When a species is housed in captivity there are facets of the managed environment that can impact on individual and population welfare. A key component of an individual’s environment is its social environment, which can have important implications for animal health and welfare. Highly social species may experience impoverished welfare if kept in captive groups that differ in size, structure and demographic to that experienced by free-living animals. Amongst the most common of social animals to be housed in captivity are the flamingos (Phoenicopteridae). The unique evolutionary biology of these birds means that key aspects of their behaviour depends upon group living. A positive relationship between breeding success and increasing flock size has previously been noted, but how flamingo flocks are structured socially remains mysterious. All six species of flamingo are currently found in captive collections. The three more generalist species, greater (Phoenicopterus roseus), Caribbean (P. ruber) and Chilean (P. chilensis) flamingos are found commonly in zoos and can, under the right conditions, breed well. The other flamingo species are much more specialised in their habitat and dietary requirements and have proved more challenging with regards to their captive management. These three species are the Andean (Phoenicoparrus andinus), James’ (P. jamesi) and lesser (Phoeniconaias minor) flamingos. All six species are included in the experimental work presented in this thesis. This research aimed to evaluate specific elements of flamingo group living using social network analysis (SNA). It also aimed to assess influences of the captive environment (i.e. enclosure style and visitor number) and climate on enclosure usage, time-activity budgets and behavioural diversity to provide, as far as possible, a complete insight into how to measure, assess and evaluate captive flamingo welfare. A synthesis of the relevance of SNA to zoo animal management, and a review of current literature to identify research needs that could evidence good flamingo husbandry form the basis of the first two chapters. These two overview chapters support the questions asked in the following data-based sections of the thesis. Flamingos were observed at WWT Slimbridge Wetland Centre from March 2012 to July 2016 with data on patterns of social associations being collected four times daily (depending upon weather and bird husbandry). Associations were defined as birds within one neck length of each other and, using photos, the affiliations of each bird in the group were recorded. For assessment of bond strength, network position and identification of preferred/avoided partners a Half-Weight Index was applied to these data. Permutation testing was applied to association matrices to determine the difference between the number of observed preferential bonds (and avoided bonds) and Mantel tests were used to compare matrix correlations to assess differences between seasons, species, years and enclosures (where appropriate). The SNA programmes Socprog, UCInet and Netdraw were used to analyse network data. These network data form the basis of three chapters and show that flamingos associate preferentially with non-random bonds occurring in all flocks observed. Influences of social bonds on courtship display were also examined, and temporal changes in association were considered across time, season and year. Finally, to see any influence of animal health on bond preferences, scores of foot condition (used to identify and evaluate the presence and severity of pododermatitis on an individual bird) were analysed alongside of network measures for three flocks of flamingos. To measure enclosure usage, each species’ exhibit was measured and zones accessible to the birds were defined. As exhibit use can be based on resource use (and these resources can form differently-sized areas within an exhibit) a modified Spread of Participation Index (SPI) was used to provide an outcome between 1 (one area or resource used more than others) and 0 (equal use of all resource zones). Time-activity budgets were calculated for all flocks over daytime, and for one flock (measured using remote camera traps) over night. These data are presented in two chapters and demonstrate that captive flamingos can change their activity patterns in a similar manner to that noted in wild birds. Interestingly, flamingos are very active during the night and this provides useful data for zoo personnel to consider when re-assessing husbandry and management plans for these most ubiquitous of zoo birds.

ICT4D champions are individuals who make a decisive contribution to an ICT4D initiative by actively and enthusiastically promoting its progress through critical stages in order to mobilise resources and/or active support and cooperation from all stakeholders. Mindful of the poor performance of development projects generally, and ICT4D projects in particular, the thesis argues that the seemingly important role of key individuals, such as champions, lacks research. Based on the repeated calls for research to better understand champion-type individuals and their roles in ICT4D initiatives, the thesis claims to have identified an original and significant knowledge gap towards which it contributes. Extant literature on champions of information systems innovations shows that champions can be conceptualised in terms of three core orientations: towards results, relationships and resources. This body of literature and conceptualisations has been used in the thesis as the starting point for exploring and describing the champion phenomenon in an as yet unexplored context - ICT4D initiatives. Critical realism is the assumed philosophical position for the research undertaken in the thesis. Theoretical constructs from the model of Transformational and Transactional Leadership and Social Capital Theory are combined in a conceptual framework to guide the empirical investigations and analysis. The research draws on three ICT4D champion cases in South Africa; case data was collected through the careful combination and sequencing of multiple mixed methods: in-depth interviews, a social network analysis (SNA) survey, and semi-structured interviews with the ICT4D champions and other key initiative stakeholders. A literal replication design was followed whereby the case studies explored and described the individual champion cases and subsequently synthesised findings across the three cases. The main contribution of the thesis is a knowledge contribution; the thesis contributes fifteen empirical findings to our conceptual understanding of ICT4D champions - their origins, competencies, characteristics and motivations, and their orientations towards results, relationships and resources. The analysis has shown how ICT4D champions are similar to champions of IS innovation in some ways, but has also revealed unique aspects, such as the importance they ascribe to addressing social concerns. This, in turn, led to a number of theoretical and practical contributions, as well as a methodological and a research contribution, all emanating from the three case studies. Firstly, two inductively generated theoretical contributions are offered: i) a conceptual framework for analysing and describing the origins of ICT4D champions; ii) a hybrid and contextual model of ICT4D champions that combines a complex set of factors (personal, organisational, and external) and the orientations of champions as a means to account for the complexity of these key individuals and their roles in ICT4D initiatives. The thesis contributes to ICT4D practice by suggesting ways to identify, develop, deploy and support champions; in so doing it offers actionable guidance on how to harness the potential positive contributions of these key individuals. Furthermore, a network-based approach - such as SNA used in the thesis - are rarely, if ever, followed in conducting champion research and this is offered as a methodological contribution. Finally, ICT4D champion research is in its infancy; the exploratory approach followed in the thesis draws on literature, the empirical findings and the theoretical contributions to offer an extensive agenda for future champion research in general, and ICT4D champion research in particular.

This thesis is a case study of three virtual communities for parents of children with special needs in Taiwan. The main focus of this research was on understanding the role that virtual communities play in providing support for parents. This study addressed the following research questions: How do virtual communities provide support for parents of children with special needs in Taiwan? What motivates Taiwanese parents of children with special needs to search for support through virtual communities? How does the support provided through virtual communities impact the relationship between Taiwanese parents of children with special needs and professionals? This thesis constructs an analytical framework that helps in understanding the concept of support in virtual communities for parents of children with special needs. Employing this framework identified three broad types of support: informational support, advocacy, and emotional support. In this study, informational support included parenting skills, advice, and access to services; advocacy referred to articulating needs and rights; and emotional support included solidarity, increased self-esteem, acceptance, and affirmation. All three virtual communities were established by parents; two are managed by parents, and one is managed by a professional. Web-based observations were conducted in each virtual community from November 2014 to December 2015. Semi-structured interviews were held with 14 parents, 7 professionals, and 6 administrators and concentrated on experiences of, and motivations for, seeking and providing support through virtual communities. The analytical framework was used to identify broad themes in the data. A thematic analysis was employed to look across the cases to identify commonalities and differences, and finally, a systematic analysis borrowing from social network analysis was used to map the interactions among the participants. The main findings of this study indicate that information and support related to parenthood and parenting skills was easily accessed through virtual communities. Parents were found to join together to share their experiences of parenting, comfort one another, and advocate for their needs through the virtual communities. The parents occasionally excluded members of the community to ensure that all members shared similar parenting values. In addition, parents are beginning to gain control of knowledge and their relationships with professionals through virtual communities. This paper's main contributions to knowledge are as follows: (1) Virtual communities allow parents to redefine themselves in ways that they believe are publicly acceptable. (2) Parents are using virtual communities to exercise power to renegotiate their identity and obtain resources. (3) Parents are also starting to alter the power relationships between themselves and professionals.

Improving the safety of medicines management when people leave hospital is an international priority. There is evidence that poor co-ordination of medicines between providers can cause preventable harm to patients, yet there is insufficient evidence of the structure and function of the medicines management system that patients experience. This research used a mixed-methods social network analysis to determine the structure, content and function of that system as experienced by patients. Patients’ networks comprised a range of loosely connected healthcare professionals in different organisations and informal, personal contacts. Networks performed multiple functions, including health condition management, and orienting patients concerning their medicines. Some patients experienced safety incidents as a function of their networks. Staff discharging patients from hospital were also observed. Contributory factors that were found to risk the safety of patients’ discharge with medicines included active failures, individual factors and local working conditions. System defences involving staff and patients were also observed. The study identified how patients often co-ordinated a system that lacked personalisation and there is a need to provide more consistent support for patients’ self-management of medicines after they leave hospital. This could be achieved through interventions that include patients’ informal contacts in supporting their medicines use, enhancing their resilience to preventable harm, and developing and testing the role of a ‘medicines key worker’ in safely managing the transfer of care. The role of GP practices in co-ordinating the involvement of multiple professionals in patient polypharmacy needs to be further explored.

With the advancement of the Internet and related technologies, many traditional crimes have made the leap to digital environments. The successes of data mining in a wide variety of disciplines have given birth to crime analysis. Traditional crime analysis is mainly focused on understanding crime patterns, however, it is unsuitable for identifying and monitoring emerging crimes. The true nature of crime remains buried in unstructured content that represents the hidden story behind the data. User feedback leaves valuable traces that can be utilised to measure the quality of various aspects of products or services and can also be used to detect, infer, or predict crimes. Like any application of data mining, the data must be of a high quality standard in order to avoid erroneous conclusions. This thesis presents a methodology and practical experiments towards discovering whether (i) user feedback can be harnessed and processed for crime intelligence, (ii) criminal associations, structures, and roles can be inferred among entities involved in a crime, and (iii) methods and standards can be developed for measuring, predicting, and comparing the quality level of social data instances and samples. It contributes to the theory, design and development of a novel framework for crime intelligence and algorithm for the estimation of social data quality by innovatively adapting the methods of monitoring water contaminants. Several experiments were conducted and the results obtained revealed the significance of this study in mining social data for crime intelligence and in developing social data quality filters and decision support systems.

Propomos o uso da análise de redes sociais para entender efeitos de agenda-setting. Para tanto, recuperamos a evolução dos estudos sobre a teoria da agenda-setting, desde as aplicações relacionadas à mídia tradicional até os estudos contemporâneos sobre mídias sociais. Em seguida, apresentamos o conceito de agenda-setting interpessoal e descrevemos métodos da análise de redes sociais para investigação desse conceito. A operacionalização empírica da proposta foi feita pela comparação de dois tipos de redes: 1) um grupo de indivíduos que publicou mensagens no Twitter sobre um tópico transmitido na TV nacional e 2) um grupo de indivíduos que publicou mensagens no Twitter sobre um tema que não fez parte da mídia broadcast. Nosso objetivo foi investigar as diferenças entre as redes de indivíduos que experimentaram efeitos de agenda-setting advindos da mídia de massa e indivíduos que experimentaram efeitos de agenda-setting interpessoal. Nossos resultados ainda são preliminares, mas indicam diferenças estruturais entre os grupos e evidências de que indivíduos mais centrais são impactados antecipadamente por mensagens transmitidas interpessoalmente. / We propose the use of social network analysis to understand agenda-setting effects. To achive that purpose, we recover the evolution of studies on agenda-setting theory, from applications related to traditional media to contemporary studies on social media. Next, we present the concept of interpersonal agenda-setting and describe methods of social network analysis to investigate this concept. The empirical operationalization of the proposal was made by comparing two types of networks: 1) a group of individuals that tweeted about a topic broadcasted on national TV and 2) a group of individuals that tweeted about a non-mainstream topic. We aim to investigate differences between networks of individuals that experienced mass media agenda-setting effects and individuals that experienced interpersonal agenda-setting effects. Our results are still preliminary but indicate structural differences between the groups and also indicate evidence that more central individuals are impacted in advance by interpersonally transmitted messages.

Sociality is widespread across the animal kingdom and explanations for its incidence and persistence are numerous. Whilst various drivers of sociality have been identified and tested, controversies remain and we are still far from a complete understanding of the mechanisms underlying social structure. Here I use a combination of field observations on a free-living population of feral horses Equus caballus and laboratory behavioural experiments on the Pacific beetle roach Diploptera punctata to investigate the drivers of sociality in these species. I explore four key aspects of sociality: the influences of kinship on sociality and social development, the strength and persistence of social bonds, the relationship between inbreeding avoidance and dispersal and the potential influence of individuals on social structure. Whilst kinship is a major driver of social structure in most mammalian species, I present evidence in Chapter Three that horse society is not structured by levels of kinship; however, in Chapter Five, I show that kinship levels to potential mates are significant in female dispersal choices in this species. In Chapter Eight, I provide evidence for significant effects of kinship to companions upon social and physical development in D. punctata, indicating a clear potential benefit of kin-based associations. The stability of social bonds can have substantial effects upon social structure. In Chapter Three, I show that the bonds between female horses show significant stability and are formed independently to kinship levels, a rare result in a non-primate species. I also provide evidence consistent with the hypothesis that these bonds are driven by male harassment. Similarly, in D. punctata, I find in Chapter Eight that female clustering occurs within resting aggregations and that the most likely explanation is the avoidance of male harassment. I therefore propose that this driver of female sociality may be a highly prevalent force structuring animal societies. Inbreeding depression has been demonstrated in a variety of species and contexts. Here I show in Chapter Five that in horses, female dispersal is likely to be influenced by kinship levels with potential mates. In Chapter Four, I then show that more heterozygous males have a higher reproductive success, most likely due to their ability to utilise a larger home range. Finally, local population structure can be highly influenced by individual association choices and behaviour. In Chapter Two, I show that in horses, mothers may allow their sons to postpone dispersal by the maintenance of stronger mother-son bonds, permitting an extended period of social learning. In Chapter Seven, I demonstrate that consistent inter-individual variation in personality traits exists in D. punctata which is stable across life stages, despite age effects on the strength of boldness. This is a source of variation which may be extremely important for decision-making social groups. My main conclusion from this work is that male harassment is often a key driver of sociality which may frequently be overlooked. I also demonstrate that the effects of kinship are far-ranging but not omnipresent. This thesis therefore makes a major contribution to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying animal sociality and presents clear potential avenues for future research.

Os contextos em que as organizações operam e agem mudaram drasticamente nos últimos anos. Neste sentido, o espaço físico e a organização encontram-se conectados. As famosas palavras de Winston Churchill em 19431: “Nós moldamos nossos prédios e nossas construções nos moldam”, indiretamente já se referia à importância do espaço físico em relação a interação entre indivíduos. O design dos espaços de trabalho é normalmente guiado por topologias (formas de configurar layouts: aberto, fechado, celular) que descrevem e determinam a qualidade das interações. Mas a questão do layout do espaço como fator de influência da troca de conhecimentos entre colaboradores é uma dimensão pouco considerada os pesquisadores da gestão organizacional, ficando restrito a arquitetos e designers a preocupação com a elaboração e configuração de um layout físico favorável. Considerando este contexto, o presente trabalho propõe, como objetivo geral, desenvolver uma sistemática que permita analisar a disposição do ambiente de trabalho com base na análise de redes sociais (SNA) com o intuito de promover a interação social e a transferência de conhecimentos entre os membros de uma equipe. A proposta desta dissertação é baseada em uma abordagem combinada de métodos quantitativos e estudo de caso. Nesses termos, os dados desta pesquisa buscam analisar a interação do layout físico com a transferência do conhecimento no ambiente de uma equipe médica. Essa interação foi analisada através da teoria das redes sociais. Como principais resultados obtiveram-se: (i) a sistematização da literatura sobre o tema da transferência do conhecimento e análise de redes sociais; (ii) análise e aplicação da prática das análises das redes sociais e estudo do layout e (iii) proposta de uma versão inicial de um artefato para auxiliar profissionais da gestão organizacional que se interessem em analisar a rede social de um ambiente antes de alterar ou elaborar um novo layout para que os colaboradores possam ter mais interação e com isso melhorar a transferência do conhecimento e, consequentemente, a inovação organizacional. / The contexts in which organizations operate and act have changed dramatically in recent years. In this sense, the physical space and the organization are connected. The famous words said by Winson Churchill in 1943: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our building shape us”, indirectly already noted the importance of the physical space and interaction between individuals. The design of office spaces is often guided by general typologies (cellular, open and closed office) to describe and determine the quality of interactions in office structures. However, the layout of spaces, as an influence factor for knowledge sharing between people, is a dimension little considered by researchers from the organizational management field. Architects and designers are the only concerned about the design and configuration of a physical layout to strengthen such interaction. Based in this context, this work proposes, as main objective, to develop a systematic that allows analyzing the work environment disposition based on both a network analysis and on a knowledge transfer perspective. This proposal is based on a combined quantitative and a case study approach. In these terms, the collected data was used to analyze the interaction of a medical team when considered the physical layout of their work environment. The interaction was analyzed through the theory of social networks. As main results, we highlight the following: (i) the systematization of the literature on the subject of knowledge transfer and social network analysis; (ii) a practical application of social networks in the studies of office layouts; and, (iii) the proposal of an artifact to help management professionals to analyze the social network of an environment before changing or developing a new layout focused on the improvement of people interaction and, consequently, improving the organizational innovation.

The thesis concentrates on marketing communication on social networks run by tourism entities. Facebook and Twitter are in the middle of the attention. In the first chapter the social networks are defined and all the key concepts are mentioned. The basic principals of marketing communications are mentioned in the next chapters as well as basics of using social network by ordinary users. In the last chapter there are examples of tourism entities presentations which are analyzed a discussed.

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