Rebels and Nomads: Have White Southerners Found Sanctuary in the Republican Party?

During the last 30 years, the Republicans have become an interesting assortment of economic, international, and social conservatism, with each leg of the triad having more prominence at distinct times. Examining key votes throughout this period, we assess how the most recent converts to the party, those from Southern states, align with Republicans from other regions on each of these three dimensions. We also estimate the relative importance of each of the three dimensions annually during this period. Finally, we examine whether the unstable equilibrium that haunted the Congressional Democrats through the first half of the Cold War era has merely found a new resting place in the Republican Party. In order to analyze these issues, we analyze House roll call votes from 1975 - 2000 to determine how closely Southern and non- Southern Republicans are aligned. Next, we examine various issue dimensions, determining how party cohesion is affected when different sets of issues take on greater legislative importance. Our findings confirm that issue dimensions affect party cohesion and that regional differences are an important distinction when analyzing House Republicans in a modern context

Web 2.0 Use and Knowledge Transfer: How Social Media Technologies Can Lead to Organizational Innovation

The concept of Web 2.0 has gained widespread prominence in recent years. The use of Web 2.0 applications on an individual level is currently extensive, and such applications have begun to be implemented by organizations in hopes of boosting collaboration and driving innovation. Despite this growing trend, only a small number of theoretical perspectives are available in the literature that discuss how such applications could be utilized to assist in innovation. In this paper, we propose a theoretical model explicating this phenomenon. We argue that organizational Web 2.0 use fosters the emergence and enhancement of informal networks, weak ties, boundary spanners, organizational absorptive capacity, which are reflected in three dimensions of social capital, structural, relational, and cognitive. The generation of social capital enables organizational knowledge transfer, which in turn leads to organizational innovation. Based on this model, suggestions for organizations to facilitate this process are also provided, and theoretical implications are discussed

An exploratory study of links between individuals' perceptions of solo tourism and their desires for social interaction and solitude.

There is a continuing growth of solo tourism as a significant sector within the tourism industry. This growth reflects a general growth of solo lifestyle choices in areas such as housing, work, relationships and leisure pursuits. While reasons for the growth of solitary lifestyles are varied, one factor that has risen to prominence is the degree of choice available to individuals; the greater the level of choice, the more positive the perception of solitary experiences. Previous research has suggested studying solitude by placing individuals along two dimensions; one measuring desire for social interaction and the other measuring desire for solitude. This paper asked one hundred and three participants to subjectively self-select their perceived placement on both these dimensions. Despite the growth of solo tourism, there are relatively few papers exploring this perspective of solo tourism, with research more likely to report issues like gender, safety, and risk in the solo tourism industry. This exploratory research therefore aimed to identify links between individuals’ perceptions of solo tourism and their desires for social interaction and solitude. Results allowed for an initial typology to be proposed according to the desire for solitude/desire for social interaction dimensions. The research also indicated potential links between individual’s placement within this typology and their general perceptions of solo tourism and tourists. Further research will aim to test these exploratory findings through study of individuals who have personal experience of solo tourism. It is hoped outcomes will widen the current relatively narrow range of solo tourism research

Lexical Derivation of the PINT Taxonomy of Goals: Prominence, Inclusiveness, Negativity Prevention, and Tradition

What do people want? Few questions are more fundamental to psychological science than this. Yet, existing taxonomies disagree on both the number and content of goals. We thus adopted a lexical approach and investigated the structure of goal-relevant words from the natural English lexicon. Through an intensive rating process, 1,060 goal-relevant English words were first located. In Studies 1-2, two relatively large and diverse samples (total n = 1,026) rated their commitment to approaching or avoiding these goals. Principal component analyses yielded 4 replicable components: Prominence, Inclusiveness, Negativity prevention, and Tradition (the PINT Taxonomy). Study 3-7 (total n = 1,396) supported the 4-factor structure of an abbreviated scale and found systematic differences in their relationships with past goal-content measures, the Big 5 traits, affect, and need satisfaction. This investigation thus provides a data-driven taxonomy of higher-order goal-content and opens up a wide variety of fascinating lines for future research

The rising powers and globalization : structural change to the global system between 1965 and 2005

This article critically assesses the increasingly prevalent claims of rapidly changing global power relations under influence of the ‘rising powers’ and ‘globalization.’ Our main contention is that current analyses of countries’ degree of global power (especially for the BRICS) has been dominated by the control over resources approach that, although it gauges power potential, it insufficiently accounts for how this potential is converted into actual global might. By drawing on a unique and extensive dataset comprised of a wide array of political, economic, and military networks for a vast number of countries between 1965 and 2005, we aim to 1) reassess alleged changes in the structure of the world-system since 1965 and 2) analyze whether or not these changes can be attributed to globalization. We pay attention to the trajectories of the BRICS and to the possibly divergent structural evolutions of the political and economic dimensions that constitute the system. Our results show that despite a certain degree of power convergence between countries at the sub-top of the system, divergence continues to take place between the most and least powerful, and stratification is reproduced. Globalization is further shown to exacerbate this trend, though its effect differs on the political and economic dimensions of the system. Though the traditional ‘core powers’ might have to share their power with newcomer China in the future, this hardly heralds a new age in which the global system of power relations are converging to the extent that stratification is being undermined

What increases (social) media attention: Research impact, author prominence or title attractiveness?

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a 'catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.Comment: Paper presented at 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI 2018) in Leiden, The Netherland