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Your money or your life: Making people prudent
No full textAbout the book:
The sociology of conduct is a well-established research field comprising Foucauldian studies on government, power and the individual; sociological approaches to social ordering exemplified in the work of theorists including Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Pierre Bordieu; and the symbolic interactionist work of theorists like G. H. Mead and Erving Goffman. The distinctiveness of this new book resides in bringing together canonical sociological figures in a text that is designed to tackle fundamental questions about the social character of ordered and extremely disordered conduct, and which is aimed primarily at undergraduates.
The book offers an innovative perspective on how individual behavior is socially patterned. It draws in part on the massive recent explosion of self-help manuals, television shows, and internet sites designed to produce and sanction particular forms of behavior. It also taps into the enduring fascination with situations in which extreme and violent conduct is widespread. As such it offers a unique sociological perspective on both mundane, everyday and extreme, exceptional conduct
AI: Coming of age?
No full textAI has had many summers and winters. Proponents have overpromised, and there has been hype and disappointment. In recent years, however, we have watched with awe, surprise, and hope at the successes: Better than human capabilities of image-recognition; winning at Go; useful chatbots that seem to understand your needs; recommendation algorithms harvesting the wisdom of crowds. And with this success comes the spectre of danger. Machine behaviours that embed the worst of human prejudice and biases; techniques trying to exploit human weaknesses to skew elections or prompt self-harming behaviours.</p
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Market will Have you: The Arts of Market Attachment in a Digital Economy
Full text link‘Click stream: an enormous, imperfect recreation of a man’s brain. Digital DNA. You are the numbers, John. Accessible in a million ways, all ones and zeros. Where you go, what you do there, questions asked, money spent, the brand of beer you drink. You are on show John, in an infinite number of ways. The most visible person imaginable. And right now someone is watching. (KD 2014: 257)
What can it possibly mean to say that the market will have you? Accustomed as we are to hearing about the havoc markets wreak upon social institutions, communities and individuals, it could perhaps signal the thuggishness of markets as in ‘h’ dropped, the market “is gonna ‘ave you”. There is of course a whole tradition in economic sociology and anthropology from Polanyi onwards of seeing what markets do this way. But since in this collection we are concerned with seeing how market exchange produces, rather than dissolves or proceeds from, social ties, that is not the path we are taking
Nudging the internet: behavioural expertise in the platform economy
Full text linkThis thesis follows ‘nudge theory’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2009) into the platform economy and examines how behavioural expertise is organised and made to work, to feel and move users. The prevailing critical and commercial accounts of online nudging tend to overrationalise the workings of techniques, hype up their effectiveness and abstract away from the practical work realities within which they are performed. Drawing on ‘pragmatic’ studies of markets, technologies, and organisations, this research presents an empirical study of online nudging, based on 30 original interviews with behavioural experts working in various roles in the platform economy, including product managers, user researchers, data scientists, designers, and marketers. The research reveals how ‘nudge’ as a frame – as an explanation of platformised interactions – and as a network – comprising people and practices – spread; and how data-intensive commercial nudging works in practice, within proximate organisational or market settings.
I find that while behavioural economic science has become a shared background to contemporary interaction design, actors selectively activate scientific rhetorical sources. Conversely, most observable instances of nudging in the platform economy, are decoupled from behavioural theory, and instead manifest as local product optimisations driven by iterative, data-driven testing assemblages aimed at enhancing product metrics through real time user feedback. Numbers, not nudges, serve as the central organising device in contemporary product development, shaping the character and value of work, and reinforcing incremental, ‘piecemeal’ and ‘A/B testable’ (as interviewees refer to them) changes often preselected for their anticipated performance against metrics. The ubiquity of nudging is better understood as an effect of technical, organisational and market arrangements within which products and interactions are designed in the platform economy, rather than as a technique that moved into the field because of its inherent efficacy in feeling and moving users. By contextualising nudging within practical arrangements, this study contributes to the platform economy literature, and offers insights into platformised interactions, their designs, as well as misfires
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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