Managers invariably use their personal contacts when they need to, say, meet an impossible deadline or learn the truth about a new boss. Increasingly, it's through these informal networks--not just through traditional organizational hierarchies--that information is found and work gets done. But to many senior executives, informal networks are unobservable and ungovernable--and, therefore, not a...

Sense of community (SOC) is empirically “unpacked” as a multilevel construct with place and social elements. SOC has been studied primarily at the individual level despite researchers acknowledging its effects at the community level. Little attention has been given to the roles of place and place attitudes in SOC. We argue that place and social are inextricably bound, and studying the impact of...

This paper presents research-in-progress of the adoption and use of social media as part of patients’ self-management of their chronic disease. The purpose is to investigate the social and organizational challenges that social media bring to the healthcare setting. We focus on how nurses can act as mediators between the formal healthcare institution and the informal setting in which patients en...

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people’s private lives. In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the eme...

BACKGROUND It is well known that informal caregiving negatively affects caregivers' mental health, while social activities improve mental health outcomes among middle-aged and elderly individuals. The goal of the present study was to examine how participation in social activities affected the trajectory of an informal caregiver's psychological distress. METHODS We used the data from a nationw...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to examine whether formal and informal social activities are associated with a lower risk of depression. Besides, we investigated which type of social activities may protect against late-life depression by gender using data from a population-based study of older Korean adults. METHODS Data for analysis were drawn from the 2010 Korean Longitudinal Study of ...

Introduction: Starting in 2008 an internet-based platform: Personal Control and Rehabilitation (PCR) has been developed for people with psychotic vulnerability and their formal and informal caregivers and was tested in two mental health institutions in The Netherlands. The Trimbos-institute and the Julius-Centrum evaluated the development, the implementation and the preliminary effects of PCR o...

The ageing of society is leading to significant reforms in long-term care policy and systems in many European countries. The cutbacks in professional care are increasing demand for informal care considerably, from both kin and non-kin. At the same time, demographic and societal developments such as changing family structures and later retirement may limit the supply of informal care. This raise...

Surprisingly, organizational control theory predicated on monitoring behavior and/or outputs has rarely been challenged or extended. The rise of remote work offers an important opportunity to (re)examine the underlying relationship between and control. Distributed teams, where members remotely, call into question assumption that rests fundamentally solely outputs. Using interview diary data fro...