Under the federal structure of the United States government, states play a central role in interpreting and implementing national social policies. Understanding the processes that shape state-level social policy decisions is therefore important for understanding whether national commitments to low-income citizens are realized in practice. Within the political science literature, scholars have d...

Social learning analytics introduces tools and methods that help improving the learning process by providing useful information about the actors and their activity in the learning system. This study examines the relation between SNA parameters and student outcomes, between network parameters and global course performance, and it shows how visualizations of social learning analytics can help obs...

Cyberbullying amongst teenagers is a major issue, due to their increased use of social media. Previous literature surveys have not covered in detail cyberbullying studies in 2014 and cyberbullying risk factors. This literature review explores cyberbullying research areas, such as the use of social media by teenagers, themes from cyberbullying studies carried out since 2012, cyberbullying risk f...

This article focuses on two broad groups of actors, international NGOs (INGOs) and international consultancy companies (ICCs), and situates them within wider trends in aid and development policies. In the context of a neo-liberal policy agenda, many leading INGOs reorganised so that they became closer to emerging ICCs, as consulting, outsourcing, and sub-contracting became key features of aid a...

We present a study of the social dynamics among cooperative and competitive actors interacting on a complex network that has a small-world topology. In this model, the state of each actor depends on its previous state in time, its inertia to change, and the influence of its neighboring actors. Using numerical simulations, we determine how the distribution of final states of the actors and measu...

Actors in a market affiliate with various categories, which undergo different processes of legitimation, both informal and formal, over time. This paper explores the role of formal codification in the categorization of identity under social movement processes. Using the identity claims of U.S. organic food wholesalers from 1988 through 2001, I find that the enactment of state laws, a type of fo...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing animated agents for tasks that are typically performed by humans. They serve as communicative partners in a variety of applications, such as tutoring systems, sales, or entertainment. This paper first discusses design principles for animated agents to enhance their effectiveness as tutors, sales persons, or actors, among other roles. I...

PURPOSE The objective of this article was to explore the meaning of early contact in return-to-work, and how social relational actions and conditions can facilitate or impede early contact among actors in the workplace. METHOD An exploratory qualitative method was used, consisting of individual open-ended interviews with 33 workplace actors at seven worksites across three public employers in ...

In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for finding overlapping communities in social networks. Our algorithm does not rely on the contents of the messages and uses the communication graph only. The knowledge of the structure of the communities is important for the analysis of social behavior and evolution of the society as a whole, as well as its individual members. This knowledge can...

Emotions play an essential role in the behaviour of human beings, either at their sudden occurrence or by the continuous care to prevent the occurrence of unpleasant ones and to search for the occurrence of pleasant ones. Notably, in any system of collective action, they influence the behaviours of the actors with respect to each others. SocLab is a framework devoted to the study of the functio...