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Based on interviews with 27 victims’ family members and survivors, this chapter explores how memory of the Oklahoma City bombing was constructed through participation in groups formed after the bombing and participation in the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. It first addresses the efficacy of a collective memory perspective. It then describes the mental context in which interviewees joined groups after the bombing, the recovery functions groups played, and their impact on punishment expectations. Next, it discusses a media-initiated involuntary relationship between McVeigh and interviewees. Finally, this chapter examines execution witnesses’ perceptions of communication with McVeigh in his trial and execution.

Over the past few years, mathematical and computational models of organizations have attracted a great deal of interest in various fields of scientific research (see Lin & Carley, 1993 for review). The mathematical models have focused on the problem of quantifying the structural (mis)match between organizations and their tasks. The notion of structural congruence has been generalized from the problem of optimizing distributed decision-making in structured decision networks (Pete, Pattipati, Levchuk, & Kleinman, 1998) to the multi-objective optimization problem of designing optimal organizational structures to complete a mission, while minimizing a set of criteria (Levchuk, Pattipati, Curry, & Shakeri, 1996, 1997, 1998). As computational models of decision-making in organizations began to emerge (see Carley & Svoboda, 1996; Carley, 1998; Vincke, 1992), the study of social networks (SSN) continued to focus on examining a network structure and its impact on individual, group, and organizational behavior (Wellman & Berkowitz, 1988). Most models, developed under the SSN, combined formal and informal structures when representing organizations as architectures (e.g., see Levitt et al., 1994; Carley & Svoboda, 1996). In addition, a large number of measures of structure and of the individual positions within the structure have been developed (Roberts, 1979; Scott, 1981; Wasserman & Faust, 1994; Wellman, 1991).

Although markets are intensely social, stock markets are peculiar in that they are normatively anonymous spaces. Anonymity is a difficult-to-achieve social accomplishment in which material identity information is successfully stripped from participants. The academic literature is conflicted regarding the degree to which equity markets are anonymous and how this influences traders’ behavior.

Based on focused, tape-recorded ethnographic interviews, this chapter investigates the work practices of professional investors and brokers to describe the conditions under which brokers veil or reveal investors’ identities to their competitors, and thereby shed light on how anonymity is socially produced (or eroded) in global stock markets.

The social structure of brokered financial markets places brokers in the awkward situation of sitting in an information-poor structural location for so-called “fundamental information” while being paid to share information with professional investors who sit in an information-rich structural location. A resolution to this material and social dilemma is that brokers can erode the market’s anonymity by gifting identity information (“order flow”) – the previous, prospective, or pending trades of their clients’ competitors – thereby providing traders a competitive advantage. They share identity information in three types of performances: transparent relationships, masked relationships, and the transformation of illicit material identity information into licit and sharable “fundamental” information. Each performance partly erodes transaction-level and market-level anonymity while simultaneously partially supporting anonymity.

Laws and regulations requiring brokers’ confidentiality of their clients’ trades are easily and systematically eluded. Policy makers and regulators may opt to respond by increasing surveillance and mechanization of brokers’ work so as to promote a normatively anonymous market. Alternatively, they may opt to question the value of promoting and policing anonymity in financial markets by revising insider trading regulations.

Even well-regulated markets are semi-anonymous spaces due to the systematic exposure of investors’ identities to competitors by their shared brokers on a daily basis. This finding provides an additional explanation for how professional investors can imitate one another (“herd”) as well as why subpopulations of investors often trade so similarly to one another.

The increasing use of digital technologies in organizational contexts, like collaborative social platforms, has not only changed the way people work but also provided organizations with new and wide ranges of data sources that could be analyzed to enhance organizational- and individual-level outcomes, especially when integrated with more traditional tools. In this study, we explore the relationship between data flows generated by employees on companies’ digital environments and employees’ attitudes measured through surveys. In a sample of 107 employees, we collected data on the number and types of actions performed on the company’s digital collaborative platform over a two-year period and the level of organizational embeddedness (fit, sacrifice, and links dimensions) through two rounds of surveys over the same period. The correlation of the quantity and quality of digital actions with the variation of organizational embeddedness over the same period shows that workers who engaged in more activities on the digital platform also experienced an increase in their level of organizational embeddedness mainly in the fit dimension. In addition, the higher the positive variation of fit, the more employees performed both active and passive digital actions. Finally, the higher the variation of organizational embeddedness, the more employees performed networking digital behaviors.

A fundamental issue driving much of the current research is the design of the interface between humans and ROVs. Autonomous robots are sufficiently different from most computer systems as to require new research and design principles (Adams & Skubic, 2005; Kiesler & Hinds, 2004). Previous work on coordination between humans and automated agents has revealed both benefits and costs of automation for system performance (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). Automation is clearly essential for the operation of many complex human–machine systems. But in some circumstances automation can also lead to novel problems for operators. Automation can increase workload and training requirements, impair situation awareness and, when particular events co-occur in combination with poorly designed interfaces, lead to accidents (e.g., Degani, 2004; Parasuraman & Riley, 1997).

Is the death penalty dying? This autobiographical essay offers observations on the application of capital punishment in three very different legal jurisdictions at three different time periods when – partially by happenstance and partially by design – she was a homicide researcher, a participant and an observer of profound changes in the jurisdiction's application of the death penalty.