This paper investigates some of the man~estations and major forces driving the emergence of the new economy. A model of the virtual enterprise is proposed and investigated in the context of a virtual industry value chain. The transition to the virtual economy is definitely technology driven but is also shaped by social, economic, institutional forces. As such, it raises a number of significant ...

We construct and analyze a nonlocal continuum model for group formation with application to self-organizing collectives of animals in homogeneous environments. The model consists of a hyperbolic system of conservation laws, describing individual movement as a correlated random walk. The turning rates depend on three types of social forces: attraction toward other organisms, repulsion from them,...

In this article, Lewin’s (1951) social field theory is used as a framework for analyzing the potential for implementing scalable and sustainable e-learning initiatives in the academy. Powerful external economic and social forces coming to bear on academic leadership decisions are considered. The impacts of the emergence of the global learning society, knowledge economy, and information technolo...

The paper offers a preliminary hypothesis of how the global system is controlled. Loosely interacting centers of control, together with less well-defined forces, control global social activity. Centers of control include government, international organizations, and informal networks. These forces have maintained relative social stability. However, population and aggregate global consumption are...

The existence of social norms is one of the big unsolved problems in social cognitive science. Although no other concept is invoked more frequently in the social sciences, we still know little about how social norms are formed, the forces determining their content, and the cognitive and emotional requirements that enable a species to establish and enforce social norms. In recent years, there ha...

supernatural forces, which in turn become oppressive social

Many studies in psychology have documented how the behaviour of verbally communicating pairs is affected by social factors such as the partner's gaze. However, few studies have examined whether physically interacting pairs are influenced by social factors. Here, we asked two partners to exchange forces with one another, where the goal was to accurately replicate the force back onto the other. W...