Jarley (2005) recently proposed a model of social capital unionism that contends that unions should strive to recreate the dense communities of the past by systematically creating social networks among workers. Underlying this approach is the notion that sustained personal contacts with members are necessary to generate the generalised reciprocity norms that mobilise workers in times of need an...

The purpose of this research is to develop a research model that examines the impact of mobile social capital on technology adoption through IT artifact Influence. To do so, we suggest that mobile networks of practice as social actors affect technology use through the userIT artifact interaction in which mobile social capital lies, thus differentiating it from social capital and bestowing uniqu...

IT acceptance is generally considered a mature research field. However, we are persuaded that current approaches are underestimating the importance of social factors and group influence on individual beliefs. This paper adopts a complementary approach to previous researches based on normative assumptions. A social capital perspective is embraced to allow us to focus on the nature and quality of...

The Tibetan grassland social-ecological systems are widely held to be highly vulnerable to climate change. We aim to investigate livelihood adaptation strategies of herder households and the types of local institutions that shaped those adaptation strategies. We examined the barriers and opportunities for strengthening adaptive capacity of local herder communities. We designed and implemented a...

This paper presents several case studies on how groups cooperate to manipulate Twitter’s Trending Topics to their benefit, creating what we called Artificial Trending Topics. We show evidences that such topics are quite common and discuss some of the strategies used by these groups to reach their goals and their motivations to do so. We further discuss these different types of topics in the con...

This article discusses the concept of social exclusion with an eye to assessing its utility in the study of ethnic and racial group inequality in the modern nation state. A brief review of the literature and some methodological discussion are offered. The article then examines race-based social exclusion in the United States, showing bow race and ethnicity can inhibit the full participation of ...

Creative Commons (CC) mechanism has been suggested as a potential means to foster a reliable environment for online knowledge sharing activity. This study investigates the role of the CC mechanism in supporting knowledge sharing among a group of university students studying programming from the perspectives of social cognitive and social capital theories. By gathering 40 university students’ fe...

In this paper, we investigate whether the social roles of dialogue participants can be recognized through the social actions performed by the participant in their interactions with others in the group. Specifically we focus on determining if a participant is the leader of the group. We decompose the problem into identifying the social goals for participant discourse segments. These social goals...

In this paper, we study relation and impact of social capital on organizational commitment among staffs of Islamic Azad University, Branch of Ayatollah Amoli. The data required were collected by using field (survey) research method and the questionary tool. Statistical population was included 152 subjects that 108 subjects were selected based on Morgan table. The descriptive results show that c...

The referral system in health care has been noted as very influential in determining which services are accessed and when. Nonetheless, existing studies have relied on specific measurable factors relating to health personnel, transportation and communication infrastructure, and finance to explain the challenges facing the referral policy in developing countries. While this is understandable, th...