MySpace is a social network site (SNS) that forms an essential part of modern online communication. The creation of a personal profile in MySpace allows a user to connect with a global network of friends and communicate in a number of different ways. This thesis sets out to explore the experience of MySpace in terms of the self, identity and community. MySpace will be studied from a constructionist form of social psychology that benefits from new dialects of movement, performance and process. MySpace is conceptualised as a mediated community where users shape and are shaped by their experience of using the site. This study uses empirical data taken from the natural use of MySpace. A total of 100 open-access profiles are explored for the myriad ways that users constitute the self and identity in MySpace. The analysis identifies a number of functions of mediating the self including: the brand me, the hoped-for self and the self in potential. The brand me describes the reflective ability to realise other normative capacities through the practice of blogging in MySpace. This focuses on the ability to create new forms of subjectivity in MySpace interactions. In a similar vein, the hoped-for self explains the modification of the self through the act of profile changing and focuses on the actual, everyday practices of the self. Each of these analytic themes demonstrates the importance of the relational connections in MySpace. Finally, the self is defined as in potential as the analysis demonstrates an ongoing need for a narrative construction to the profile that is performed in both the visual and the textual aspects of the page.

Social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and online communities plays an important role for knowledge production and diffusion as well as discussions among people. Among social media, online brand communities (OBCs) have recently received attention from both academics and practitioners due to the practical benefits of OBCs for consumers and companies. For consumers, knowledge sharing and its collective activities help them to make purchase decisions and to protect themselves against firms’ monopoly and oligopoly or collusion and anticompetitive actions. For companies, new ideas and feedback on brand products created by OBC members are useful input to develop new products and enhance existing product lines. Therefore, active content generation by community members is one of the critical success factors of OBCs. However, many scholars argue that only a few members who are more devoted to a community are tending to engage in OBC activities and many community members tend to remain in the periphery (sometimes called ‘lurkers') of the community by using OBCs merely for gathering information without any contributions. Therefore, it is important to make members in the periphery of the community transit to the core to increase members’ intentions and ‘devoted members’ to produce more valuable benefits for both consumers and firms. In spite of its importance, the literature is lacking in efforts to explain how and when community members in the periphery transit to the core of the community in a long-term perspective. This study aims to reveal how and why OBC members transit from the periphery to the core of the community and how to increase their intention to use OBC from a long-term perspective. OBC use behaviour is classified into, largely, two categories according to the purposes of an OBC: behaviour with a brand product consumption purpose; and behaviour with a social relationship building purpose. This study classifies OBC members as three clusters by social identity theory: tourists, minglers, and devoted members (devotees and insiders). The devoted members have valuable consumption knowledge of brand and strong social bonds in the OBC and the OBC members become a devoted member by accumulated brand knowledge and experiences through long-term OBC use. Therefore, from a socialisation aspect, this study adopts organisational socialisation theory as the theoretical lens to explain how and why the members evolve from novice members as tourist to devoted members in OBC contexts. Socialisation theories argue that there are usually three sequential stages for a member to gain full membership in a community: pre-entry, accommodation, and affiliation. In addition, this study adopts IS implementation theory to understand OBC user behaviours from an IS use behaviour perspective: acceptance in the pre-entry stage and routinisation in the accommodation stage and infusion in the affiliation stage. By reviewing socialisation theory and IS implementation theory, this study finds four significant motivations, those of information quality, trust, sense of belonging, and brand loyalty for intention of OBC use from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. To integrate the socialisation perspective with the IS use perspective, this study adopts a technology acceptance model (TAM) as a theoretical framework to link to motivators in different OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stages. As a result, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain the OBC members’ transition process from acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation). The aim of this study is to predict and explain the transition of motivators for OBC use from pre-entry to affiliation and how to improve members’ intention of OBC use from a long-term perspective ultimately to foster ‘devoted members’. This study adopts an online survey targeting 518 participants who belong to 17 OBCs in South Korea and the conceptual framework is validated. The results show that all factors (i.e. information quality, trust, sense of belonging, brand loyalty) are significant determinants to increase intention to use OBCs and the factors have a causal relationship with each other to form a transition process from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. This study also reveals that brand loyalty has a significant role to explain the transition process and directly influence user intention to use OBCs. The sense of belonging also directly affects members’ intention to use OBCs but has less impact than brand loyalty. In addition, the results indicate that TAM is an appropriate model to predict user behaviours in a long-term perspective to explain the change of OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stage and confirms that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have significant impact on the intention to use OBCs as in other IS studies. Understanding the transition process within OBCs has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it will extend our understanding of how IS end users transit from acceptance behaviour to continued use and extended use of information systems in virtual community contexts. For managers, this study will provide them with insight on how to retain potential consumers in OBCs and facilitate their activities to gain consumer feedback on existing and new products.

This thesis presents a research model to investigate university-students’ acceptance and behaviour in relation to social-networking sites (SNS). In order to carry out this investigation, the research project was divided into two phases using qualitative and quantitative data based on a diverse sample of university students. Phase One used a think-aloud technique to explore the interaction experiences associated with students’ use of Facebook, a popular social-networking site. Twenty-six participants from Teesside University took part in the first study and six categories of experience (communication, gratification, inquisitiveness, evocation, interconnection, apprehension, and ambience) were identified. Subsequently conceptual similarities were found between all six categories of experience and six psychological human needs (relatedness, pleasure, popularity, security, competence and meaning). In Phase Two, a research model was constructed, based on existing literature on technology acceptance and the psychological needs identified in Phase One. Results from an online survey of 766 university students in the United Kingdom, who were also SNS users, provided evidence for the proposed model. The model explained and predicted students’ adoption of SNS, accounting for half of the variance in behavioural intention and almost a quarter of the variance in actual use behaviour. The results showed that students’ personal beliefs, social identity and psychological human needs influenced their decision to adopt SNS. Specifically, user-perceived usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment and credibility were found to iv be important factors in students’ adoption of SNS. The influence of social identity on students’ behavioural intention was also found to be mediated by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Furthermore, the findings emphasise the importance of psychological human needs in students’ adoption of SNS. In particular, the need for relatedness was found to be a significant independent predictor of behavioural intention. Based on the results of this study, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The educational system in Sweden is expanding and while some see higher education as a remedy for unemployment, others argue that credentialing of the society with diplomas will harm the competition on the labour market and the value of higher education. However, the effects of educational expansion are noticeable not only at the macro, but also at the micro level. Studies have shown that Sweden is internationally on the bottom of the list when it comes to gross returns of higher education. During the 1990s the educational expansion led to the impairment of university and college degrees to uplift individuals to high income positions. Studies have also shown that fluctuations in training premia are inconsistent with the supply of higher educated labour force. The focus of this quantitative dissertation is on the period between 2000 and 2010. By measuring the success on the labour market in terms of monthly salary the aim is to find out how the educational expansion affected Swedish labour market after the 1990s. By using SPSS, a multiple linear regression analysis is applied on data that is extracted from Levnadsnivåundersökningen (LNU) 2000 and 2010. The results suggest that even though the effects of higher education are not dramatically different between these years, it explained more of the total variance in monthly salary in 2000. Furthermore, social background and social networks had stronger effects on the success on the labour market in 2010. This implies that meritocratic principles were utilized more during the early twenty first century and that social status continues to determine salaries in a modern capitalist society.

Keeping forestland intact has emerged as a critical policy objective at state and federal levels. This target has been supported by substantial public investment. The collective impact from the bequest decisions of millions of landowning individuals and families has the potential to affect the extent and functionality of future forests in the United States. Despite a growing body of research devoted to studying these transitions in forest ownership, much remains unknown about how family forest owners make decisions in this arena. The social and emotional dimensions of woodland succession planning have been particularly under-examined. This thesis explores the process of planning for the future use and ownership of woodlands through in-depth analysis of 32 semi-structured interviews with family forest owners in Massachusetts, Maine, New York, and Vermont. The first article investigates how family forest owners evaluate and integrate stories derived from their social networks when planning for the future of their woodlands. Analysis of the themes contained in stories framed as “cautionary tales” revealed common fears surrounding succession planning. The second article explores the complexity of emotional relationships with family forests showing how emotional geographies manifest in the succession planning process. Together, these studies deepen understanding of how family forest owners plan for the future of private woodlands and offer implications for Extension and outreach.

Då de äldre delarna av populationen förväntas bli en större andel av den svenska totalpopulationen är det av intresse att undersöka deras hälsotillstånd, där livstillfredsställelse tycks vara en viktig faktor för ett gott åldrande. Utomlands har ett starkt stöd för en korrelation mellan livstillfredsställelse och religiositet hittats. Ett delsyfte i denna studie var att undersöka om en sådan korrelation även kan hittas i sekulära Sverige. Utifrån att också en stark korrelation mellan livstillfredsställelse och sociala nätverk hittats både utomlands och i Sverige var nästa delsyfte att undersöka om de sociala nätverk som kan hittas via ett religiöst deltagande i till exempel en församling bättre kan förklara religionens effekt på livstillfredsställelse än just religiositeten själv. Deltagarna i studien var hämtade från en longitudinell studie kring åldrande och vård kallad "The Swedish National Study on Aging and Care" (SNAC). Resultaten kunde inte visa på någon korrelation mellan religiositet och livstillfredsställelse i Sverige. I och med detta utgick ansatsen till att förklara en sådan korrelation. Studien pekade på att effekten religiositet har på en svensk befolkning tycks skilja sig från den effekt den har på andra populationer. / As the elder parts of the population are expected to become a larger proportion of the Swedish total population there is an interest in investigating their state of health, for which life satisfaction seems to be an important factor. Strong support for a correlation between life satisfaction and religiousness has been found outside of Sweden. One aim of this study was to investigate if such a correlation could also be found in secular Sweden. A strong correlation between life satisfaction and social networks has also been found both in and outside of Sweden. Following this the next aim of the study was to investigate if the social network that can be found via religious participation in for example a congregation could better explain the effect of religion on life satisfaction than religiousness itself. The participants in the study were gathered from a longitudinal study about aging and care called "The Swedish National Study on Aging and Care"(SNAC). The results did not show any correlation between religiousness and life satisfaction in Sweden. The Study indicates that the effect religiousness has on the Swedish population seems to be different from the effect it has on other populations.

Large scale social data from online social networks, instant messaging applications, and wearable devices have seen an exponential growth in a number of users and activities recently. The rapid proliferation of social data provides rich information and infinite possibilities for us to understand and analyze the complex inherent mechanism which governs the evolution of the new technology age. Influence, as a natural product of information diffusion (or propagation), which represents the change in an individual’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors resulting from interaction with others, is one of the fundamental processes in social worlds. Therefore, influence analysis occupies a very prominent place in social related data analysis, theory, model, and algorithms. In this dissertation, we study the influence analysis under the scenario of big social data. Firstly, we investigate the uncertainty of influence relationship among the social network. A novel sampling scheme is proposed which enables the development of an efficient algorithm to measure uncertainty. Considering the practicality of neighborhood relationship in real social data, a framework is introduced to transform the uncertain networks into deterministic weight networks where the weight on edges can be measured as Jaccard-like index. Secondly, focusing on the dynamic of social data, a practical framework is proposed by only probing partial communities to explore the real changes of a social network data. Our probing framework minimizes the possible difference between the observed topology and the actual network through several representative communities. We also propose an algorithm that takes full advantage of our divide-and-conquer strategy which reduces the computational overhead. Thirdly, if let the number of users who are influenced be the depth of propagation and the area covered by influenced users be the breadth, most of the research results are only focused on the influence depth instead of the influence breadth. Timeliness, acceptance ratio, and breadth are three important factors that significantly affect the result of influence maximization in reality, but they are neglected by researchers in most of time. To fill the gap, a novel algorithm that incorporates time delay for timeliness, opportunistic selection for acceptance ratio, and broad diffusion for influence breadth has been investigated. In our model, the breadth of influence is measured by the number of covered communities, and the tradeoff between depth and breadth of influence could be balanced by a specific parameter. Furthermore, the problem of privacy preserved influence maximization in both physical location network and online social network was addressed. We merge both the sensed location information collected from cyber-physical world and relationship information gathered from online social network into a unified framework with a comprehensive model. Then we propose the resolution for influence maximization problem with an efficient algorithm. At the same time, a privacy-preserving mechanism are proposed to protect the cyber physical location and link information from the application aspect. Last but not least, to address the challenge of large-scale data, we take the lead in designing an efficient influence maximization framework based on two new models which incorporate the dynamism of networks with consideration of time constraint during the influence spreading process in practice. All proposed problems and models of influence analysis have been empirically studied and verified by different, large-scale, real-world social data in this dissertation.

The politicians have entered a new platform with the potential to democratization and to exchange ideas. Therefore, we want to look into what new conditions social media creates for politicians. Through strategic political communication the goal-oriented two-way communication is depicted as it is crucial for relations to establish, build up, maintain and to be affected.   One aspect of this is about the creation of messages and the visual communication affecting the meaning of the content. In our study, these theories have become the foundation in the research, and of the tools used when developing messages for social networks. We have looked deeper into Facebook as a social media and political parties on this platform. We focused on and observed their different ways of developing messages in their Facebook feed and the reactions they generated. We found tendencies saying that pictures and videos have a great effect on a engagement generated in the posts. This proves that visual communication is a crucial tool for political strategic communications within the networks of social media.

The increasing usage of social networking sites, such as Facebook has changed the way that corporations and customer interact with each other. New ways of customer-corporation interactions evolve constantly, enabling customers to participate and co-create value with the corporations. An organisation that has taken this a step further is Skånetrafiken, which uses Facebook as a channel for its customer service. This thesis focuses in the interactions that occur between Skånetrafiken and its customers, which in this case takes place on Facebook.   The purpose of this thesis is to explore the what, how and why customer and corporation interaction occur on Skånetrafiken's Facebook page. In order to approach the phenomenon of co-creation, we conducted a case study as a research design and strategy. Data collection methods we used were observations on Skånetrafiken’s Facebook page, an interview and a focus group discussion.     The findings indicate that there must be an engagement for the co-creation process to begin and that the co-creation process is continuous rather than a fixed model. It further turned out that different types of interactions occur, not only customer-to-corporation, but also customer-to-customer and customer-to-employee interactions. The limitations of the study imply that the findings cannot be generalised on all organisations since only one organisation have been examined. This thesis further gives a practical implication by presenting an applicable framework for co-creation on Facebook. Additionally, few if any have previously studied phenomenon of co-creation on Facebook, which contributes to the original value of the thesis.

In der vorliegenden Forschungsarbeit – im Charakter einer Pionierstudie auf diesem Gebiet – wird mittels selbstkonstruiertem Onlinesurvey untersucht, inwiefern die Social-Network-Site Facebook die Bildungspartizipation und das Konsumverhalten ihrer Nutzer beeinflusst und verändert. Nach Definition eines sozialen Netzwerks, einer Social-Network-Site und definitorischer Eingliederung von Facebook als solche wird die Sozialplattform selbst historisch und faktisch erklärt und der bisherige Forschungsstand zusammengetragen. Zur weiteren Hypothesenformulierung dienen für die Bildungspartizipation Marotzkis strukturale Bildungstheorie (1990) und Banduras kognitive Lerntheorie (1979), für das Konsumverhalten ebenfalls Banduras sozial-kognitive Lerntheorie (1971; 1976; 1986), Heiders Balancetheorie (1946) und Festingers soziale Vergleichstheorie (1954). Nach äußerst umfangreicher Operationalisierung, Rekodierung und Skalenbildung, univariater und bivariater Analyse, Drittvariablenkontrolle und Mediationsprüfung werden im Regressionsabschnitt alle fünf Prädiktoren der Haupthypothesen der Bildungspartizipation und drei der fünf Haupthypothesen des Konsumverhaltens bestätigt. Die „Anzahl an Facebook-Freunden“, „Neue Facebook- Freunde“, „Daten aus der Vergangenheit“, „Lesen bildungsrelevanter Aspekte“ und die „Facebook-Nutzungshäufigkeit (pro Woche)“ beeinflussen somit signifikant positiv die Bildungspartizipation. Die „Neigung zu positiv geschlossenen Triaden“, die „Relevanz positiver Meinungen der Vergleichspersonen“ und die „Beobachtung positiver Signale Statushoher“ beeinflussen positiv-signifikant das Konsumverhalten, wobei jedoch im Endmodell die „Beobachtung negativer Konsumerfahrungen“ und die „Relevanz der Ähnlichkeit von Vergleichspersonen“ keinen statistisch gesicherten Effekt mehr aufweisen. Der überwiegende Teil der vorab gebildeten Unterhypothesen – als theoretische Zusatzannahmen fundiert – werden bestätigt. Als weiteres statistisches Instrument wird ein Künstliches Neuronales Netz als Regressionsfunktionsapproximator eingesetzt, das bemerkenswert genau die Einflussstärken der Haupthypothesenvariablen validiert. / Nowadays, the social network site Facebook preferably serves as an appropriate medium of communication and as adviser on issues about daily life. Thus, recent social scientists have plenty of reasons to investigate the research field Facebook, the connections amongst its members, their cognitive structures and way of behaving which is frequently not intended. Through an online survey, including 1,358 German respondents, the influence of Facebook on educational participation and consumer behaviour is analysed. According consumer behaviour as dependent variable, Heider´s Balance Theory (1946), Bandura´s Social Cognitive Theory (1971, 1976, 1986), and Festinger´s Theory of Social Comparison Processes (1954), including theoretical continuations for each of these, are used. In order to derivate hypotheses for educational participation Marotzki´s Strukturale Bildungstheorie (1990), further extensions and Bandura’s Social Cognitive Learning Theory are taken. To sum up, tending to positively closed triads, relevant positive opinions of persons of comparison, and observing positively social signals from persons with a high status on Facebook significantly and positively influence consumer behaviour. Surprisingly, there is no significant influence from similarity to persons of comparison and observations of negative consumer´s experience. All hypotheses concerning educational participation could be confirmed: For instance, the more often a person gets new Facebook friends or the more often friends post visible educational aspects (i.e. newspaper articles or similar), the higher is educational participation on Facebook. These results, analysed by a regression analysis, are checked by an alternative method which is rarely used in that context. Using an artificial neural network (multilayer perceptron) a sensitivity analysis is conducted. Interestingly, the rank order of beta coefficients is almost reproduced. The existing study which was carried out at the Institute of Sociology in Leipzig is a pilot experiment in respect of both theoretical and methodical aspects. There are exploratively connections between social-psychological theory and consumer behaviour and educational participation on Facebook, supported by an extensive implementation of control variables.