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Nowadays, the event detection is so important in gathering news from social media. Indeed, it is widely employed by journalists to generate early alerts of reported stories. In order to incorporate available data on social media into a news story, journalists must manually process, compile and verify the news content within a very short time span. Despite its utility and importance, this process is time-consuming and labor-intensive for media organizations. Because of the afore-mentioned reason and as social media provides an essential source of data used as a support for professional journalists, the purpose of this paper is to propose the citizen clustering technique which allows the community of journalists and media professionals to document news during crises.

The authors develop, in this study, an approach for natural hazard events news detection and danger citizen’ groups clustering based on three major steps. In the first stage, the authors present a pipeline of several natural language processing tasks: event trigger detection, applied to recuperate potential event triggers; named entity recognition, used for the detection and recognition of event participants related to the extracted event triggers; and, ultimately, a dependency analysis between all the extracted data. Analyzing the ambiguity and the vagueness of similarity of news plays a key role in event detection. This issue was ignored in traditional event detection techniques. To this end, in the second step of our approach, the authors apply fuzzy sets techniques on these extracted events to enhance the clustering quality and remove the vagueness of the extracted information. Then, the defined degree of citizens’ danger is injected as input to the introduced citizens clustering method in order to detect citizens’ communities with close disaster degrees.

Empirical results indicate that homogeneous and compact citizen’ clusters can be detected using the suggested event detection method. It can also be observed that event news can be analyzed efficiently using the fuzzy theory. In addition, the proposed visualization process plays a crucial role in data journalism, as it is used to analyze event news, as well as in the final presentation of detected danger citizens’ clusters.

The introduced citizens clustering method is profitable for journalists and editors to better judge the veracity of social media content, navigate the overwhelming, identify eyewitnesses and contextualize the event. The empirical analysis results illustrate the efficiency of the developed method for both real and artificial networks.

Presents findings from a community survey of citizens who rated the importance of a variety of police practices commonly associated with community policing. Findings show that citizens give lower ratings to preventive community policing activities that are usually thought of as having an indirect effect on crime, and they give the highest ratings to proactive enforcement activities. Estimates several different regression models in order to detect systematic differences in patterns of ratings: gender has the most consistent effect across the different models. Discusses the need for studies that include cross‐community comparisons.

To examine how social media restrict and recreate messages within current interactionist scripts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), this study applies a framework of digital reflexivity highlighting stages of information flow. It applies the symbolic interaction concept of emotional events to analyze the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and the role of social media in disseminating Bouazizi’s act as one catalyst of the MENA citizen uprisings. The role of social media in the “Arab Spring” merits investigation because social media provide opportunities to examine shifting identities, interactions, and actions of citizen activists in the MENA uprisings. This study is important and timely because little symbolic interactionist scholarship exists on MENA identities and social movements, or on crowd interaction and activism outside the West. The nuanced nature of MENA political activism and complex processes of the development of activists’ “mutable” selves (Zurcher, 1977) are fluid and resistant to symbolically defined social roles, interactionist scripts and reflexivity, and public communication practices in a MENA under political and social transition.

This paper aims to reveal the philanthropy landscape processes for dealing with disasters and examine the influence of lean thinking in managing philanthropy for disasters. It sought to leverage continuous improvement and maximise disaster response and humanitarian logistics efficiency.

A sequential quantitative, qualitative research methods strategy was utilised involving data collection with literary analysis and two sets of online surveys with 212 NGO staff members in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In addition, in-depth key informant interviews were conducted with 23 staff members at various management levels from these countries.

The study found that lean thinking had a positive, statistically valid influence at a 95% confidence level. Community incorporation, government support and collaboration with other philanthropic organisations were critical success factors. When lean thinking tools were applied (any tools), philanthropic organisations experienced waste reduction and value addition, where waste reduction accounted for 67% variation, and value-addition accounted for 58%, respectively. These were the same benefits experienced in other industries, thus, justifying lean thinking's applicability in the non-profit sector. Lean was most helpful about the communication and duplication of efforts challenges humanitarian or philanthropic organisations face when responding to a disaster.

The study equips leaders and philanthropic organisations with suggestions to manage and respond to disasters in a lean and effective manner. The study helps philanthropy leaders rethink their funding and response models to pursue lean policies catering to humanitarian organisations and the communities they serve.

The study closes significant gaps in the literature and practice by adopting a multi-sectoral lens that borrows from business and manufacturing tools into a non-profit context. It enables documentation of processes and logistical management by philanthropy organisations for continuous improvement and elimination of waste to ensure efficiency in the philanthropic role of alleviating the impact of disasters. The study also affirms the need for philanthropic organisations to incorporate community feedback, use lean tools to collaborate with other responding organisations and work closely with the local authorities to fulfil the government's supportive role: the primary source and executor in disaster response.

Approximately 75% of journalists in Western society maintain a Twitter account. This significant presence underscores Twitter's impact on the public agenda. The purpose of this paper is to gain an understanding of journalists' practices on Twitter, from the perspective of journalists in Israel, and explore whether journalists use Twitter's potential as a pluralistic platform of expression.

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with leading journalists working on traditional media and those active on Twitter in Israel.

Although Twitter is an open, inclusive platform for opinion exchange, in which journalists have a sense of unfettered freedom of expression, findings indicate that in Israel, Twitter effectively functions as an echo chamber used by a clique of journalists and politicians in a manner than reifies the hegemonic system. The majority of the public do not use Twitter to draw attention to contentious issues, and journalists almost exclusively continue to set and control the agenda on this platform. As a result, journalists become even more disconnected from society. Therefore, Twitter has been found to be a complementary platform to traditional media that helps to preserve the existing social order.

This paper offers not only a theoretical contribution but also social relevance, as the topics and issues discussed in the paper might concern citizens and policymakers. This paper contributes to the debate on freedom of the press, which is an important principle of pluralism and democracy. This study illustrates that the general public's opinions remain unheard-of on Twitter. Therefore, despite its potential to express a variety of opinions and voices, Twitter does not undermine the existing social order, but it is one of the cultural frameworks that help preserve the existing social order and reinforce it through uniform conformity thinking.

The novelty of this research lies in its identification and analysis of the characteristics of the Twitter scene, its meanings and its implications from the perspective of journalists. In addition, this research investigates the relationships forged in the Twitter space between journalists and politicians and among journalists themselves.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-07-2020-0324

Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine the impact of co-operative governance structures on citizen participation in public service provision.Methodology – Using a multiple case study-approach, we analyse and compare five examples of co-operative public–citizen partnerships in Austria and Germany.Findings – The study clearly shows that co-operatives can be a tool for both, (1) the bottom-up self-organization of citizens (co-operative as ‘contested space’) and (2) the top-down organization to canalize citizen participation (co-operative as ‘invited space’). Co-operative public–citizen partnerships therefore represent a balancing act between dependency through public funding and autonomy through community-based decision making.Research implications and limitations – The chapter underlines the importance of context-sensitive qualitative research. Limitations might stem from the fact that municipal areas might differ in other countries than Germany and Austria, for example, due to legal prerequisites.Practical implications – If regional government representatives are supporting a bottom-up initiative, they are more inclined to provide crucial resources for the public–citizen partnership and tensions between different stakeholders involved are weakened.Social implications – Co-operative public–citizen partnerships might enhance participatory democracy and seem to strengthen solidarity and social cohesion on the neighbourhood level.Originality/value of chapter – In showing that co-operatives are a suitable governance structure for community organizations, which enhance democratic decision making and foster social innovation in public service delivery, we support the findings of other studies. The chapter suggests that in order to enhance our understanding of citizen participation, context-sensitive research that goes beyond merely descriptive governance analysis is needed, taking into account the historical trajectories of public–citizen partnerships.

The purpose of this paper is to review the “state of the art” in research on police legitimacy. The authors consider two bodies of theory and empirical research on police legitimacy: one rooted in social psychology and concerned with individual attitudes, and the other based on organizational institutionalism. The authors contrast the theories, discuss the methods with which propositions have been examined, and take stock of the empirical evidence. The authors then turn to a direct comparison of the theories and their predictions.

Critical review and comparison of two bodies of literature.

Police legitimacy is a phenomenon that can be properly understood only when it is addressed at both individual and organizational levels. A large body of social psychological research on police legitimacy has been conducted at the individual level, though it has dwelled mainly on attitudes, and the empirical evidence on the relationships of attitudes to behavior is weak. A much smaller body of research on organizational legitimacy in policing has accumulated, and it appears to have promise for advancing our understanding of police legitimacy.

The understanding of police legitimacy can be deepened by the juxtaposition of these two bodies of theory and research.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight in how South African local governments organize citizen engagement. The new South African constitution provides ways to construct and implement citizen engagement at local level. However, understanding citizen engagement at local level is still a challenge and municipalities search for proper structures and mechanisms to organize citizen engagement efficiently.

Interviews with different municipal actors were analyzed using a single case study method. As a primary unit of analysis, a specific project in which citizen engagement is organized was used. In addition, document analysis and a focus group were used to deepen understanding.

The findings reveal that citizen engagement is a viable strategy to identify the needs of the community if facilitated by a third party and that learning leadership is important when organizing citizen engagement.

The value of this research is the exploration of the citizen engagement process. It sheds light on the conditions that play a role when a local government organizes citizen engagement. As local governments search for ways to effectively organize and structure citizen engagement, insight into these conditions is helpful.

This study aims to understand basic elements that form and influence citizen engagement to sustain service delivery of rural water in Indonesia.

Citizen engagement is elaborated through a sociological perspective of basic elements of social life that consist of structure, culture and process within the realm of a community’s living environment. Sustainability is explored through the life cycle of rural water supply service delivery by means of a strategic plan, financing and budget allocation, construction/expansion, operational and maintenance and support system for sustaining services. A case study was conducted in four Pamsimas villages in two districts with comparable natural environment and water system but with a contrast sustainability performance. Pamsimas is the biggest rural water supply program in Indonesia that was started in 2008 and implemented in 27,000 villages.

Through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, the study found that appropriate citizen and government engagement since the implementation of the strategic plan throughout the rest of sub-cycles is key to sustainable service delivery. In the four aforementioned villages, sustainability is influenced more by structure elements such as government policy, program governance and source of water than by social and cultural elements.

The study was done in four Pamsimas villages located in a mountainous area with a gravitation type of water system. The findings may be different in other locations or settings.

Lessons from this study will guide sector stakeholders to better define the engagement of citizens and the government and to create activities that trigger better engagement between citizens and the government, particularly the village government, so that citizens can avail the services.