This paper explores the general landscape of virtual communities and reflects upon their relevance to their agent community counterparts. It examines several disparate virtual communities in order to identify common threads and characteristics, which underpin social cohesion. In turn we introduce social realism and reflect on the extent to which, this can form the basis of a social scaffolding ...

The question of how to best design an online course that promotes student-centred learning is an area of on-going research. This mixed-methods study focused on a section of advanced high school students, in college-level mathematics courses, that used a synchronous online environment mediated over web-conferencing software, and whether the affordance of multiple communication channels and stude...

In One Dimensional Man (1964) and Repressive Tolerance (1965), German philosopher and political theorist Herbert Marcuse claimed that developing technology institutes new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion, making totalitarian control through terrorisation unnecessary. Rather, ‘advanced industrial society’ creates false needs which integrate individua...

Social environmental influences on survey cooperation are explored using data from six national household surveys in the United States matched to 1990 decennial census data. Consistent with the past literature on prosocial behavior, cooperation rates in these six surveys are found to be lower in urban, densely populated, high crime rate areas. Measures of social cohesion show no evidence of inf...

The European economy is facing many challenges: consolidating the current recovery, redressing the public finances which have deteriorated in many countries, reducing unemployment which is still too high and preserving social cohesion, preparing for the ageing process and in particular its financial consequences, but I think one of them is now the most important: improving Europe’s growth poten...

Organizations have become increasingly dependent on teams to carry out their R&D tasks. Effective teams rely on knowledge sharing and group cohesiveness to achieve better performance. In particular, the transactive memory system (TMS) and trust are two important factors that impact knowledge sharing in R&D teams. To date, there has been relatively little empirical investigation of the effects o...

by society's need to promote the family. This question is addressed in other chapters in this volume. Here 1 will note only that the cost in human suffering and productivity should be entered into the equation; equal treatment would only result in more social cohesion as sources of alienation are removed. The fuller participation of gay citizens in the political, economic, and social life of th...

This paper addresses the research question: How do digital backchannels, mediated by Real-Time Communications, facilitate the progress of conference calls? It is argued that whilst the fields of Distributed Work and Computer Supported Collaborative Work have been studied in depth, research into Real-Time Communications (RTC) and Instant Messaging (IM) is at an early stage. There is a paucity of...

While knowledge sharing attitude represents a key factor affecting knowledge sharing behavior, the knowledge sharing attitude remains vaguely understood in the literature. Despite that attitude is a multicomponent concept, most past studies of knowledge sharing have focused on knowledge sharing attitude as a single-component construct. Thus, the structure of the knowledge sharing attitude, its ...

After having coordinated their nationality laws since the late 19th century, the Scandinavian countries have moved in distinctly different directions in this field since the turn of the millennium. Today Sweden has one of the most liberal citizenship policies in Europe, while Denmark has one of the most restrictive. Norway occupies an intermediate position between its Scandinavian neighbours. I...