The emergence of social web technologies has provided the average individual with a power online the likes of which they have not had previously. Such a power however presents problems for the law of defamation that the current cyberpaternalistic approach is not able to address. It requires a greater understanding of sociology and technology to develop a new model of governance that proposes th...

The Telecommunications Research Group is an interdisciplinary team located at the University of Bremen. In this team, researchers educated in computer science, business administration, sociology, and law are cooperating on a wide range of topics. One main topic is the technology assessment of telecommunication networks, especially ISDN, with a special emphasis on social effects, in particular, ...

1 Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America, 2 Microsoft Research, New York, New York, United States of America, 3 Data & Society, New York, New York, United States of America, 4 Information Law Institute, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America, 5 Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics, L...

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household (∼10(-2) km) to continental (∼10(4) km) scales. Empirical data indicate simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of cities (known as Zipf's law) and the population density fluctuations as a function of scale. Using techniques from random field theory and statistical physics, we show t...

This chapter surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand social, political and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how they arise, what purposes they serve, how they change and how they may be reformed. Following conven...

An element shared by sociology and history, and to a certain extent by social or cultural anthropology as well, is their claim to study society as a whole. Whereas economy, law, political science, religious studies or linguistics concentrate on a single aspect of society, the aforementioned disciplines aspire to integrate all aspects into a comprehensive and coherent picture. This requires, fir...

1. Sociology's Relevance to International Relations 2. Historical Origins of Sociological Thought 3. Historical Sociology 4. The Historical Sociology of the State and International Relations 5. Principles of Historical Sociology 6. Problems with Historical Sociology 7. Sociology of Globalization 8. Global Versus Historical Sociology? 9. The Future Sociological Agenda in International Relations ...

Expectations created by the early rapid developments in virtual organizations, hoping to resolve the main challenges in the area and continuous emergence of new related facilities are still far from full materialization. Being a multidisciplinary area that requires the participation of experts in ICT, theory of organizations, sociology, economy, law, etc., there is primarily a need for further ...

This document presents an attempt to build a theoretical framework for the spatial analysis of social facts, derived from Tobler’s first law of geography (‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’) and Blau’s theory of macro sociology and multilevel structural analysis. At individual level four basic times of position and interaction are de...