Collective intelligence: Scale development and validation

In today’s growing competition, organizations face shrinking innovation cycles, swelling customer expectations, and distributed talent which impels organizations to apply knowledge, skills, and experience of employees most effectively. Applying collective intelligence, i.e., the combined knowledge and expertise of a diverse group, has become the order of the day. Therefore, collective intelligence level of an individual is of immense importance for high performance and achievement of the goals. In the present research, an attempt is made to operationalize the components of organizational collective intelligence from working professionals. Specifically, an attempt is made to develop a scale to measure collective intelligence among 600 working professionals. The results were subjected to the robust measurement tools such as Exploratory Factor Analysis and Structures Equation Modeling to confirm the factor structure. The instrument resulted in four factors and a 17-item scale. The instrument can be used by the policymakers and human resource managers for selecting, harnessing, and retaining appropriate talent in the organization.     

Improving quality at the point of service

The authors provide a research-based construct of youth program quality that differentiates safety, support, interaction, and engagement, four important issues for practitioners working with youth in the middle years. They describe two tools that have helped direct staff to be intentional about creating offerings that are appropriate for early adolescents: the focusing idea of point-of-service quality and the technology of observational assessment. They describe how these tools can be used to create cultures of accountability and intentionality that extend across program levels.     

What does the pursuit of a high quality of life entail?: Grounding a theoretical model in lived experience

In response to calls for a better understanding of quality of life, we draw upon working professionals’ perspectives and experiences to introduce a theoretical model that emerged from an inductive analysis of respondents’ language. A key element of this model includes a collective picture of factors representing quality of life. Further, this model suggests interrelatedness among these factors with pursuit of a high quality of life emerging as a dynamic process with a tensional nature. Our proposed model extends existing research by more fully capturing the complex ways in which people from the United States describe quality of life and its pursuit.     

La calidad de vida. Juicios de satisfacción y felicidad como indicadores actitudinales de bienestar

Abstract

This article argues that institutional apologies are rituals that can be conceived from a neo-Durkheimian viewpoint as external social tools of collective emotion, which allow people to assume collective guilt and shame, increase agreement with reparatory behaviors, and reinforce social cohesion. The review of studies presented in this monograph shows that an apology reactivates and intensifies collective emotions, mainly of shame and guilt, above and beyond merely reminding people of past misdeeds, and increases support for reparation. Shame and sorrow fuel and support reparative tendencies. Finally, salience of past collective violence together with an apology improves social climate to some extent, enhances intergroup reconciliation by decreasing prejudice and improving intergroup contact, and helps to reconstruct in-group collective memory in a more critical way. Changes in collective emotions and representations of the past mediate the positive effects of apologies on reparation and social cohesion.     

Mobilizing Voluntary Associations into a Social Movement: The Case of Environmental Quality*

The mobilization behavior of voluntary associations in a community was studied to explain why some organizations were successfully recruited into the environmental quality movement and others were not. Analysis of a random sample of 209 community organizations in a midwest urban area showed that approximately half were mobilized into supporting the environmental quality movement. Hypotheses on the effects of goal overlap, organizational resources, and position in the multi-organizational field were tested. The significant factors were the size of the manpower base, the leader's personal mobilization into the environmental quality movement and the allocation of social responsibility among community groups for solving local pollution probems. The last factor—the acceptance or rejection of group responsibility for working for the collective good—emerged as the most important explanatory factor. Thirty-one percent of the variance in the mobilization of organizational interest and 22 percent of the variance in the mobilization of group activity was explained.     

A generalised model of judgment aggregation

The new field of judgment aggregation aims to merge many individual sets of judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a single collective set of judgments on these propositions. Judgment aggregation has commonly been studied using classical propositional logic, with a limited expressive power and a problematic representation of conditional statements (“if P then Q ”) as material conditionals. In this methodological paper, I present a simple unified model of judgment aggregation in general logics. I show how many realistic decision problems can be represented in it. This includes decision problems expressed in languages of standard propositional logic, predicate logic (e.g. preference aggregation problems), modal or conditional logics, and some multi-valued or fuzzy logics. I provide a list of simple tools for working with general logics, and I prove impossibility results that generalise earlier theorems.     

Making Sense of Social Change: Observing Collective Action in Networked Cultures

This article presents an overview of rising trends in the study of networked interactions conveyed by social media technologies and the emergence of new meanings associated with social change. In recent years, a healthy amount of studies has focused on ICT uses within collective action, considering social media tools to have become crucial components of many transnational movements and social change projects. Crossing boundaries between social movements theories, political science, and communication studies, literature suggests that ‘online activism’ and increasingly networked interactions may have transformed the meanings and definitions associated with ‘collective action’ and ‘social change’. To make sense of these meanings, we identify three approaches used by scholars, which focus on (i) the actual networking of actors, (ii) the diffusion of new repertoires and frames through networks, and (iii) making sense of new meanings conveyed within networked cultures. We conclude by suggesting the need for more comprehensive research to better observe and make sense of how's actors define collective action and how they use social media tools when striving to convey social change.     

Physical education and sport teachers' health: from expressed ill-being to hindrances of action

The researches that specifically analyse the working conditions of teachers are few in the ergonomic literature. Our research relates more specifically to teachers of physical education and sports in french context of college. The research project described here includes both a quantitative exploratory survey (218 respondents) and qualitative case studies (interviews and observation), using the general framework of Activity Ergonomics. The results of this exploratory work tend to emphasize the importance of collective and organizational dimensions in the experience of teachers' physical education and sports. Specifically, in a perceived context of degradation of working conditions and accumulation of constraints, the collective and local ability to negotiate the various constraints on the activity appears to be a protective factor. This power to act, these margin of manoeuvre could be a relevant topic for future research.     

Social Movement Strategy,Tactics, and Collective Identity1

Tactical choices and their execution are closely related to the construction of collective identities in social movements. Studying collective identity has helped scholars understand why people participate in collective action, but the array of tactics that constitute action has not been fully explored. An emerging interest in culture and strategy that situates social movement actors in a field of contention with opponents, allies, and bystanding publics raises questions about the tactics that are used and the construction of collective identity, which is formed in interaction with others. Strategies and tactics reflect collective identities but also provide opportunities for reaffirming or challenging them. Innovative methods can create tension as activists work to resolve what they do with who they feel they are. Conflict studies, nonviolent action studies, and sociological research using concepts such as framing, discourse, protest events, and tactical repertoires offer tools with which to bridge tactics and collective identity.     

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age

This starts out by distinguishing between communication and communication mediums when examining social movement-powered formations of collective identity and collective action. We then focus on communication mediums to examine the different ways that old and new media are utilized in urban social movements under neoliberal capitalism. Based on shifts in the political economy and correspondingly in the contemporary composition of the working class, we focus on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia to argue that contemporary urban social movements and networks utilize a multi-media platform to further class-based politics. The respective use of old or new media depends on important contextual questions, regarding technology access and geographic aspects of movement building work.     

Preventing violence in disadvantaged communities: Strategies for building collective efficacy and improving community health

ABSTRACT

Violence is a critical health issue that compromises the strength of communities and permanently damages the lives of individuals and families. The impact of violence on health and well-being is particularly devastating in disadvantaged and minority communities, leading to negative health outcomes, including premature death. However, research suggests that communities can prevent violence and negative health outcomes by developing collective efficacy, which happens when neighbors share norms and values, trust one another, and are willing to intervene to address problems. Despite the importance of collective efficacy in preventing violence and improving health, almost no research has investigated actionable strategies to build collective efficacy in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This article describes a theoretical and conceptual model that illustrates how collective efficacy impacts community violence and related health outcomes. We begin by reviewing other approaches to community violence prevention, including criminal justice and developmental approaches. We then discuss how collective efficacy works and why it matters, including theoretical and empirical research explaining collective efficacy and its impact on community violence and health. We then discuss a research-based intervention that social workers can use to facilitate collective efficacy, including our conceptual model and the key components of the intervention. Finally, we discuss implications for social workers who are working with communities to address violence and related health issues.     

Knowledge co-production with social movement networks. Redefining grassroots politics,rethinking research

Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement networks in Spain, this article explores the challenges and possibilities of research collaboration. My project focused on the emerging logics and practices of collective action, the ongoing re-definition of grassroots politics. The engagement with social movements as reflexive communities – not simply objects to be studied, but subjects actively producing their own analysis and explanations, their own ‘knowledge-practices’ – deeply transformed the in-fieldwork encounter. Through a series of co-analysis workshops, designed and implemented together with the research subjects/collaborators, this research became an open-ended dialogue of reflexivities. The shift from working on social movements to working and thinking together with social movement activists as co-researchers produced new scholarly knowledge, advancing our understanding of contemporary collective action, while simultaneously making research useful for the activists. Moreover, locating epistemic and methodological questions at the centre of the project, I addressed salient debates in social science, exploring collaborative frameworks in order to problematize traditional forms of knowledge production and validation.     

Collective consumption models with restricted bargaining weights: an empirical assessment based on experimental data

We use experimental data to analyze consumption decisions by groups of individuals who have to reach a consensus on spending a joint budget. Our experiment involves dyads (i.e. two-member groups) who have to compose consumption bundles consisting of three commodities (wine, orange juice and M&Ms). We focus on the collective consumption model to describe group behavior. This model represents group decisions as Pareto optimal outcomes of a within-group bargaining process, with rational group members who are each characterized by individual bargaining weights. We also consider specifications of the collective model that restrict the variation of these bargaining weights. A distinguishing feature of our study is that we use revealed preference testing tools to assess the goodness-of-fit and discriminatory power of alternative specifications of the collective model. Our experimental results suggest that the most appropriate model specification allows for a limited variation of the bargaining weights.     

Staging precariousness: The Serpica Naro catwalk during the Milan Fashion Week

The article illustrates the Italian process of work precarisation and the collective resistance of precarious workers. It interprets them in terms of the birth of a collective identity that conducts a critique against precariousness while developing learning resources. Through discursive analysis of the Serpica Naro catwalk, organised in the area of Milan by the activists of the May Day Parade and the San Precario network, the article illustrates the process of construction of this collective identity that uses irony and playfulness to resist and denounce precarious working conditions. The purpose is to interpret the anti-precariousness movement as a process of critical urban learning that creates the viability of spaces for resistance in metropolitan contexts.     

A Game Real Actors Won't Play? Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Denmark as a Collective Action Dilemma1

Integration of refugees and immigrants in Denmark has so far proved more difficult than expected. In international comarison, Denmark stands out as a laggard, especially when it comes to labor market integration of the new minorities. Xenophobia and prejudices in the majority population are often cited as the main reasons. But individuals from both minorities and the majority also face a collective action dilemma when it comes to integration. In principle a collective action dilemma can be overcome through the working of selective incentives. In the case of integration, however, such incentives are weakened by some of the institutions of the universalistic Danish welfare state. Nevertheless, so far there has been very little ethnicization of Danish social policies. One possible explanation is that such reforms would create a collective action dilemma of their own. Thus the collective action dilemma of welfare state reforms seems to be blocking the solution of the collective action dilemma of integration.     

Reply to comments

Conclusion The comments can be ordered on a linear scale according to the amount of disagreement with my position. Roemer has virtually no quarrels with my position, which is why I have virtually nothing to say on his comment. Van Parijs is also fairly close to my view, even if we disagree about the nature and importance of the non-intentional mechanisms that can sustain functional explanations. With Cohen the disagreement goes deeper, because he argues that we can dispense with knowledge of the mechanism altogether, though I accept his criticism of my analysis of exploitation. Next on the scale, still further come Berger and Offe. We share an interest in the same problems, such as the nature of the capitalist state and the problem of collective action, but we use quite different conceptual tools to handle them. I feel very far from Giddens's position, to the extent that it is at all intelligible to me. Social theory in his hand becomes extremely abstract, without acquiring the precision for which one is sometimes prepared to pay a high price in terms of level of abstraction. Though, at the most general level, I symphatize with his objections to the dualism of choice versus structure, my agreement gives way to puzzlement when I try to understand how his views could make a difference for the working social scientist.     

Ergonomic interventions in weeding operations for drudgery reduction of hill farm women of India

Weeding is an important time consuming and drudgery prone task mainly performed by hill farm women for almost all crops grown. This directs for interventions in terms of improved technologies (weeder, kutla and hoes) to relieve women from high energy demands, time spent and associated drudgery particularly for weeding activity. The study was conducted in two hill states of India viz. Himachal Pradesh (35 villages and 1500 representative samples) and Uttrakhand (10 villages and 500 representative samples). Experimental data were conducted on representative sub sample of 60 hill farm women of both states to assess physiological workload and musculo-skeletal problems both while working with traditional tools along with improved tools by employing selected parameters viz. physical fitness level, physiological parameters etc. The results showed that heart rate values were more than acceptable limits for task performed with the traditional tools as compared with improved tools. Significant reduction in the heart rate was observed while working with improved tools. Analysis of MSDs showed that the postural stress and severity of pain in various body parts was reduced by adopting new technology. Hence, the use of improved weeding tools is recommended over the existing ones for drudgery reduction.     

Working the Project: Research Proposals and Everyday Practices for Emerging Feminist Researchers

Seeking to support graduate students in engaging in feminist sociological research, we provide guidance on “working the project”—working collaboratively and creatively to foster compassion and solidarity as we bring diverse research projects to fruition. We offer reflections on our everyday experiences and struggles as emerging feminist researchers, including with writing research proposals. We also include four condensed research proposals ‐ on the social organization of care work, sex work, criminal justice, and abortion care ‐ to support fellow students in the process. Spurring collaborative, fun and inclusive ways of working, we speak to feminist scholar‐activists who may require additional support in navigating the social relations of academe, while contributing to collective projects of investigating and remaking the social organization of everyday life.     

Intervention of gender friendly land preparation technologies for drudgery reduction of hill farm women

Inventory of all agricultural tasks depicted land preparation by women farmers as one of the most drudgery prone task with high energy cost, thereby, making it amenable to ergonomic interventions in terms of improved technologies (clod breaker, improved plough/'danella') to relieve women from high energy demands, time spent and associated drudgery. The study was conducted in two hill states of India viz. Himachal Pradesh (35 villages and 900 representative samples) and Uttrakhand (10 villages and 900 representative samples). Experimental data were conducted on representative sub sample of 60 hill farm women of both the states to assess physiological workload and musculo-skeletal problems both while working with traditional tools along with improved tools by employing selected parameters viz. physical fitness level, physiological parameters etc. The results showed that heart rate values were more than acceptable limits for task performed with the traditional tools as compared with improved tools. Significant reduction in the heart rate was observed while working with improved tools. Analysis of MSDs showed that the postural stress and severity of pain in various body parts was reduced by adopting new technology. Hence, the use of improved land preparation tools is recommended over the existing ones for drudgery reduction.     

REPRODUCING NATION,REDESIGNING POSITIONING: RUSSIAN AND pALESTINIAN STUDENTS INTERPRET UNIVERSITY KNOWLEDGE

This paper discusses the reproduction of hegemony and social hierarchy through education. It brings together two case studies of marginal groups at a university—Russian Jewish immigrants and Palestinian Israeli women—who make sense of their position in social hierarchies and power relations through constant interpretative work on the various dimensions of university knowledge. The article reveals how marginal actors’ interpretations of knowledge simultaneously are guided by students’ positioning vis-à-vis the dominant collective and also articulate and redesign positioning. The two groups redesign their marginalities vis-à-vis the Israeli-Jewish collective by transforming knowledge to identity. In so doing, these groups reproduce national borders of Israeli social hierarchy, while working to change the meaning of these borders for their group's positioning.