Emergent leadership in online communities: an interactive process of co-influencing

We propose a theoretical approach informed by a power-in-practice perspective that allows us to examine the emergence of leadership in online communities. We theorize leadership emergence as a process of co-influencing that is constituted by forces of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ different enactments of power that are formative of communal interactions. More specifically we identify three pathways for emergent leadership based on different modes of community influence. These insights are based on a detailed exploration of interactions in one particular online community #WeAreNotWaiting, offering distinct contributions to the literature on leadership emergence, particularly in online communities without formal roles and hierarchies

Exploring the emergence and disappearance of transableism on transabled.org: Digital ethnography of a transient mental illness

Transableism is an historical condition that originated in an online community named transabled.org, existing between 1996 and 2013. Transableism manifested as the desire to be disabled, arising out of a felt sense of incongruence between one’s inner sense of identity as disabled, and one’s bodily reality as abled. During its existence, transableism attracted clinical attention and was proposed for entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) under the descriptor Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). However, despite its growing visibility, in 2012 BIID failed to enter the DSM and the online transabled community disappeared. The aim of this thesis is to explore transableism’s rapid emergence and subsequent failure to achieve formal medical recognition. The key questions underpinning this thesis are (1) why did transableism emerge and (2) why did it disappear? Taking a qualitative approach, this thesis uses digital ethnography to analyse all content posted to transabled.org in its active years. The originality of this thesis lies in the way it uses the theoretical lens of an ecological niche of ‘transient mental illness’ (Hacking, 1998) to examine the historical, cultural and social factors which informed transableism, opening up a new, never before explored perspective. Use of the ecological niche of transient mental illness model provides a nuanced and holistic answer to the questions which underpin this thesis. I argue that transableism emerged because it reflected and expressed broader cultural understandings and tensions surrounding authentic versus inauthentic disability. Its emergence was also facilitated by a centralised model of community leadership which, for a time, successfully fostered a coherent group identity and enlisted the interests of clinicians. On the other hand, transableism disappeared because BIID failed to conform to an accepted authenticity politics of disabled identity and was policed accordingly. In addition, although the centralised model of community leadership initially facilitated transableism, towards the later years, this model collapsed, leading to conflict, community attrition and moderator burn out. Overall, this thesis makes 6 original contributions to knowledge by advancing understandings within (1) extant transableism scholarship, (2) broader medical sociological literatures, (3) the disability studies literature, (4) scholarship that explores claims to authentic identities, and the limits of such claims, (5) the literature on leadership and moderation practices within online communities and (6) the health advocacy community literature

Distributed leadership, trust and online communities

This paper analyses the role of distributed leadership and trust in online communities. The team-based informal ethos of online collaboration requires a different kind of leadership from that in formal positional hierarchies. Such leadership may be more flexible and sophisticated, capable of encompassing ambiguity and rapid change. Online leaders need to be partially invisible, delegating power and distributing tasks. Yet, simultaneously, online communities are facilitated by the high visibility and subtle control of expert leaders. This paradox: that leaders need to be both highly visible and invisible as appropriate, was derived from prior research and tested in the analysis of online community discussions using a pattern-matching process. It is argued that both leader visibility and invisibility are important for the facilitation of trusting collaboration via distributed leadership. Advanced leadership responses to complex situations in online communities foster positive group interaction and decision-making, facilitated through active distribution of specific tasks

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Marine Corps Cultural Similarities to Native Americans

According to the 4-field approach to anthropology, a people can be defined by its archaeology, culture, biology and linguistics (Hicks, 2013). Native Americans and Marines have striking similarities as a people when using this approach, especially in cultural and linguistic analysis

Emergence of wellbeing in community participation

This paper explores and reflects upon the literature and several mini case studies to recommend a change of focus for the linking management and development of community participants and community organisations. This change of focus looks at complexity and patterns that arise from the multitude of social interactions; the support and development of individuals and the effect this can have on an organisation’s wellbeing; and the effect a community organisation can have on that of the individual. To gain insight into wellbeing, people need to be aware of their mind, body and energy and how they affect others. There is evidence that terminally ill people who have found new beliefs have experienced a spontaneous remission of disease. Humanity evolves in the same way as we control our destiny. We can learn to love, respect, trust, and commit to each other and work in harmony, or we can foster disharmony resulting in failure and negative feelings. As the economy changes, community organisations are under threat of extinction. Just as species and humanity evolve, we suggest that community organisations need to evolve to ensure wellbeing

Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics

Emergence of scale-free leadership structure in social recommender systems

The study of the organization of social networks is important for understanding of opinion formation, rumor spreading, and the emergence of trends and fashion. This paper reports empirical analysis of networks extracted from four leading sites with social functionality (Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube) and shows that they all display a scale-free leadership structure. To reproduce this feature, we propose an adaptive network model driven by social recommending. Artificial agent-based simulations of this model highlight a "good get richer" mechanism where users with broad interests and good judgments are likely to become popular leaders for the others. Simulations also indicate that the studied social recommendation mechanism can gradually improve the user experience by adapting to tastes of its users. Finally we outline implications for real online resource-sharing systems

Nation-state Crises in the Absence and Presence of Segment States: The Case of Nicaragua

This study provides a critical examination of the relationship between segment states and nationalist crises through a consideration of Nicaragua\u27s recent history. Nicaragua experienced a nationalist crisis from 1981 to the mid-1980s. That crisis ended with the creation of two autonomous regions on the Atlantic Coast. Although relations between the common state and the new segment state proved difficult over the next few years, the new arrangement held for two decades. Roughly around 2007, however, a new nation-state crisis emerged in Nicaragua. Taking advantage of the fact that Nicaragua provides an opportunity to compare two nation-state crises across time, this study asks whether the country\u27s pattern of nation-state crisis, creation of a segment state, and emergence of a second nationalist crisis may mean that segment states are endogenous to nation-state crises. In addition, it raises the question of whether, if fully followed through, autonomy arrangements may prove stabilizing under certain contexts