Identifying species exhibiting variation in social organization is an important step towards explaining the genetic and environmental factors underlying social evolution. In most studied populations of the ant Leptothorax acervorum, reproduction is shared among queens in multiple queen colonies (polygyny). By contrast, reports from other populations, but based on weaker evidence, suggest a sing...

The creation of Virtual Breeding Environments (VBE) is a topic which has received too little attention: in most former works, the existence of the VBE is either assumed, or is considered as the result of the voluntary, participatory gathering of a set of candidate companies. In this paper, the creation of a VBE by a third authority is considered: chambers of commerce, as organizations whose goa...

Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community. In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency. We...

Developing the next generation of advanced computing systems will change the patterns of work in software system development organizations. Based on empirical studies of how new computing systems are developed, we find that major system engineering problems require organizational solutions rather than just technical solutions. We continue to investigate organizational settings where large softw...

A new approach to investigation of human influences on the environment identifies social organization as an influence independent of population size, affluence, and technology. The framework also identifies population events, such as births, that influence the environment. The authors use longitudinal, multilevel, mixed-method measures of local land use changes, population dynamics, and social ...

Traditional social theorizing holds that strong and cohesive family, community, and religious institutions rein in violence. However, in cultures where certain types of violence are condoned, this should not be true. Specifically, in the U.S. South and West, where culture-of-honor traditions persist, greater social organization should be associated with more violence. This pattern was confirmed...

The characterization of large-scale structural organization of social networks is an important interdisciplinary problem. We show, by using scaling analysis and numerical computation, that the following factors are relevant for models of social networks: the correlation between friendship ties among people and the position of their social groups, as well as the correlation between the positions...

Mature social networking services are one of the greatest assets of today’s organizations. This valuable asset, however, can also be a threat to an organization’s confidentiality. Members of social networking websites expose not only their personal information, but also details about the organizations for which they work. In this paper we analyze several commercial organizations by mining data ...

The relationship between a mother and an adult daughter is examined in a group of free-ranging ruffed lemurs (Vurecia uuriegutu) at the Duke University Primate Center (DUPC). Although the two females were aEliative during the birth season, interactions during the mating season were predominantly agonistic. The maturing daughter was dominant to the mother, as has been observed in many caged soci...

The New Social Movement Approach and the Resource Mobilization Approach are the dominant approaches in social movement research. They focus either on macro-aspects and externalism or on micro-aspects and internalism. This paper suggests that the notion of self-organization is one way of taking into account both internal and external, structuraland action-based aspects of social movements and th...