In this study, equity theory and relationship maintenance were employed as the framework through which couples' perceptions of and use of diet- and exercise- related social influence strategies were examined. Additionally, this research investigated whether people's perceptions of social influence were associated with their health maintenance behaviors and relationship quality, as well as whether their perceived diet- and exercise-related support from the partner moderated these associations. Finally, individuals' motivation to use influence strategies to encourage their partners to be healthier was also be evaluated. This study included a sample of 192 cohabiting or married couples. The results of the Actor Partner Interdependence Models indicated that actors' perceived relationship maintenance and control mutuality were positively associated with their perceptions of positive influence strategies from the partner. Additionally, actors' perceived positive influence strategies from their partners were associated with greater health maintenance and relationship satisfaction, with the inverse being true for actors' perceived negative influence strategies from their partners. Individuals' reports of using social influence strategies varied depending on their various motivations for using social influence strategies (i.e., perceived partner ability and willingness to change, reasons for using social influence, and reasons for not using social influence). Finally, individuals reported engaging in more health maintenance behaviors when they also perceived more positive social influence and more diet- and exercise-related support from their partners. These results suggest that relationship functioning is related to individuals' perceptions of influence strategies from the partner, which are also associated with individuals' health maintenance behaviors and relationship quality. Consequently, romantic relationships appear to be an important context in which to examine diet- and exercise- related social influence strategies.

The underlying theme that draws together all the chapters presented in this thesis is that surveillance, like any feature of our social world, is not imposed in a vacuum; and that information pertaining to the origin and purpose of surveillance is vital in determining how it will be perceived and evaluated (and how it will then impact on behaviour). The key aims of this thesis are, first, to demonstrate how a social identity approach can account for varying reactions to surveillance originating from different sources; second, to investigate how various contextual features exert their impact, resulting in the disparate perceptions of surveillance that exist in our society; and finally, to demonstrate how the imposition of surveillance can itself impact on the broader social context, including the relationship that is understood to exist between those watching and those being watched. These aims are broken down into ten research questions that are addressed in seven chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on perceptions of surveillance and that on social identity, and attempts to illustrate how they may be theoretically combined, resulting in the advancement of both fields. In Chapter 2, we present two studies which demonstrate a negative relationship between shared identity and the perception of surveillance as an invasion of privacy. This relationship was mediated by perceptions that the purpose of surveillance was to ensure safety. In Chapter 3, two studies demonstrate how level of surveillance moderates followers’ responses to leaders with whom they either share identity, or not. Imposing high surveillance where identity was shared with a leader undermined perceptions of the leader as a team member and affected willingness to work for the group, reducing levels to that of leaders without a shared identity. Chapter 4 presents a study that aimed to investigate the role of social identity and surveillance in affecting both discretionary behaviour and task performance. High surveillance led to higher productivity on a task, but this was associated with lower quality of work. Additionally, when identity was shared with the person in charge, helping this person was detrimentally affected by high, as opposed to low, surveillance; whereas no such differences were found where identity was not shared. Chapter 5 presents two studies which showed that framing surveillance as targeting the in-group led to outcomes such as increased privacy invasion, lower acceptability of surveillance, and reduced levels of trust in the implementers of surveillance, as compared to when surveillance was framed as targeting an out-group. However, a third study failed to replicate these results. In Chapter 6, we address how level of threat in the environment can affect evaluations of surveillance. Two studies showed that high levels of threat led to surveillance being seen as less privacy-invading, more necessary, and as having a safety purpose. Finally, in Chapter 7, we review and integrate our findings, discuss the limitations of the research, and consider the implications it has, both theoretically and practically. We conclude that, overall, the findings presented in this thesis support the notion that the source of surveillance and the perceived purpose for it are integral to the perception and interpretation of the surveillance.

Background: Alcohol has become ubiquitous in Swedish lifestyle blogs, as alcohol can be present in one third or one fifth of blog posts in some of Sweden’s biggest lifestyle blogs. Research suggests that exposure to media and commercial communications on alcohol increases consumption and that users and user-generated content related to alcohol and drinking may intensify social norms around alcohol consumption. This means Swedish lifestyle bloggers may be exposing alcohol and creating social normative influence that can affect blog readers’ intention to consume alcohol. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to explore if and how the presence of alcoholic beverages on Swedish blogs may affect young females’ intention to pursue alcohol consumption. Firstly, the study looks at to what extent and how alcoholic beverages and alcohol-related activities appear on Swedish lifestyle blogs. Secondly, the study explores if the presence of alcohol in blogs is recognised by blog readers and if they perceive this to affect their own and others' intention to consume alcohol. Method: This thesis has two different data collections to fulfil the purpose of the study. First a web content analysis is conducted on eight Swedish blogs to explore the presence of alcohol. Thereafter semi-structured interviews are conducted with nine respondents. The findings are compared to previous findings and analysed from theories on behavioural change. Conclusion: Alcohol and alcohol-related activities are depicted frequently in some of Sweden’s biggest lifestyle blogs when variation between blogs and monthly variance per blog are considered. Alcohol is put in a favourable setting through a positive or a commercial context. Blog readers perceive blog posts to contain positive alcohol content, and claim others may be affected to consume alcohol by these as bloggers have influence empowered by their social status. A majority of respondents claim they themselves are not affected by blog posts with alcohol. It is suggested this is because subjective attitude towards alcohol and a belief of personal control has stronger impact on intention to pursue alcohol-related activities. Another suggestion is that more salient and ready accessible referents such as parents, family and friends are deemed more important in affecting norms around alcohol through individuals’ perceived view of these referents’ desires and actions.

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Nowadays, people have many business activities and entertainments on a variety of online platforms. Despite their various functionalities, online platforms have a fundamental administrative problem: How do platform designers or administrators create proper online environments, including mechanisms and policies, to better manage user behaviors, in order to reach the goals of the platforms? Starting with a taxonomy of online platforms, I introduce three critical dimensions that help to characterize such platforms, including revenue model, heterogeneity in the role of users and level of user interaction. Then, I choose three online platforms as research contexts and conduct empirical studies, trying to identify and understand the impact of the incentive program, quality information disclosure, and social influence, on users' decision-making in online platforms. The first essay investigates the effectiveness of incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more challenging goals, in motivating user contribution in the same platform. The findings have important implications for crowd-based online applications, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing. The second essay focuses on online consumer review sites, and studies whether and how consumer-generated word-of-mouth of restaurants-both volume and valence-is influenced by the disclosure of quality information from health inspectors, by conducting analytical modeling and econometric analyses using data from a leading consumer review site. The third essay examines how social interactions matter in a large-scale online social game that adopts an increasingly popular freemium revenue model. The study leverages an econometric model to quantify the effect of peer consumption on players' repeated decisions for the consumption of both free services and premium services. Finally, I conclude the dissertation by highlighting the three fundamental issues of design and management of online platforms.

Konformitet ses som att människor anpassar sitt beteende utifrån andra och betraktas ofta som något negativt i västerlänska samhällen. Syftet med undersökningen var att framhäva om konformitet gynnade människor när andra ansågs bidra med nyttig information, konstruera ett mätinstrument för normativ och informativ social influens samt undersöka samband mellan personlighetsindexar och konformitet. En enkätstudie genomfördes med totalt 83 deltagare från en högskola i Mellansverige. Deltagarna delades in i två grupper, där konformitetsgruppen fick, tillskillnad från kontrollgruppen, en procentsats vid varje kunskapsfråga. Resultaten visade att konformitet förekom och att det gynnade sig att följa strömmen vid lätta och medelsvåra kunskapsfrågor. Ytterligare förekom det inga samband mellan personlighetsindexarna och konformitet. Slutsatsen var att människor inte borde se konformitet som något negativt, utan bör ibland ta del av det majoriteten har att erbjuda i vardagliga situationer. Förhoppningsvis kommer det konstruerade mätinstrumentet användas i framtida forskningar.

While knowledge is one of an organization’s greatest assets, it remains a challenge to facilitate knowledge transfer between people within an organization. Social influence has been studied in its role of facilitating information diffusion, which is necessary for knowledge transfer to occur. Among this research, tie strength, a quantifiable characteristic of a social network that determines the link between two nodes, has been measured to determine the impact of social influence on knowledge transfer and information dissemination within a social network. Current research that explores the impact of social influence on information diffusion has been conducted within public social networks due to the availability of data that can be gathered from public social online network systems, such as Facebook. With the emergence of collaboration technologies that exist in online social network tools being utilized within organizations, there is an opportunity to digitally collect information regarding information dissemination within a collaborative network. This study captured data from an online social network, specifically a unified communication tool, being used within a collaborative social network at a mid-sized South Central corporation. A content analysis of Lync messages for 1,749 connections was performed to quantitatively measure the influence of tie strength on information dissemination within a collaborative social network. The results demonstrated that tie strength had a significant impact on information dissemination using a collaborative system. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that tie strength had the largest impact on information dissemination using the instant messaging modality of a collaboration system.

Studies investigating aspects of social influence or power in counseling settings have examined the relationship between nonverbal cues and social influence or power. This study investigated perceptions of power, responsiveness, attractiveness, expertness, and trustworthiness by manipulating posture, facial expression and sex of therapist. After viewing photographs of stimulus therapists and listening to audio tapes, 96 male and 98 female undergraduates completed the Counselor Rating Form and a questionnaire measuring therapists' power and responsiveness. Results indicated that facial expression was more salient than posture. Smiling decreased ratings of power and increased ratings of attractiveness, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. Open posture was seen as more attractive and more powerful than closed posture. Surprisingly, females were viewed as more powerful than males. Other gender differences were found only in interaction with other variables.

The study examines how social media can be used in a business-to-business context. To understand the communication conditions, factors has been identified that affects the choice of communication channels for different types of information transferred between parts. Furthermore, the study investigates the underlying reasons for why certain communication channels are chosen before others, in different situations. The study results are based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with employees in a small engineering consulting company. The investigation has focused on employee communication and choice of communication tools primarily in relation to the business relationship. The study answers the following questions: What factors may contribute to the selection of different communication tools in business-to-business? What are the conditions and reasons for employees to use social media in business-to-business? What opportunities can social media pose for managing knowledge exchange with customers in business-to-business? The theoretical framework is based on Media Richness Theory and Social Influence Theory. The results show that factors that affect use of social media between businesses are 1) social environmental influences on attitudes towards social media (positive or negative), 2) individual analogue and digital values, 3) social media are primarily used in a private context 4) individual's role and level within the company. It is proposed that companies require strategies and increased knowledge to operate efficiently with social media in business to business. The results also shows that factors affecting the choice of communications channels between employees and business relationship are: 1) context-dependent, 2) the availability and accessibility, 3) the role and level in the company, 4) customer relationship development, 5) the information degree of ambiguity, 6) communication channel degree of "richness", 7) urgency, 8) confirmation of agreement. / Program: Magisterutbildning i strategisk information och kommunikation

With the expansion of online communities, extant research in multiple disciplines has attempted to investigate its adoption and use among individuals. However, the biggest challenge encountered by managers of these communities is supplying knowledge, particularly, the willingness to share knowledge among the members. It is extremely important to maintain committed members in terms of active participation. Yet their level of participation might vary based on some social, behavioral and environmental factors that eventually affect their intentions on whether to participate actively or not, in fact some users choose to discontinue participating totally in the community. Cancers figure among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths in 2012. The number of new cases is expected to rise by about 70% over the next 2 decades. Among men, the 5 most common sites of cancer diagnosed in 2012 were lung, prostate, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancer. According to the world cancer report, among women the 5 most common sites diagnosed were breast, colorectal, lung, cervix, and stomach cancer. For this reason, there is an ever-increasing need to establish communities to offer empathic support to patients. Though peer support groups have been known to offer adequate support to patients with cancer and are considered to be an important complement to the formal health care system, however, practical barriers such as time, mobility and geography limit their use, this is where the online communities serve an advantage, as they have the potential to overcome barriers posed by regular offline communities. To achieve its objectives, this study mainly adopts the Social cognitive theory and two components of the social influence theory. According to the SCT, user behaviour is influenced by two factors: personal cognition and environment. Social influence model postulates that individual behaviour in a community can be affected by the social environment and three factors constitute this, they are compliance, identification and internalization. The study aims to provide insights on how and why patients diagnosed with cancer (and their relatives) seek social support using the Internet and social media. In particular, we seek to understand the motivation for joining these groups and the values derived from the community for the users both active and non-active.