My dissertation examines how individuals respond to workplace social comparisons. I measure the explicit set of referent others that individuals compare themselves against in order to evaluate their own level of performance. I examine how the social context of these comparisons impact discretionary performance related behaviors by examining how an individual’s position within a social network and the structural characteristics of an individual’s reference group influences the experience of discrete emotions. Specifically, I examine how malicious envy and benign envy mediate the relationship between social comparison and workplace behavior in a field setting. Results indicate that social network structure plays a significant role in motivating both productive and counterproductive responses to social comparison. Whether or not an employee responds to upward social comparisons by increasing their own work effort or engaging in deviant behavior is influenced by the experience of benign and malicious envy, which is in turn influencedby the network structure of reference groups. Furthermore, social network position plays a moderating role in the occurrence of workplace deviance by either enhancing or limiting the opportunities an employee has to engage in deviant behavior.

This paper provides insights on how five different frames of the Edward Snowden issue (Hero, Patriot, Traitor, Whistleblower, Dissident) have been diffused on the Twitter platform. This study uses NodeXL to collect, analyze and visualize all the tweets including the keyword “Edward Snowden” from February 17 to April 10, 2014 to examine the flow of information and the interaction between opinion leaders along with the characteristics of opinion leaders in this specific issue. Findings provide insight about future strategic communication for general branding and public image maintenance. / text

Given the increasing number of younger immigrants from China, we have noticed diversified performances of Chinese-American teenagers based on the age they come to the U.S. This thesis thus examines three specific aspects—assimilation, social network site (SNS) use, and reaction to Asian stereotype—of Chinese-American teenagers living in Austin, regarding intraethnic differences between and among different clusters of this cohort as the second generation immigrant. By employing semi-structured interviews conducted with teenagers who have respective immigrant history and family background, a wide array of patterns about assimilation, SNS use, and reaction to Asian stereotype are traced and analyzed alongside demonstrating outlines and traits in terms of different generation clusters (1.25ers, 1.5ers, 1.75ers and 2.0ers). A total of ten Chinese-American teenagers, aged from 15 to 18, are recruited and interviewed through snowball approach, allowing for the surface of intraethnic variations on the aforementioned aspects. Preliminary discussions are made to tease out how these three aspects are intertwined. / text

<p>Abstract</p><p>As online social network services are becoming one of the dominant media channels the importance of disseminating messages through them is of high importance for governments, organizations, companies etc. The online social network services are several and changes rapidly as they grow and evolve. Being networks, the services give the user the tools to send, as well as receive text and information. This proposes us with yet another obstacle in communication via online social network services since sender and receiver merges together.</p><p>Online social network services and the Blogosphere, which essentially also is a network, exist in the context of Web 2.0. The crucial feature of Web 2.0 is to a large degree the harnessing of collective intelligence i.e. the collection of individual knowledge and information. Many of the tools and sites within Web 2.0 are therefore of a network structure, hence further stressing the importance to communicate via networks in general.</p><p>Network Analysis is the discipline through which we can see and understand the larger patterns of networks. In this thesis I have looked into three key concepts of Network Analysis; Weak Links, Growth and Preferential Attachment. I have found that we can use the knowledge of Network Analysis to disseminate messages via online social network services since it provides us with the raw structures of how networks tend to grow, and how messages tend to disseminate.</p><p>Title: Web 2.0 and Network Society – PR and Communication: The Challenge of Online Social Networks</p><p>Number of pages: 34</p><p>Author: Max Tandefelt</p><p>Tutor: Else Nygren</p><p>Course: Media and Communication Studies C</p><p>Period: HT 07</p><p>University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.</p><p>Purpose/Aim: Facilitate message dissemination through online social network services, as they are becoming one of the dominant media channels</p><p>Material/Method: Network Analysis</p><p>Main results: I have presented crucial concepts of Network Analysis that can be used for message dissemination via online social network services</p><p>Keywords: Online Social Network Services, Network Analysis, Web 2.0, Message Dissemination</p>

Nowadays people and organizations are more and more interconnected in the forms of social networks: the nodes are social entities and the links are various relationships among them. The social network theory and the methods of social network analysis (SNA) are being increasingly used to study such real-world networks in order to support knowledge management and decision making in organizations. However, most existing social network studies focus on the static topologies of networks. The dynamic network link formation process is largely ignored. This dissertation is devoted to study such dynamic network formation process to support knowledge management and decision making in networked environments. Three challenges remain to be addressed in modeling and analyzing the dynamic network link formation processes. The first challenge is about modeling the network topological changes using longitudinal network data. The second challenge is concerned with examining factors that influence formation of links among individuals in networks. The third challenge is regarding link prediction in evolving social networks. This dissertation presents four essays that address these challenges in various knowledge management domains. The first essay studies the topological changes of a major international terrorist network over a 14-year period. In addition, this paper used a simulation approach to examine this network's vulnerability to random failures, targeted attacks, and real world authorities' counterattacks. The second essay and third essay focuses on examining determinants that significantly influence the link formation processes in social networks. The second essay found that mutual acquaintance and vehicle affiliations facilitate future co-offending link formation in a real-world criminal network. The third essay found that homophily in programming language preference, and mutual are determinants for forming participation links in an online Open Source social network. The fourth essay focuses on the link prediction in evolving social networks. It proposes a novel infrastructure for describing and utilizing the discovered determinants of link formation process (i.e. semantics of social networks) in link prediction to support expert recommendation application in an Open Source developer community. It is found that the integrated mechanism outperforms either user-based or Top-N most recognized mechanism.

Despite the fact that swidden agriculture has been the subject of decades of research, questions remain about the extent to which it is constrained by demographic growth and if it can adapt to environmental limits. In this dissertation I analyze ethnographic and ethnohistorical evidence from the Toledo District, Belize, and suggest that Q'eqchi' Maya swidden agriculture may be more ecologically adaptive than previously thought. I use social network analysis to examine farmer labor exchange networks from a chronosequence of five villages where swidden is used. Results suggest that changes in land-use patterns, network structure, and reciprocity rates may increase the system's resilience to changes in the forest's agricultural productivity. I develop a novel interpretation of labor reciprocity that highlights how unreciprocated exchanges, when they occur within the context of a social network, may limit overexploitation of a common property resource. These results are then interpreted in the context of panarchy theory; I suggest that the structural variability observed in labor exchange networks may explain how Q'eqchi' swidden maintains its identity under changing environmental conditions - a definition of resilience. Thus, the resulting picture of Q'eqchi' swidden is one of socioecological resilience rather than homeostasis; dynamic labor exchange networks help maintain a village's social cohesion, ultimately limiting pioneer settlements and slowing overall rates of deforestation. A historical and demographic analysis of market incursions into southern Belize supports this conclusion.

We study a message passing network where nodes keep a numeric attitude toward a subject. Messages are created by a message factory and each is sent to a random seed-node, which then gets eventually propagated in the network. Each message has some information about the subject, which is interpreted by the receiving node based on its features. Hence, the same message could be interpreted quite differently by two different nodes. Once a message is interpreted, the attitude of the node toward the subject is updated. In this setting, the thesis is that an external agent can influence (in a desired way) the average attitude of the network, by sending the messages to specific nodes (rather than sending them randomly) based on the message content. We call this agent a leader which its goal is to minimize (maximize) the average attitude of the network, and its actions are choosing one of the seed-nodes for a given message. The leader does not have any information about the nodes in advance, instead, it eventually learns the interests of the seed-nodes through sending messages and receiving the feedback of the network. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem and study the effectiveness of a leader in different network configurations. Moreover, we study the case that there are two adversarial leaders, and present different policies and evaluate their effectiveness. Finally, we study the leader's performance when there are dynamic changes in the nodes features and network's topology.

古今中外歷史中，在政治權力的結構裡，除了在最上位的領袖外，其下的文武百官，往往根據其職份或私交等情況，自成人際關係網絡。然而，依照每個人在網絡中位置的不同，重要程度也有所不同。在網絡中扮演重要角色者，除了代表其人際關係愈複雜外，同時也暗示其政治影響力愈大。這些人物往往也就是足以影響當時政治的「權臣」。然而在歷史上，有些皇帝的在位時間較長、統治時間較久。在其統治期間，可能因為皇帝本身，或政治環境遞嬗等因素，使得不同的時期有不同「權臣」，或是其晚年才出現明顯的「權臣」。本論文便是基於這樣的歷史現象，研究由史料中探勘當時的人脈網絡。我們先從文本中，自動擷取出人名。然後，藉由人物在文本中與其他人物的共現場合，建立歷史人物的人脈網絡，接著利用社會網絡分析的理論基礎，分析這些網絡，進而在網絡中找出權臣，以及偵測政治權力結構的變化，為時代作出分期。本研究選用的文本為《清實錄》中的《高宗純皇帝實錄》，意欲以清高宗 (乾隆)時期為例，探勘該朝的人脈網絡，完成上述之工作。希望這樣的研究，可以在中國政治制度史等研究上，協助史學研究者。 / In power structure from ancient times to the present, officials who under the leader usually take part in the social network according to their positions or friendship. However, the importance of each person is different by their locations in network. The people who play important roles in network have complex interpersonal relationship as well as high influence in political situation. We call them "chief counselors." But in the history, some emperors reign for extremely many years. Due to some causes, such like emperor himself or changing of political circumstances, there could be several different chief counselors during their reign. This thesis focuses on social network mining from historical documents in view of above-mentioned historical phenomenon. After extracting person names from the corpus, we can construct social network by co-occurrence of people, then to find chief counselors and detect transition of power structure by Social Network Analysis. The "Veritable Records of Gaozong" is taken as the example for experiments and the result of effectiveness analysis demonstrates that the proposed methods are helpful to assist historian for historical research.

社會網路分析（social network analysis）將社會關係以網路形式表示，從原本純粹分析社會互動的工具，到近年來被廣泛被應用在社會學、組織研究、資訊科學、生物學、語言學等各種領域，藉由引入數學圖學理論與與日益精進的電腦處理能力，使得社會網路分析能從有別於以往的角度找出個體間行動的規律；而詞義相似度（word similarity）是資訊檢索等技術發展的基礎課題之一，近年來對詞義相似度的量測有許多方法的提出。 本研究針對英語字詞利用社會網路分析這樣的工具，藉由提出不同的網路建構方式，以語料庫為資料來源，設定網路節點與連結關係，以共現網路（co-occurrence networks）為基礎，經由改變產生與篩選的條件，觀察以社會網路分析已有的性質或指標做調整，是否可以對詞義相似度提供另一種量測方式；同時以目前詞義相似度研究上已有同義詞標準評比對前述產生的網路與所計算的性質做驗證，並進一步探討使用社會網路分析在詞義相似度研究上的適用性。

The purpose of the study isto,based on network theory, systems theory and development ecological systems theory,understand parent’sexperiences of having children with autismspectrum, as well as understand the importance of social networksfor the parents. All of the intervieweeswere mothers. The results showed that it is important to parentsto have contact with other parents who are in the same situation as them. Many of the interviewees had a small social network. The parents have tostruggle to get the support they are entitled to and thereforetheyfeel likethe "annoying" parent. Some of the parents felt that they are socially isolated and do not have the energy to maintain asocial life. In some cases,thesurrounding had a lack of patience and understanding for the families with children with autismspectrumand the family did not have the energy to keep in touch with them.The resultsalso showed that all the interviewees have previously had difficulties in the cooperation with the school butithas slowly gotten better, which may be because the mothers have to be the "annoying" parents who require their rights to theirchildren.