How do collectives of amateurs handle complexity on financial markets while deciding? An ethnography of investment clubs

This paper questions how investment clubs – as small groups of retail investors that pool their money – cope with issues of hyper-complexity and truth while deciding together where to invest their money. This may be challenging because investment-decisions are characterised by informational complexity, an unknown future and double contingency. By employing ethnographic data, this paper traces how investment clubs reach a collective decision despite hyper-complexity. It will be shown how the members of the group struggle to make sense of and to find a shared definition of a situation. During this process they try to reduce complexity by evaluating and deciding collectively. The ways the different groups achieve this is influenced by the group composition, their organisational structure and the interaction order. In some groups negotiations are an essential part of their meetings whereby complexity is initially cultivated. Negotiations are used to develop a shared definition of the situation. These groups question if the truth can be uncovered in financial markets. Other groups reduce complexity by using certain techniques to uncover the true value of a stock. These ways of coping with complexity are bound to certain ways of organising and types of members. Accordingly, successful evaluating and deciding, which means that decisions are made, is bound to several exclusions that are made legitimate by the inclusion in the financial market. In summary, the paper adds new insights to processes of decision making in situations that are characterised by complexity

Analyse des Einflusses der Finanzierungsform einer Organisation auf das kreative Handeln in der Organisation

In diesem Paper wird der Zusammenhang zwischen der Organisationsform, vor allem der Art der Finanzierung einer Organisation, und der Möglichkeit in der Organisation kreativ zu handeln untersucht. Ausgegangen wird davon, dass die Finanzierungsform und die Organisationskultur einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Spielräume für Kreativität in einer Organisation haben. Kreativität als kontingenter Begriff wird dazu theoretisch verortet und in Richtung kreativen Handelns innerhalb von Organisationen näher bestimmt. Darauf aufbauend werden Interviews aus drei technikentwickelnden Organisationen qualitativ ausgewertet, mit dem Blick darauf, was sich zu kreativem Handeln in den Organisationen dokumentiert und zwei typische Arten der Organisation von kreativem Handeln vorgestellt

Toward open computational communication science: A practical road map for reusable data and code

Computational communication science (CCS) offers an opportunity to accelerate the scope and pace of discovery in communication research. This article argues that CCS will profit from adopting open science practices by fostering the reusability of data and code. We discuss the goals and challenges related to creating reusable data and code and offer practical guidance to individual researchers to achieve this. More specifically, we argue for integration of the research process into reusable workflows and recognition of tools and data as academic work. The challenges and road map are also critically discussed in terms of the additional burden they place on individual scholars, which culminates in a call to action for the field to support and incentivize the reusability of tools and data

Zeitprobleme des Entscheidens: Kleinanleger auf dem Finanzmarkt

Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden drei Zeitprobleme des Entscheidens herausgearbeitet: Zeitknappheit, Zukunftsungewissheit und Zukunftshorizont; und es werden drei Entscheidungsmodi – Inkrementalismus, Coping und Planung – dahingehend charakterisiert, welches dieser Probleme sie jeweils in den Vordergrund stellen. Abstrahiert man von der sachlichen und sozialen Komplexität von Entscheidungssituationen, zeigt sich in zeitlicher Hinsicht eine Abstufung der komplexitätsverursachenden Gewichtigkeit der drei Zeitprobleme. Zukunftsungewissheit wiegt am schwersten. Je höher sie ist, desto mehr ist Entscheiden auf Coping zurückgeworfen. Zeitknappheit lässt, sofern mit ihr nicht hohe Zukunftsungewissheit einhergeht, hingegen zumindest Inkrementalismus zu. Und nur wenn sowohl Zukunftsungewissheit als auch Zeitknappheit nicht zu hoch sind, kann man mittels Planung versuchen, den verarbeiteten Zukunftshorizont zu erweitern. Der so konzipierte analytische Bezugsrahmen wird dann zur Aufschlüsselung empirischer Befunde über das Entscheidungshandeln von Kleinanlegern auf dem Finanzmarkt genutzt. Dabei werden zum einen individuell entscheidende Kleinanleger, zum anderen Kleinanleger, die in Investmentclubs gemeinsam Entscheidungen treffen, betrachtet

Text analysis in R

Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operations in a computational text analysis project, and demonstrate how each step can be performed using the R statistical software. As a popular open-source platform, R has an extensive user community that develops and maintains a wide range of text analysis packages. We show that these packages make it easy to perform advanced text analytics

How Combining Terrorism, Muslim, and Refugee Topics Drives Emotional Tone in Online News: A Six-Country Cross-Cultural Sentiment Analysis

This study looks into how the combination of Islam, refugees, and terrorism topics leads to text-internal changes in the emotional tone of news articles and how these vary across countries and media outlets. Using a multilingual human-validated sentiment analysis, we compare fear and pity in more than 560,000 articles from the most important online news sources in six countries (U.S., Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, and Lebanon). We observe that fear and pity work antagonistically—that is, the more articles in a particular topical category contain fear, the less pity they will feature. The coverage of refugees without mentioning terrorists and Muslims/Islam featured the lowest fear and highest pity levels of all topical categories studied here. However, when refugees were covered in combination with terrorism and/or Islam, fear increased and pity decreased in Christian-majority countries, whereas no such pattern appeared in Muslim-majority countries (Lebanon, Turkey). Variations in emotions are generally driven more by country-level differences than by the political alignment of individual outlets