micro level social capital is converted from the cultural. Therefore, social capital induces positive gain in form of consent and knowledge based political decisions. However, actors diverging from shared expectancies are excluded in the political decision making. This thesis paves the way for socio-political research on social capital, parliamentary policy making, and organizational leadership by introducing a theoretical frame that conjoins the third dimension of power and Bourdieu’s social capital.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

The impact of employees' working relations in creating and retaining trust: the case of the Bahrain Olympic Committee

Introduction: This thesis investigates the impact of employees’ working relations in creating, maintaining and retaining trust in the Bahrain Olympic Committee (BOC). Aim: The main aim of this thesis is to determine how the three groups of Organisational Trust variables, namely Social System Elements (SSE), Factors of Trustworthiness (FoT) and Third-Party Gossip (TPG), affect employees’ Organisational Trust (OTR) in the BOC and promote Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB). To answer this main aim, a conceptual framework was created that focused on exploring the following research aims: (1) the interrelationship between SSE and FoT, (2) the effect of SSE on OTR, (3) the impact of TPG on OTR and (4) the effect of OTR on overall OCB. Methodology: The study uses a mixed-method case study research style that included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 managers, an online questionnaire survey with 320 employees of the BOC and an analysis of the BOC’s Annual Reports from 2015 to 2018. Results: The qualitative and quantitative findings indicate, firstly, that there is a significant interrelationship between SSE and FoT, establishing that SSE’s perception of organisational justice (OJ), including that FoTs benevolence and integrity as the most important factors in yielding employees’ trust in the BOC. Secondly, it has been established that SSEs have significant direct and indirect effects on OTR. Thirdly, negative and positive TPG concurrently occurred in the BOC and the prevalence of negative TPG poses more impact on OTR. Finally, this study’s findings demonstrated OTR’s effect in generating OCB, including that Civic Virtue was rated as the most preferred of the five OCB themes; this indicates the managers’ and the employees’ strong emotional attachment and support of the activities taking place at the BOC. Contributions: Overall, this thesis substantially contributes to OTR literature, particularly in the context of the Middle East. It also proposes several insightful recommendations for future research and practical implications for practitioners in the field of Organisational Trust