Most corporations today have an organizational framework that includes a separation between ownership and management of the company. Along with the Board of Directors, the chief executive officer (CEO) usually has the power to make significant decisions on corporate policy and also takes personal responsibility for the performance of the company. Thus the selection of an optimal CEO is a crucial business decision, and is the focus of this management study. When undertaking the procedures for CEO succession, the members of the Board must select appropriate candidates for the position, as well as deciding upon the CEO¡¦s job responsibilities. The Board evaluates the extent to which the various candidates¡¦ capabilities and experiences match the needs of the corporation. After discussing the pros and cons of each candidate, the Board selects the most appropriate individual for the position. However, certain circumstances often exist that serve to affect this decision process. Specifically, the quality and timing of Board meetings may have a serious detrimental affect on selecting the optimal candidate. By analyzing the literature reviews and annual reports of 682 public companies in Taiwan in 2003, three succession logics of selecting a CEO can be observed: 1) social relationship, 2) political power, and 3) rational capability. From these three logics, the following conclusions can be drawn: 1) The social relationship has the most influence on the selection outcome, with political power acting as the second most influential aspect, and management capability as the third; 2) The influence of the Chairman¡¦s abstract power, as well as his ownership of stock, do not have an obvious influence on the selection outcome, though the Chairman¡¦s control over Board seats has a statistically significant impact on CEO selection; 3) A CEO¡¦s social relationship can not be replaced by his management capability; 4) CEO¡¦s social relationship and stock ownership both have high positive correlation with his involvement of the Board, while the Chairman¡¦s power and the CEO¡¦s management capability don¡¦t.

Abstract This study is based on social capital theory and we made used of the concept of community action as the output of the proposition of social capital theory. The purposes of the study are to discuss rural community elites¡¦ social capital and the application of social capital theory in the participation of community action. In the strategies of analysis, we used community role as an indicator to measure the level of social capital and the participation of community action, and then present the differentiation of rural community elites. In practice operation, social capital could be measuring with two dimensions, including social tie, social network and the social capital of the bridge role (cognitions, trust, and support). The measurement of the participation of community action is based on the concept of community development. And we made use of the indicator¡Xcommunity role to measure the differentiation of rural community elites participation in community action. This study was conducted in three rural communities in the edge of Kaohsiung Metropolitan¡XTashe town, Jenwu town, and Yenchao town.76 valid samples were surveyed .We also made use of the community role as an indicator to separate the rural community elites into five categories, as a comparison and analysis. And this includes: the township office administrators, the local representative, primary school principles, the leaders of social groups, and the directors of community development association. There are four main findings in this study: First, the results to experiment shows that there are some differentiations between the community role of rural community elites in the concepts of social network and the social capital, especially it expressed significantly on the local representative. Second, there are some differentiations when the rural community elites take part in different extent of their community action. But there is no differentiation between the participation of the whole community action. Third, social network is a form of social capital. However, in order to become a form of social capital must work with actions. It causes resources mobility in social network. Also, there will be some differentiations between the community roles if it makes use of social network as social capital by affecting community action. The final one, as the cognitions, trust, and support to the bridge roles of the community by rural community elites, causes their participation of community action. In other words, the social capital owned by the bridge roles affects the degree of rural community elites¡¦ participation of community action. Keyword: social capital, community elite, social network, community action

This research is aimed to build a social network system for college teachers by retrieving different data sources available on the Internet, the characteristics of the constructed social network are represented in graphic and numeric modes. By applying relationships maintained in the social network, we can find the shortest path between any two researchers or the ego-center social network of any individual teacher according to the input parameters given by a query user.. That is to say we have realized the knowledge map concept for college teachers. In this research, we focus on searching the advisory relationships between advisors and students. . Because after a Ph.D. student graduated, he/she could be an advisor guiding other students, by applying recursion of advisory relationships ¡A we can construct a multi-level hierarchy of family-tree for a given advisor and the family-tree can be viewed as a whole family-tree and just those non-leaf nodes. We also analyzed some interesting characteristics of the created family-tree¡A compared with the human relationships in our real society to evaluate and explain some phenomena happened in our academic society. Furthermore, we combine two information of social network and knowledge map for developing the ANIWEB system, providing web-based query functions for users to search teachers¡¦ social network. Two types of query can be applied, one is searching for teacher¡¦s personal information, such as biography, educational background, specialty and NSC projects; the other is searching for social network information about an interested teacher, such as multi-level advisory relationship, co-advisory relationship, ego-center social network and the shortest path between any two teachers. Users can apply different search patterns for their different needs. For example, a user can first search for those teachers with an expertise of a given research topics, then search for the shortest path from the social network to find out the expert he/she could get in touch.

In this thesis, we propose a system for finding friend groups in Blogosphere. This system includes two parts: The first part can traverse the Blogosphere so as to obtain the friend network; and the second part is used to find friend groups from the friend network. Our practical performance was tested on Wretch, which is the largest Blogosphere in Taiwan. In today's blog service environment, the establishments of friend relationships are usually unidirectional, i.e., a blogger can add any other as his friend without confirmation. Traditional methods such as clique/club or 2-clique/club are not suitable because the bidirectional link is built incompletely in the social network under such circumstances. To solve this problem, we propose the 1.5-club based on transitive extension. We further make a comparison among the results of finding groups by 1-club, 1.5-club, 2-club and k-clique, and analyze the historical data of social networks from over almost one year. The experimental results show that our proposed method is effective and promising.

Executive search recruiting by head hunters have been the main and important human resources strategy. In the past, there are a few thesis topics on executive search recruiter (head hunter), and all of these studies focus on either executive search industry or the competency of executive search recruiter. This study surveyed a sample of executive search recruiters island wide, and learn the effects of hunter hunter¡¦s personality trait, human capital and social network on job performance. A brief version of Goldberg¡¦s Unipolar Big-Five Markers was used to evaluate head hunters; as for social networks we focus on four properties of the social network that have been identified as important in the study of executives' networks: the propensity to network, the scope of the network, the strength of ties with network members, and the prestige of network members. The effective sample is 65 after deleting two ineffective questionnaires. The result after regression analysis is as follows: 1. Head hunter¡¦s current job seniority and the seniority of their past original professional field before being a head hunter have a positive impact on their job performance. 2. Having master degree or not and the total seniority of being a head hunter have no obvious impact on job performance. 3. The personality trait of head hunter has impact on their subjective job performance but has no impact on their objective job performance. 4. Head hunter¡¦s social network has no impact on their job performance.

This study aims to describe and analyse consumer behaviour in social media toward fashion brands. Specifically, it is analysed consumers’ motivations to follow fashion brands on social media, activities developed on social platforms concerning to fashion brands and level of engagement regarding fashion brands on social media.

With the advancement of internet technology, online news content has become very popular. People can now get live updates of the world's news through online news sites. Social networking sites are also very popular among Internet users, for sharing pictures, videos, news links and other online content. Twitter is one of the most popular social networking and microblogging sites. With Twitter's URL shortening service, a news link can be included in a tweet with only a small number of characters, allowing the rest of the tweet to be used for expressing views on the news story. Social links can be unidirectional in Twitter, allowing people to follow any person or organization and get their tweet updates, and share those updates with their own followers if desired. Through Twitter thousands of news links are tweeted every day. Whenever there is a popular new story, different news sites will publish identical or nearly identical versions (``clones'') of that story. Though these clones have the same or very similar content, the level of popularity they achieve may be quite different due to content agnostic factors such as influential tweeters, time of publication and the popularities of the news sites. It is very important for the content provider site to know about which factor plays a important role to make their news link popular. In this thesis research, a data set is collected containing the tweets made for the 218 members of 25 distinct sets of news story clones. The collected data is analyzed with respect to basic popularity characteristics concerning number of tweets of various types, relative publication times of clone set members, tweet timing and number of tweeter followers. Then, several other factors are investigated to see their impact in making some news story clones more popular than others. It is found that multiple content-agnostic factors i.e. maximum number of followers, self promotional tweets plays an impact on news site's stories overall popularity, and a first step is taken at quantifying their relative importance.

Technologically mediated listening has changed the way in which music is heard as well as the way in which musical communities are constructed. Communities are no longer necessarily tied to place, and in the case of virtual communities, musicians can create a sense of community and a sense of place through their interactions. Some virtual communities of musicians - specifically those that specialize in electronic music - are ideally situated in cyberspace; what a producer of electronic music hears in his or her headphones when composing music is exactly what the audience hears after downloading or streaming it. The music remains in a digital format from its conception to its reception.In a Brazilian virtual community of electronic musicians called EnergyBR.net, fans, DJs, and producers exchange ideas about music, creating a feedback loop. In EnergyBR.net, this cyber-feedback loop shapes musical creation as well as a sense of place and community.

Little is known about the communication principles necessary for the design and implementation of health information technology (HIT) that supports the needs of healthcare providers from multiple professions. The purpose of this descriptive, exploratory research was to examine the patterns and methods of communication used by nurses, physicians, social workers, respiratory therapists, and pharmacists to share patient information during a patient handoff between units. The principles of complexity science were used as a theoretical framework and an original model of the healthcare organization consisting of embedded complex adaptive systems is presented.Five patient handoffs from the emergency department to participating inpatient units were included in the study. Providers responsible for the care of patients during the designated handoffs were identified through observation and snowball sampling and asked to complete a survey asking whom they communicated with and how. Social Network Analysis was used to map, analyze, and compare the communication patterns used by healthcare providers. Inferential statistics and thematic content analysis were used to examine provider characteristics and satisfaction with the quality of information available.The multi-professional collaborative patterns that emerged revealed the simultaneous use of both synchronous and asynchronous communication methods. HIT was shown to play a major role in the coordination process. Centrality and centralization measures identified that there is no one particular professional group dominating communication and hierarchy metrics indicate a unidirectional communication flow with tiers of dominant providers filtering information to providers on the lower tiers. These patterns suggest that the coordination of patient care during a handoff is a complex process that is the domain of more than one professional group.Satisfaction with the quality of available information was higher for providers working in the ED compared to the admitting units. Verbal communication was preferred by most participants despite difficulties identifying or contacting providers in other units. This study provides a foundation for future research that examines how communication principles that reflect the needs of multiple providers can be incorporated into healthcare provider workflow and HIT design.

Cultural evolutionary models that relate spatial and temporal patterning in artifact sequences to human social learning processes and history have made many recent advances. Specifically, these models connect evolutionary forces and social leaning mechanisms along cultural pathways with expectations that can be assessed using material culture. In this dissertation, I use an historical archaeology case study of carved New England gravestones to evaluate three different aspects of cultural transmission and artifact patterns. First, I study the role of social network structure in the transmission of cultural information among carvers organized in workshops that were principally comprised of a carver and his apprentices. The results of this study suggest that the motifs reflect widespread similarity that transcends workshop organization. However, the finer grained decorative elements that make up these motifs correspond with cultural lineages of gravestone carvers. Second, I examine the relationship between the diffusion of innovations and cultural transmission mechanisms that result in spatiotemporal patterning. The spatial patterning suggests that social contagion among consumers created brief instances of wave-like diffusion from a distinct workshop, highlighting the role of consumer choice. A review of probate payments shows that gravestones were rarely purchased from distance sources, as transport costs could be prohibitive. The spatial patterning and historic record suggest that carvers also learned from other carvers creating a hierarchical diffusion process. These two populations created a feedback mechanism that leads to complex emergent phenomena, as illustrated by the rapid and widespread adoption of the cherub motif. Third, the neutral model of stylistic variation is applied to gravestone data to examine the ways that increased consumption and an expanding carving industry led to dominant decorative motifs. This study shows that neutrality can be a fleeting and transitional state between the dominance of single decorative styles. These three studies use New England gravestones to illustrate the evolutionary forces and cultural transmission mechanisms among artifact producers and consumers, which generated the stylistic patterning we observe in the archaeological record.