Dominance relations between individuals can be represented by a directed social network. A relational power measure is a function that assigns to each position in a directed network a value representing the relational power of that position in the network. We axiomatically characterize two such power measures, the b-measure and the score-measure. We also apply these measures to weighted directe...

Andrew Feenberg’s political philosophy of technology uniquely connects the neo-Marxist tradition with phenomenological approaches to technology. This paper investigates how this connection shapes Feenberg’s analysis of power. Influenced by De Certeau and by classical positions in philosophy of technology, Feenberg focuses on a dialectical model of oppression versus liberation. A hermeneutic rea...

Facilitating communities of practice for knowledge sharing and application is a goal pursued by knowledge managers, intraorganizational or inter-organizational. One major short-coming in the CoP literature is the lack of attention paid to power relations. The term communities of practice (CoPs) invoke the notion of peers sharing knowledge as equals. In actual practice, power relations within a ...

The paper discusses some of the main contributions to the theory of communities of practice (COP theory), especially as it relates to organizational learning. The paper does not attempt a full overview but concentrates on the notion of power relations. Early COP theory, was formulated as part of situated learning theory, and promised to work on issues of social context and unequal power relatio...

This study considers empowerment in nurse–manager relations by examining how conflict is handled on both sides and how the critical social perspective has influenced these relations. The authors use inductive analysis of empirical data to explain how (1) nursing work is organized, structured, and circumscribed by centrally determined policies and practices that downplay nurses’ professional jud...

School is the main scenario of social actions where the foundations of interpersonal relations other than those of the family are laid down; it has therefore become one of the main settings for psychoeducational research. In recent years, the phenomena of poor interpersonal relations, gratuitous and cruel aggression, the resulting victimization, and the construction of a psychopathic and inmora...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the nursing staff opinion about the continuous quality improvement program at a University Hospital. METHODS A descriptive study designed as a case study, analyzing the quality program at a University Hospital, with the opinion of a sample stratified by nursing team category through a self-administered questionnaire, from May to July 2012. The answers were submitted to fa...

The rise of China/East Asia and the perceived decline of the US/West pose an emerging question about how International Relations (IR) Theory should respond to this change. Increasingly, there have been heated discussions within the Chinese IR academia over a desirable Chinese contribution to IR Theory, particularly the possibility of building a distinctive Chinese IR Theory. Inevitably, this dr...

We present the SPIN system, a computational tool to detect linguistic and dialog structure patterns in a social interaction that reveal the underlying power relations between its participants. The SPIN system labels sentences in an interaction with their dialog acts (i.e., communicative intents), detects instances of overt display of power, and predicts social power relations between its partic...

Power laws, such as Zipf s law, and exponential relations, leading to straight lines in logarithmic or semi-logarithmic scales, are presented in a unified setting. It is shown that the class of size-frequency power laws is larger than the class of rank-frequency power laws. Their ubiquity in all fields of science is illustrated.