Institutional theories of organizations provide a rich, complex view of organizations. In these theories, organizations are influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself. Under some conditions, these pressures lead the organization to be guided by legitimated elements, from standard operating procedures to professional certification and state requirement, which often have the effect of directing attention away from task performance. Adoption of these legitimated elements, leading to isomorphism with the institutional environment, increases the probability of survival. Institutional theories of organization have spread rapidly, a testimony to the power of the imaginative ideas developed in theoretical and empirical work. As rigor increases, with better specification of indicators and models, it is likely to attract the attention of an even larger number of organizational researchers. Institutional theory is inherently difficult to explicate, because it taps taken-for-granted assumptions at the core of social action. The main goal of this review, then, is to make institutional theory more accessible. The review begins with a brief summary of the two current theoretical approaches to institutionalization in organizations, moves to identification of indicators of central concepts, and then progresses to a review of empirical research. It concludes with two short sections, one on points of intersection with other theories of organization, the other on the "new institutionalism" in economics and political science.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2083256.pdf

Institutional Theories of Organization

It is widely believed that case studies are useful in the study of human affairs because they are down-to-earth and attention-holding but that they are not a suitable basis for generalization. In this paper, I claim that case studies will often be the preferred method of research because they may be epistemologically in harmony with the reader’s experience and thus to that person a natural basis for generalization.

The Case Study Method in Social Inquiry

Extending beyond the boundaries of science, art, and culture, content-based multimedia information retrieval provides new paradigms and methods for searching through the myriad variety of media all over the world. This survey reviews 100p recent articles on content-based multimedia information retrieval and discusses their role in current research directions which include browsing and search paradigms, user studies, affective computing, learning, semantic queries, new features and media types, high performance indexing, and evaluation techniques. Based on the current state of the art, we discuss the major challenges for the future.

/pdf/content-based-multimedia-information-retrieval-state-of-the-41z647ll8w.pdf

Content-based multimedia information retrieval: State of the art and challenges

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.

/pdf/the-globalization-of-liberalization-policy-diffusion-in-the-3182u08iz4.pdf

The Globalization of Liberalization: Policy Diffusion in the International Political Economy

The accepted tripartite divisions of the formal study both of mankind's past and present are to a considerable extent based on man's development first of language and later of writing. Looked at in the perspective of time, man's biological evolution shades into prehistory when he becomes a language-using animal; add writing, and history proper begins. Looked at in a temporal perspective, man as animal is studied primarily by the zoologist, man as talking animal primarily by the anthropologist, and man as talking and writing animal primarily by the sociologist.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0010417500001730

The consequences of literacy

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives” [1]. MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky believes that the U.S. official doctrine of low-intensity warfare is almost identical to the official definition of terrorism [2]. Political commentator Bill Maher equates U.S. drone attacks with terrorist acts [3].

War and Peace

Call for papers for Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications on Interactive Digital Television

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP)

Anna Marie Piersimoni, our distinguished editorial board advisor, is Director of Internet Communications and Director of Media & Technology at the American Film Institute. Previously, as Director of Enhanced TV for the AFI, she developed the acclaimed AFIIntel Enhanced TV Workshop, a unique hands-on R&D training environment for television professionals in the production of new convergent media.

Anna Marie Piersimoni

From 1984 to Total Information Awareness.- Social Networks and Privacy.- Smartphones and Privacy.- Consumer Privacy in the Age of Big Data.- Twitter - a World of Immediacy.- Generation C in the Age of Big Data.- Privacy Breaches.- Business Intelligence.- Misinformation and Disinformation.- E-Government and E-Activism.- Living in Facebook Nation.- Personal Information Management.- Total Information Awareness.- From Total Information Awareness to 1984.- Facebook Timeline.- Index.

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness

The theme of our workshop quotes a variation of the title of a seminal and widely popular book "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins in 1998 which followed a meeting organized in 1996 at MIT. Until that time, both industry and research endorsed myths about females and gaming. On the one hand, software companies did not believe that there was a commercial market for girls. On the other hand, researchers did not fully recognize the study of game design and play as a resource for understanding how learners and women, in particular, engage in STEM. The title refers to the popular game Mortal Kombat — a violent first person shooter game played mostly by men and boys, and to the BarbieFashion Designer game. In 1996, the Barbie game challenged the myth that girls do not like computer games — it was the commercially most successful software package that Christmas season, and it was designed for girls! The book challenged the myth that research on games is not useful, as the chapters provided insight into learning, technology, design, and gender studies.

Newton Lee

Papers

War and Peace

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (ACM TOMCCAP)

Anna Marie Piersimoni

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness

Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: new perspectives on gender, games and computing