Corruption poisons corporations in America and around the world, and has devastating consequences for the entire social fabric. In this article, we focus on organizational corruption, described as the abuse of authority for personal benefit, and draw on Weber’s three ideal-types of legitimate authority to develop a theoretical model to better understand the antecedents of different types of org...

Understanding of the psychology of tyranny is dominated by classic studies from the 1960s and 1970s: Milgram's research on obedience to authority and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Supporting popular notions of the banality of evil, this research has been taken to show that people conform passively and unthinkingly to both the instructions and the roles that authorities provide, however...

Social Media have gained more and more importance in many areas of our daily lives. One of the first media types in this field were weblogs, which allow everyone to easily publish content online. For weblogs, the reliable algorithmic detection of importance based on social reputation is still an open issue. In this thesis we attempt to measure this authority with algorithms from the field of So...

The problem of knowing who knows what is multifaceted. Knowledge and expertise lie on a spectrum and one’s expertise in one topic area may have little bearing on one’s knowledge in a disparate topic area. In addition, we continue to learn new things over time. Each of us see but a sliver of our acquaintances’ and co-workers’ areas of expertise. By making explicit and visible many individual per...

OBJECTIVE To understand belief in a specific scientific claim by studying the pattern of citations among papers stating it. DESIGN A complete citation network was constructed from all PubMed indexed English literature papers addressing the belief that beta amyloid, a protein accumulated in the brain in Alzheimer's disease, is produced by and injures skeletal muscle of patients with inclusion ...

A typical classroom is already a community of practice and learning. Teachers and students are not blank slates when they encounter CSCL systems. They already have social roles, norms and conventions that effect social interaction and communication. College students, in particular, are not novices at working in the role of student; they are skilled students with a lot of experience. A major for...