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The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on researchers and practitioners about sentiment analysis in hospitality and tourism. The technical details described throughout the chapter with a case study to provide clarifying insights. The proposed chapter adds significantly to the body of text mining knowledge by combining a technical explanation with a relevant case study. The case study used supervised machine learning to predict overall star ratings based on 20,247 comments related to Royal Caribbean International services for determining the impact of cruise travel experiences on the evaluation company process. The results indicate that travelers evaluate their travel experiences according to the most intense negative or positive feelings they have about the company.

As Ovid said, “There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent.” It is this very premise that frames the discoveries in this chapter and the compelling paradox it has raised. What began as a question of how performance is sustained, unveiled a collection of core organizational paradoxes. The findings ultimately suggest that sustained high performance is not a permanent state an organization achieves, but rather it is through perpetual movement and dynamic balance that sustainability occurs.

The idea of sustainability as movement is predicated on the ability of organizational members to move beyond the experience of paradox as an impediment to progress. Through holding three critical “movements” – agile/consistency, collective/individualism, and informative/inquiry – not as paradoxical, but as active polarities, the organizations in the study were able to transcend paradox, and take active steps to continuous achievement in outperforming their peers. The study, focused on a collection of hospitals across the Unites States, reveals powerful stories of care and service, of the profound grace of human capacity, and of clear actions taken to create significant results. All of this was achieved in an environment of great volatility, in essence an unbalanced system. It was the discovery of movement and ultimately of dynamic balancing that allowed the organizations to in this study to move beyond stasis to the continuous “state” of sustaining high performance.

After the ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden¹ disclosures of the National Security Agency surveillance of Americans’ online and phone communications, the Pew Research Center² administrated a panel survey to collect data concerning Americans’ opinions about privacy and security. This survey has mixed types of qualitative questions (closed and open-ended). In this context, to our knowledge, until today, no research has been applied on the open-ended part of these data. In this chapter, first the authors present their findings from applying sentiment analysis and topic extraction methods; second, the authors demonstrate their analysis to sentiments polarities; and finally, the authors interpret the semantic relationships between topics and their associated negativity, positivity, and neutral sentiments.

This essay studies disconnections between the macrolevel societal problems of a state and more microlevel political alignments.

Using a dataset composed of macrolevel measures of state problems and microlevel responses to a 2008 election survey, this essay applies multilevel statistical models to explain the state-to-state variance between the states on anti-abortion and pro-gun sentiments. This analysis uncovers the macro- and microlevel factors that disconnect a state’s neglect-of-children indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about abortion, and the factors that disconnect a state’s crime indicators from its citizens’ sentiments about guns.

The initial associations between a state’s indicators of neglect of children and anti-abortion sentiments are explained by the state’s lower human development (HD) and social attributes, especially religious beliefs, which predict social conservatism. The initial associations between a state’s indicators of crime and incarcerations are also explained by a state’s lower HD and the social attributes, especially religious beliefs, which predict social conservatism. Considering both abortion and guns as key indicators of social conservatism, the voters’ political choices exhibit a moralistic axiological rationality rather than a more pragmatic instrumental rationality.

The moral absolutism associated with sentiments about abortion and guns suggests that social conservatism and authoritarianism are intertwined but separate conceptions, which have similar consequences and determinants. Both may be influenced by the same changes in social and educational policies, especially the quality of education.

The literature surrounding appreciative inquiry (AI) has focused little on how the practitioner can work productively when negative emotions such as anger, shame, despair, cynicism, and fear emerge. The author reflects personally on her own process of coming to understand the life-giving tension of light and shadow at the heart of AI, offering insights gained by an AI into her practice, and possibility statements created to support her work. The chapter proposes that creative transcendence is not only possible but critical to the generative potential of AI, and invites the AI community to openly explore how we may work more holistically within this paradox.

In this chapter, we examine social influence in groups by considering three distinct aspects of the complex process: the force, the source, and the message. The force instantiates the internal drivers that are activated to change group members' public and private positions. These drivers relate to a desire for accuracy (i.e., informational influence) or a desire for group harmony (i.e., normative influence). The source of social influence includes influence attempts from a majority or a minority of group members. Finally, influence messages can contain evidence in support of a position (i.e., informational statements) or group member preferences (i.e., normative statements). These aspects are frequently conflated with informational influence strongly linked to minorities and informational statements and normative influence similarly linked to majorities and normative statements. We review research consistent with this position. However, we argue that each aspect should be considered separately. Thus, we also explore how majorities and normative statements generate informational influence and how minorities and informational statements lead to normative influence.