Scholarship as a Vocation: Reflections on the Past and Future of Social Science

This essay seeks to expose readers from the social sciences to current debates in their fields, beyond the discussions of induction and deduction one learns about in a typical research methods course. It provides glimpses of social science from its dawn in 17th century empiricism, through the rise of postpositivism and antipositivism, to the infamous “science wars” in the 1990s, and expresses a hope for a broader and more inclusive future. Specifically, the paper compares the traditional positivist method of scientific inquiry to a phenomenological approach, and attempts to demonstrate the relevance of philosophical investigation in social science research

"Digital Sanctums of Empowerment": Exploring Community and Everyday Resilience Building Tactics in Online Professional Communities for Women

Work and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet women have and may continue to face multiple restrictions that hinder and impede their professional outcomes. These restrictions are especially pronounced in the technical domains of Information technology and Computer science. This paper explores the power of informal online communities to act as collective shields of care in the context of professional development, especially for women. Using a mixed-methods comparative investigation of 400,268 conversational traces from three professional development communities on Reddit, we report resilience and communal empathy-building tactics, as well as calls for inclusivity and belongingness, which drive the collective identity of these online channels. The long-term goal of this work is to address the way in which such channels can be designed and curated to offer spaces for enrichment, empowerment, and advocacy with a focus on the professional development of women, especially those engaged in technical domains

U.S. Hurricane Tweets (2006-2018)

This dataset contains 7,206,623 tweet IDs of Twitter activity during all major U.S. hurricanes since Twitter's inception in 2006. The tweets were harvested by focusing on users mentioning the words "storm," "superstorm," and "hurricane" 1 month before landfall, during, and 1 month after dissipation. Data is collected for the following hurricanes: Arthur (2014), Florence (2018), Gustav (2008), Harvey (2017), Hermine (2016), Humberto (2007), Ike (2008), Irene (2011), Irma (2017), Isaac (2012), Jose (2017), Maria (2017), Matthew (2016), Michael (2018), Nate (2017), Patricia (2015), and Sandy (2012). Due to Twitter’s Developer Policy, only tweet IDs can be publicly shared for academic purposes, which is why the .csv file only contains tweet IDs. These can easily be "hydrated" using a hydrating tool such as Hydrator or Twarc

Examining the Role of Personality Traits in Fatal Opioid Overdose: Text Mining Approach

The opioid crisis in the United States has reached epidemic levels, with the number of opioid-related overdose deaths now surpassing car accident fatalities. The severity of this crisis makes identifying the key risk factors associated with opioid overdo

Examining the Role of Top Management in Corporate Sustainability: Does Supply Chain Position Matter?

A burgeoning stream of sustainability research explores the role of companies’ top management team (TMT) characteristics in corporate sustainability efforts, while another stream investigates the effect of a company’s supply chain position on its likelihood of engaging in sustainability. This study shows the importance of integrating the two research streams by demonstrating that supply chain position moderates the relationship between TMT characteristics and sustainability and thus establishes boundary conditions for this relationship. By matching 758 corporate sustainability initiatives with control observations, our results show that the size of the top executive team and the average age of its members, two well-known predictors of corporate sustainability, are distinctly moderated by supply chain position. While business-to-business (B2B) companies are less likely to report a sustainability initiative compared to business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations, we found that B2B TMT size has a greater positive effect on sustainability initiative likelihood than B2C TMT size. Conversely, average B2C TMT age has greater predictive power in explaining sustainability initiative likelihood than average B2B TMT age. The implications of these findings in advancing corporate sustainability and organizational change are discussed

Examining the Social Media Antecedents of Racial Justice: Evidence from Twitter

Despite an increasing body of research focusing on the use of social media posts for inferring various social phenomena such as influenza spread, political preferences, or information diffusion, less attention has been given to the influence such posts have on user attitudes. Rooted at the nexus of social capital, sociolinguistics, and the theory of critical consciousness, this study aims to explore the social media factors playing a role in racial justice attitude development. Using a matched sample of 5,365 Twitter users, we demonstrate the impact of user posts’ topical diversity and bridging and bonding capital on the likelihood of engaging in antiracist discourse online in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder