Browsing by Subject "Social influence"
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Item Community Detection in Social Networks(2016-12)Item Culture jamming: ideological struggle and the possibilities for social change(2008-05) Nomai, Afsheen Joseph, 1969-; Kearney, Mary Celeste, 1962-This dissertation examines the activities and texts of four groups of activists who use culture jamming as a tactic to challenge dominant ideologies as they advocate for progressive social, cultural and economic change. Culture jamming, as defined here, is a practice whereby texts critical of the status quo are created through the appropriation and/or mimicry of the aesthetics and/or language that are a part of popular, or at least widely experienced, culture. Exploring the work of the Yes Men, the Adbusters Media Foundation, the Billboard Liberation Front and the Illegal Art exhibit, I argue that through their culture jamming these activists take critical theory into practice as a part of their goal is to raise the critical consciousness of the public. Confronting the issues of globalization, consumerism, and the political economy of the media in the United States, these culture jammers aim to highlight aspects of domination and oppression in their view results primarily from the corporate control of culture and politics. Using theories of ideology and hegemony developed by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams to guide my analysis, I trace how each of these groups develop, present, and promote their critique. I steer clear of discussing the effectiveness of these culture jammers, focusing instead on the actions they take and theorizing some of the possible challenges and limitations they face in light of their own experiences. Differing requirements of cultural capital and deeper contextual information for most, if not all, of these culture jamming activities can make them especially complex forms of activism. What becomes clear is that culture jamming may be a tactic best suited to the maintenance of an activist community of people who already hold a critical position, as the jammer’s challenges to dominant culture and ideologies can be lost because of the form of the critique, or marginalized or otherwise ignored by the mainstream media.Item Essays on social media, social influence, and social comparison(2013-08) Tang, Qian, active 2013; Whinston, Andrew B.Social networking and social media technologies have greatly changed the way information is created and transmitted. Social media has made content contribution an efficient approach for individual brand building. With abundant user generated content and social networks, content consumers are constantly subject to social influence. Such social influence can be further utilized to encourage pro-social behavior. Chapter 1 examines the incentives for content contribution in social media. We propose that exposure and reputation are the major incentives for contributors. Besides, as more and more social media websites offer advertising-revenue sharing with some of their contributors, shared revenue provides an extra incentive for contributors who have joined revenue-sharing programs. We develop a dynamic structural model to identify a contributor's underlying utility function from observed contribution behavior. We recognize the dynamic nature of the content-contribution decision--that contributors are forward-looking, anticipating how their decisions impact future rewards. Using data collected from YouTube, we show that content contribution is driven by a contributor's desire for exposure, revenue sharing, and reputation and that the contributor makes decisions dynamically. Chapter 2 examines how social influence impact individuals' content consumption decisions in social network. Specifically, we consider social learning and network effects as two important mechanisms of social influence, in the context of YouTube. Rather than combining both social learning and network effects under the umbrella of social contagion or peer influence, we develop a theoretical model and empirically identify social learning and network effects separately. Using a unique data set from YouTube, we find that both mechanisms have statistically and economically significant effects on video views, and which mechanism dominates depends on the specific video type. Chapter 3 studies incentive mechanism to improve users' pro-social behavior based on social comparison. In particular, we aim to motivate organizations to improve Internet security. We propose an approach to increase the incentives for addressing security problems through reputation concern and social comparison. Specifically, we process existing security vulnerability data, derive explicit relative security performance information, and disclose the information as feedback to organizations and the public. To test our approach, we conducted a field quasi-experiment for outgoing spam for 1,718 autonomous systems in eight countries. We found that the treatment group subject to information disclosure reduced outgoing spam approximately by 16%. Our results suggest that social information and social comparison can be effectively leveraged to encourage desirable behavior.Item Exploratory study on factors impacting job satisfaction among ethnic minority employees(2011-12) Koo, Lamont Bon-gul; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; McCann, BruceAs organizations are being confronted with the pool of people seeking employment that are increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity (Oerlemans et al. 2008), and as job satisfaction has been one of the important drivers for work-related well-being in employees, there have been a number of studies about job satisfaction among ethnic minorities (Spector 1997). Although there is a growing body of research on job satisfaction and ethnic minorities at work, there is still a paucity of studies regarding factors impacting job satisfaction among ethnic minorities specifically. The present study explores contributing factors impacting ethnic minorities’ job satisfaction, using qualitative method based on Motivator-Hygiene Theory (Frederick 1966, 2003) and Job Characteristics Theory (Hackman and Oldham 1976). Three Hispanic/Latino Americans and three Asian Americans, all workers in construction sites in Samsung semiconductor in Austin, Texas, were individually interviewed with open-ended questions by the author in the summer of 2010. Participants reported professional development opportunities and appropriate and well-deserved compensation as the main factors impacting job satisfaction, while heavy workload, not being recognized, time constrains, and stressful work environment were reported as factors in dissatisfaction. Family, personal goals and money were the three most important personal values that participants considered when making decisions about their career paths. It is important to continue to examine other predictors of and contributing factors to job satisfaction of ethnic minority employees, so that their employers and managers in the work place can form a better understanding of these populations and work effectively with them. It is also important to educate human resources professionals about ethnic minorities’ needs and how those needs can be met for work-related well-being.Item Gender, values, and the formation of occupational goals(2006) Weisgram, Erica S.; Bigler, Rebecca S.Item Normative and informational influences in conformity, persuasion, and group polarization: a unified paradigm of social influence(Texas Tech University, 1993-05) Holzhausen, Kurt GResearchers have long held that two types of conformity, public "compliance" and private "acceptance," result, respectively, from the desire to meet expectations held by the majority and from the belief that the majority is accurate. These motives underlie the traditional distinction between processes of normative and informational social influence. The recent discovery of additional types of conformity has questioned the utility of conceiving social influence processes as dichotomous. Fortunately, the concepts of normative and informational social influence have evolved considerably in the domains of group polarization and persuasion. A model that unifies processes of social influence, as conceived in conformity, group polarization, and individual attitude change research was tested. The model postulates three related processes, based on the traditional normative/informational distinction, that give rise to three forms of influence. As predicted, results supported the existence of one process of normative social influence and two processes of informational social influence. In a problem-solving setting, subjects complied with implausible majority responses to simple problems. Based on the assumption that "consensus implies correctness," subjects accepted both plausible and implausible majority responses to complex problems. Acceptance under these conditions did not generalize to related items or exhibit other characteristics of effortful processing. Finally, when subjects actively considered simple problems from the perspective offered by a plausible majority, they discovered arguments to support the majority's perspective. Subsequent acceptance generalized to related items and persisted over time. Implications for integrating research in conformity, group polarization, and persuasion were discussed.Item Seat at the table(s) : an examination of senior public relations practitioners' power and influence among multiple executive-level coalitions(2012-08) Neill, Marlene Sue; Drumwright, Minette E.Scholars have advocated that public relations executives need to seek a seat at the table among the most senior officers in the organization, referred to as the dominant coalition. However, this study found that public relations practitioners also need to seek a seat among the division leadership team and executive-level committees to fulfill a valuable internal boundary spanning role, a role that has been neglected in public relations theory. Consistent with social capital theory, the contacts that public relations practitioners developed allowed them to gather intelligence across the company and then they used that information to help their companies make better strategic decisions and avoid costly mistakes. Through in-depth interviews with 30 senior executives from a variety of disciplines, three other services were identified that enhanced public relations’ power and influence: online reputation management, external boundary spanning and advocacy, and stakeholder analysis. Factors that enhanced or hindered public relations practitioners’ ability to perform these services were also identified. Favorable conditions included the use of integrated decision teams, Theory Y management, perceptions of public relations as a strategic business partner, commitment to transparency in communication, internal relationship building, and the integration of public relations’ activities with core business objectives and operations. The study also examined why informal coalitions are formed and found they existed in both companies with strong adherence to hierarchy and those with decentralized management, a finding that contradicts previous theory.Item Social forces and hedonic adaptation(2013-05) Chugani, Sunaina Kumar; Irwin, Julie R.Consumers acquire products to enhance their lives, but the happiness from these acquisitions generally decreases with the passage of time. This process of hedonic adaptation plays an integral role in post-acquisition consumer satisfaction, product disposal and replacement behavior, and the "hedonic treadmill" that partially drives the relationship between consumption and happiness. Humans are social animals, however, and we know little about the relationship between the social environment and hedonic adaptation. My dissertation addresses this gap by exploring the moderating role of social presence (Essay 1) and self-concepts (Essay 2) on hedonic adaptation to products. Essay 1 explores how social presence affects hedonic adaptation to products. Research on general happiness has shown that significantly positive life events tend to maintain their positivity for longer periods of time when they involve active social interactions. I examine a more common situation in the domain of product consumption, i.e., the presence of others during consumption, and test whether hedonic adaptation to products is moderated by public contexts. By tracking happiness with products over time, I show that a "social audience" (i.e., the presence of others and the perception that those others notice the consumer) moderates hedonic adaptation through a consumer's inference of the social audience perspective. Inferring that the social audience is admiring one's product slows down adaptation, and inferring that the social audience is negatively viewing one's product accelerates adaptation. Essay 2 explores the role the identity-relevance of a product plays in hedonic adaptation. Extant research illustrates that consumers avoid consuming identity-inconsistent products in order to avoid dissonance arising from product choices conflicting with important self-concepts. I show that dissonance can also arise from consuming identity-consistent products because of the force of hedonic adaptation. I provide evidence that consumers feel uncomfortable experiencing declining happiness with identity-consistent products and thus resist hedonic adaptation to such products in order to resolve the dissonance.Item A spatial econometric approach to the study of social influence(2012-12) Morgan, Dorothy Lam; Lin, Tse-min; Luskin, Robert; Roberts, Brian; Shaw, Daron; Workman, SamuelWhile political scientists have traditionally examined social influence through social network or contextual studies, this dissertation argues for the use of spatial econometrics as an alternative approach. While spatial econometrics is not new to political science, the dissertation attempts to broaden its application by exploring spaces based on geography, demographic characteristics, and ideology. Social influence can be understood as a form of spatial interdependence among individuals in these spaces and can be analyzed as spatial autocorrelation. In the dissertation, I discuss the dimensions of the three spaces, what might account for mutual influence in these spaces, how to measure distances in these spaces, and how to use these distances for estimating social influence in models of political attitudes using ANES data. By taking a broader approach to space, I show that spatial econometrics can offer many advantages over more conventional approaches.Item Time of your life : exploring the influence of popular messages on enactments and construals of "work-life" time(2009-12) Webster, Sunshine Paige; Ballard, Dawna I.Popular messages not only illuminate many of the struggles people experience wrestling with the tensions between work and home life, but these popular texts also influence the behaviors of those who consume them. They not only reflect organizational members' experiences, but they also shape what they do. The following dissertation provides a theoretical discussion that conceptualizes and locates popular messages within dominant cultural patterns and explores the role of popular discourse in socializing organizational members. Next, "work-life" research is understood in terms of enactments and construals of time. This discussion not only develops a temporal perspective for "work-life" research, but also highlights inequalities embedded in the current "work-life" research. A narrative approach is offered as a theoretical perspective and methodological tool for uncovering perspectives. Sixty-seven participants are interviewed, and findings suggest differing perspectives on work-life balance, work-life expectations, and the role popular messages play in shaping work-life expectations vary along gender, socioeconomic, and generational lines. Further, analyses of interview data reveal gender and socioeconomic inequalities exist within the "work-life" construct and differing construals of time.