Influential Individuals Research Articles

Is Information Literacy a Public Concern?: A Practice in Search of a Policy

Since its emergence in the 1970s, information literacy has developed in theory, practice, and scope. In the United States, librarians, business leaders, and political stakeholders have emphasized that information literacy is essential to an informed twenty-first-century citizenry. But despite the pervading feeling that the subject is important, there is as yet no clearly identifiable public policy on information literacy. Public policy may be defined as governmental action or inaction, decided upon and taken by the public, the state, and other actors. Public policies are usually enacted as the result of sustained effort to place them on the public policy agenda, that is, bring them to the attention of the public, and gain support from critical interest groups, influential individuals, and politicians at different levels of government. The authors contend that information literacy is not yet part of the public agenda. Rather, information literacy is claimed by a relatively narrow group of stakeholders, lacks name recognition and broad-based public support, is not mandated in U.S. primary and secondary education ("K-12"), and therefore remains fundamentally ineffective in implementation. This article considers whether information literacy is a legitimate public interest, and therefore the degree to which it merits a public policy and where such a policy might best be located. However, locating information literacy within education policy, although this seems intuitive, appears to be problematical. The authors discuss how policy options emerge, identify barriers to doing so, and provide recommendations for advancing the critical development and dissemination of information literacy.

Icons of black America: breaking barriers and crossing boundaries

This stunning collection of essays illuminates the lives and legacies of the most famous and powerful individuals, groups, and institutions in African American history. The three-volume Icons of Black America: Breaking Barriers and Crossing Boundaries is an exhaustive treatment of 100 African American people, groups, and organizations, viewed from a variety of perspectives. The alphabetically arranged entries illuminate the history of highly successful and influential individuals who have transcended mere celebrity to become representatives of their time. It offers analysis and perspective on some of the most influential black people, organizations, and institutions in American history, from the late 19th century to the present. Each chapter is a detailed exploration of the life and legacy of an individual icon. Through these portraits, readers will discover how these icons have shaped, and been shaped by, the dynamism of American culture, as well as the extent to which modern mass media and popular culture have contributed to the rise, and sometimes fall, of these powerful symbols of individual and group excellence. * 100 alphabetically arranged profiles, each accompanied by a photograph

Museums in Kenya: Spaces for Selecting, Ordering and Erasing Memories of Identity and Nationhood

This article discusses representations of ‘nationhood’ at National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and community peace museums (CPMs). The representations range from a virtual absence of exhibitions on nationhood to exhibitions of cultural objects associated with specific ethnic groups and commemoration of local and/or national heroes. The representations at NMK appear to be informed by the expressed and/or assumed wishes of the country's political leadership. As such, the social memory they evoke has suffered episodic interruptions through time. On the other hand, representations at CPMs are, to a large extent, informed by influential individuals or small sections of the community and tend to concentrate on the ethnic group within which they are located, thus articulating local as opposed to national issues. This situation contributes to contestations of ‘nationhood’ in Kenya, a phenomenon that has come to the fore with every general election since the re-introduction of multi-party politics 20 years ago and, in particular, with the 2007/08 post-election violence.

Who Sits on Texas Corporate Boards? Texas Corporate Directors: Who They are & What They Do

Corporate directors play an important role in governing American business, in the capital formation process, and are key to the stewardship of economic growth. Texas businesses play a disproportionately important role among the states in aggregate U.S. job creation, responsible for 37% of all net new American jobs since the post 2008-2009 recovery began. It is the job of the board of directors to govern the corporation. The duties and responsibilities of a corporate director include: the duty of care; duty of loyalty; and duty of good faith. This paper results from the author’s previously assembled biographical data for most of the approximately 20,000 for-profit corporate directors serving on the boards of Texas companies. Corporate directors are among the most influential and affluent individuals in our society. Many present or former chief executive officers are sought to serve on corporate boards due to their expertise and experience overseeing corporations. The average age of Texas directors of for-profit entities is fifty-seven years old; and only about six percent of corporate directors in Texas are women. Texas corporate directors are highly educated: over ninety-nine percent are college graduates: eighty percent hold advanced college degrees; twenty-eight percent have law degrees; and twenty percent of Texas corporate directors hold an MBA degree. Most Texas corporate directors serve the banking and finance sector (thirty-nine percent), next largest is the energy sector (at eighteen percent), and technology companies account for nine percent. Most boards look to recruit someone who understands their business and former CEOs are preferable. Every public company board of directors must now have an audit committee comprised of entirely independent directors, and each publicly-traded company is required to have at least one qualified “financial expert” on its audit committee. Therefore, public company auditing experience, along with a growing recognition that every board needs expertise to govern the enterprises’ information technology - have become “must have” skills represented on every board.

Comparative Law in Colonial British America

American comparatists are unfamiliar with thinking about Ro man, civil, and canon law influence on colonial British American laws and legal institutions or about American colonial lawyers using Roman and civil law examples in their legal argument or reform ef forts in a manner that today we would consider practical comparative law. This Article explores whether American comparative law really began prior to 1776 with early European settlers. The aim here is to connect comparative law with its sister discipline, legal history, as far back as the evidence supports and to suggest promising avenues for further research. First, I consider the use of comparative law in England through the eighteenth century. Across the Atlantic, I then divide the analysis between intellectual legal history and social legal history. For the for mer, I consider the nature of legal education, availability of law books, and influential law-trained individuals. Because the social and physi cal environment in America was so different from that in England, I examine the importance of social factors on the development of law, especially on lawyers and courts. In addition, I speculate on the par ticular relevance for law of the religious and cultural diversity that existed in the thirteen colonies. Finally, I select John Adams as an exemplary legal comparatist in the pre-revolutionary period and de scribe his law practice and early political writings.

Adoption rationales of new management practices

This study considers that multiple and diverse rationales, including rational, emotional and socially conditioned responses can influence the adoption of management practices. The study includes four case studies in order to subject the adoption rationales that Sturdy (2004) posits to empirical inquiry and to explore the impacts of these differing rationales on characteristics of the subsequent adoption. The findings show that five of the six rationales Sturdy proposes are empirically identifiable. The findings also suggest that, subject to the exploratory nature of the study, earlier adoption of management practices is associated with political and psychodynamic rationales, consistent with notions of being seen to adopt new ways of working. The findings also suggest that the political and dramaturgical rationales are associated with more rapid adoption due to influential individuals or groups acting as champions. Whilst Sturdy proposes his rationales as a simple list, the findings of this study suggest a more complex relationship between the rationales. The study contributes to the growing body of literature that addresses the important topic of management practices, particularly those that provide an expository consideration.

Israeli Colonial Contraction: The Cases of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip

Two main cases of previous Israeli colonial contraction have occurred in recent history. The first occurred from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in 1982; the second from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In both, the Israeli settlements were completely demolished before leaving these areas. The main strategic difference between the Sinai and Gaza Israeli contractions is that the evacuation of Yamit settlement complex stemmed from the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978, the second was a unilateral move as part of the Israel Disengagement Plan. The main question this paper attempts to answer is under which conditions does Israeli contraction occur, and what are the dynamics of this process? This is answered by providing the analyses of the two cases of Israeli contractions from Sinai and Gaza, which explain the strengths and weaknesses within Israel thus giving indications of how it deals with its colonized space. The analyses raise several interesting points showing the similarities, differences, inter-relations, as well as strategic and political considerations. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first and the second give an overview of each of the two cases separately presenting the dynamics of interaction between the different actors involved in the process, whether the Israeli government, influential individuals and organizational bodies, or the settlers. The third section presents a comparison between the two cases and concludes with some observations about possible colonial contractions. It is noticed that in both cases, strategic considerations took a dominant role.

Death Taxes In The United States: A Brief History

<p class="MsoTitle" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Death taxes have been used in various forms in the United States, from a simple stamp tax to the complex estate tax currently in use. On June 7, 2001, President George W. Bush signed legislation that would abolish the federal estate tax in 2010. This would end a 200 year history of death taxes in the U.S., at least for one year, unless Congress changes that legislation. Experts are still debating whether Congress will take such action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>This paper examines the history of death taxes, including stamp taxes, inheritance taxes, and estate taxes, in the U.S. and the reasons that death taxes were enacted. They were usually enacted as revenue raising provisions, but some feel that their potential for redistributing wealth is a better reason for their existence. This paper also examines the current estate tax and why such a tax on the wealthy has had the support of several wealthy and influential individuals.</span></span></p>

Corporate social capital: Results of empirical research in a financial institution

The aim of this paper is to present results from empirical research on social networks, conducted in a financial institution in Poland. The topic is approached within a corporate social capital framework. Corporate social capital is defined as networks of social relations existing within a corporation, by which a company has access and a possibility to activate material and virtual resources. This concept is divided into two types: bonding social capital that affects performance by influencing employees’ motivation and engagement and bridging social capital that affects performance through advantages of access to valuable information and support of influential individuals. The first is conceptualised as residing in relations between team members, integrated by strong social group norms and group identification. The second is assumed to deal with relations between employees from different teams, as connected by breaching groups’ borders and building bridges over structural holes.The aim of the research is to investigate the influence of bonding and bridging social capital on employees’ and teams’ performance, moderated by type of the tasks. The research includes both quantitative methods (based on surveys) and qualitative methods (based on interviews and observations). The quantitative part was to test the theoretical propositions, the qualitative part was to prepare measuring tools, get to know the context and interpret the results.The main findings of the research support some of the propositions: bonding social capital is found to be of value especially in the case of operational tasks and there is also some evidence that different aspects of social capital interact while influencing performance. What is more, the research provided a profound study of bonding social capital, both in terms of its advantages and disadvantages. In opposition to the conception before the research, both relations in the team and outside the team in the particular company under the study were finally assessed as of bonding character and bridging social capital was not identified within the research context.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Opinion Leadership

Influential individuals who shape the attitudes and behaviors of their peers are termed opinion leaders. The interpretability of research on opinion leadership, however, has frequently been hampered by the use of divergent instruments that follow either a domain-specific view of opinion leadership or a more domain-independent trait conceptualization. In two studies, multitrait-multimethod matrices are analyzed regarding the convergent and discriminant validity of both approaches. Study I (N = 407) demonstrates the stability of the opinion leadership scales over time and their discriminant validity to established measures in personality (e.g., extraversion) and attitudinal research (e.g., involvement). Study II (N = 185) replicates these results in the form of a multitrait-multiinformant design, demonstrating high convergence of self- and peer-assessments. However, different operationalizations of domain-independent opinion leadership displayed limited convergent validity, indicating that they capture different, albeit related, traits.

A note on maximizing the spread of influence in social networks

We consider the spread maximization problem that was defined by Domingos and Richardson (2001, 2002) [7,22]. In this problem, we are given a social network represented as a graph and are required to find the set of the most “influential” individuals that by introducing them with a new technology, we maximize the expected number of individuals in the network, later in time, that adopt the new technology. This problem has applications in viral marketing, where a company may wish to spread the rumor of a new product via the most influential individuals in popular social networks such as Myspace and Blogsphere. The spread maximization problem was recently studied in several models of social networks (Kempe et al. (2003, 2005) [14,15], Mossel and Roch (2007) [20]). In this short paper we study this problem in the context of the well studied probabilistic voter model. We provide very simple and efficient algorithms for solving this problem. An interesting special case of our result is that the most natural heuristic solution, which picks the nodes in the network with the highest degree, is indeed the optimal solution.

Double-dealing behavior potentially promotes cooperation in evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games

We investigate the effects of double-dealing behavior on cooperation in evolutionary games. Each individual in a population has two attributes: character and action. One's action may be consistent with one's character or not. We provide analytical results by a mean-field description of evolutionary prisoner's dilemma games (PDGs). Moreover, we give numerical results on different networks, ranging from square lattices to scale-free networks (SFNs). Two important conclusions have been drawn from the results on SFNs. Firstly, if only non-influential individuals (those with low degrees) have chances of becoming double-dealers, cooperation is certain to deteriorate. Secondly, when influential individuals (those with high degrees) adopt double-dealing behavior moderately, cooperation would be enhanced, which is in opposition to the traditional belief. These results help us to understand better the social phenomenon of the existence of double-dealers. In addition to the PDG, other types of games including the snowdrift game, the stag-hunt game and the harmony game have also been studied on our model. The results for these three games are also presented, which are consistent with the results for the PDG qualitatively. Furthermore, we consider our model under the co-evolution framework, in which the probability of an individual changing into a double-dealer and the individual strategy both could evolve during the evolutionary process.

Rich-club connectivity dominates assortativity and transitivity of complex networks

Rich-club, assortativity and clustering coefficients are frequently used measures to estimate topological properties of complex networks. Here we find that the connectivity among a very small portion of the richest nodes can dominate the assortativity and clustering coefficients of a large network, which reveals that the rich-club connectivity is leveraged throughout the network. Our study suggests that more attention should be paid to the organization pattern of rich nodes, for the structure of a complex system as a whole is determined by the associations between the most influential individuals. Moreover, by manipulating the connectivity pattern in a very small rich-club, it is sufficient to produce a network with desired assortativity or transitivity. Conversely, our findings offer a simple explanation for the observed assortativity and transitivity in many real world networks--such biases can be explained by the connectivities among the richest nodes.

The Experiences of UAE Women Leaders in Developing Leadership Early in Life

The purpose of this study is to explore the influences that current Arab women leaders believe were most important in assisting them throughout their lives to prepare for their present leadership roles and responsibilities within the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In-depth, qualitative interviews using the phenomenological methodology were conducted. This article focuses on the themes related to family and childhood/youth influences. The results indicate that a wide variety of influences (for example, parents, siblings, influential individuals, schooling activities and experiences, and struggles/difficulties) during the early phases of their lives provided unique experiences that enhanced their leadership skills and abilities. This is the first scholarly study conducted and published on the life development of women UAE leaders. It provides insights for educators, scholars, and practitioners to assist them in more effectively designing successful leadership programs for Arab women in educational and non-educational settings. This study also provides some clear themes that can serve as the basis for continued research in the area of women and leadership in the UAE.

Increasing Support for Contraception as HIV Prevention: Stakeholder Mapping to Identify Influential Individuals and Their Perceptions

BackgroundVoluntary contraceptive use by HIV-positive women currently prevents more HIV-positive births, at a lower cost, than anti-retroviral drug (ARV) regimens. Despite this evidence, most prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programs focus solely on providing ARV prophylaxis to pregnant women and rarely include the prevention of unintended pregnancies among HIV-positive women.Methodology/Principal FindingsTo strengthen support for family planning as HIV prevention, we systematically identified key individuals in the field of international HIV/AIDS—those who could potentially influence the issue—and sought to determine their perceptions of barriers to and facilitators for implementing this PMTCT strategy. We used a criteria-based approach to determine which HIV/AIDS stakeholders have the most significant impact on HIV/AIDS research, programs, funding and policy and stratified purposive sampling to conduct interviews with a subset of these individuals. The interview findings pointed to obstacles to strengthening linkages between family planning and HIV/AIDS, including the need for: resources to integrate family planning and HIV services, infrastructure or capacity to provide integrated services at the facility level, national leadership and coordination, and targeted advocacy to key decision-makers.Conclusions/SignificanceThe individuals we identified as having regional or international influence in the field of HIV/AIDS have the ability to leverage an increasingly conducive funding environment and a growing evidence base to address the policy, programmatic and operational challenges to integrating family planning with HIV/AIDS. Fostering greater support for implementing contraception for HIV prevention will require the dedication, collaboration and coordination of many such actors. Our findings can inform a targeted advocacy campaign.

How globalization and market innovation challenge how we think about and respond to drug use: ‘Spice’ a case study

How globalization and market innovation challenge how we think about and respond to drug use: ‘Spice’ a case study

Is the Outcry for More Pilot Schools Warranted? Democracy, Collective Bargaining, Deregulation, and the Politics of School Reform in Boston

Using a theoretical lens of democratic education, this study critically analyzes pilot schools in the Boston Public School system, a school model gaining influence and imitation around the United States. Building on theories regarding the role of democracy in schools, and especially workplace democracy, this article juxtaposes these conceptions of democracy with competing economic theories of marketization, privatization, antiunionism, and individualism, here referred to as neoliberalism, and analyzes the political terrain onto which pilot schools emerged, are debated, and understood.The Boston Teachers Union first conceptualized, and bargained for, pilot schools in the early 1990s. However, the union has since come under criticism from influential individuals and groups for resisting or slowing the expansion of this reform. This study examines the proposition that more pilot schools should be created and argues that insufficient evidence exists to warrant the current outcry for pilot school expansion.

Collier Cobb and Allen D. Hole: Geologic mentors to early soil scientists

Many influential individuals involved in the early US soil survey program were trained as geologists rather than as agronomists or soil scientists. Several geology departments served as pipelines for students interested in a career in soil survey. This paper looks at the professional history of two early mentors of these geologists turned soil surveyors and some of the students they sent on to the US soil survey and other soil science careers. Collier Cobb sent over 10 students to the soil survey starting in 1900 when US soil survey was in its infancy, including individuals of note such as Hugh H. Bennett, George N. Coffey, Williamson E. Hearn, and Thomas D. Rice. Allen D. Hole worked on soil surveys for the state of Indiana and sent over a dozen students on to US soil survey careers between 1911 and 1937, including Mark Baldwin and James Thorp. Francis Hole and Ralph McCracken, other students of Allen Hole, also went on to have distinguished soil science careers. These mentors and students clearly show the close ties that existed between soil science and geology in the United States during the early 1900s.

Celebrity Activism in International Relations: In Search of a Framework for Analysis

The article examines the growing celebrity activism in world politics and attempts to develop a framework for analysis. It briefly reviews the relevant literature on the emergence of influential individuals as transnational activists. Then, it analyses the factors that account for the specific growth of celebrity activism and evaluates its impact on public awareness, the mobilisation of resources and government decisions. Finally, the article tests this framework by focusing on two case studies: Princess Diana's contribution to the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines and Mia Farrow's activism in respect to China's policy towards Sudan.

The Impact of Social Networking Websites to Facilitate the Effectiveness of Viral Marketing

The Internet and the World Wide Web have become two key components in today's technology based organizations and businesses. As the Internet is becoming more and more popular, it is starting to make a big impact on people's day-to-day life. As a result of this revolutionary transformation towards the modern technology, social networking on the World Wide Web has become an integral part of a large number of people's lives. Social networks are websites which allow users to communicate, share knowledge about similar interests, discuss favorite topics, review and rate products/services, etc. These websites have become a powerful source in shaping public opinion on virtually every aspect of commerce. Marketers are challenged with identifying influential individuals in social networks and connecting with them in ways that encourage viral marketing content movement and there has been little empirical research study about of this website to diffuse of viral marketing content. In this article, we explore the role of social network websites which has influence on viral marketing, and the characteristics of the most influential users to spread share viral content. Structural equation modeling is used to examine the patterns of inter-correlations among the constructions and to empirically test the hypotheses.