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Purpose – As researchers need partners to collaborate with, this study aims to provide author recommendation for academic researchers for potential collaboration, conference planning, and compilation of scientific working groups with the help of social information. Hereby the chapter analyzes and compares different similarity metrics in information and computer science.

Methodology/approach – The study uses data from the multidiscipline information services Web of Science and Scopus as well as the social bookmarking service CiteULike to measure author similarity and recommend researchers to unique target researchers. The similarity approach is based on author co-citation, bibliographic coupling of authors and collaborative filtering methods. The developed clusters and graphs are then evaluated by these target researchers.

Findings – The analysis shows, for example, that different methods for social recommendation complement each other and that the researchers evaluated user- and tag-based data from a social bookmarking system positively.

Research limitations/implications – The present study, providing author recommendation for six target physicists, is supposed to be a starting point for further approaches on social academic author recommendation.

Practical implications – The chapter investigates in recommendation methods and similarity algorithm models as basis for an implementation of a social recommendation system for researchers in academics and knowledge-intensive organizations.

Originality/value of chapter – The comparison of different similarity measurements and the user evaluation provide new insights into the construction of social data mining and the investigation of personalized recommendation.

Purpose: The development of service automation continues to underpin the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors providing benefits for both customers and service companies. The purpose of this chapter is to showcase the practice of self-service technology (SST) usage in the contemporary tourism and hospitality sectors and present a conceptual framework of customer SST adoption.

Design/Methodology/Approach: This chapter offers an examination of theory, research and practice in relation to SST usage in tourism, highlighting the benefits and drawbacks arising for both customers and service providers. Since the benefits are achieved only if SSTs gain effective adoption with customers, this chapter focuses on concepts underpinning the study of customer SST adoption. Drawing on SST adoption factors and SST customer roles, a conceptual framework of SST adoption is discussed.

Findings/Practical Implications: This chapter examines the principles and practice underpinning the usage of self-service technologies in the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors, with specific reference to customer SST roles in co-creation. The customer SST roles provide a more detailed and nuanced picture of the customer perspective on SST usage. These nuanced roles are captured in a conceptual framework which seeks to further refine the understanding of customer SST adoption.

Research Implications & Originality/Value: The framework provides a useful foundation for further research with a focus on customer empowerment in SSTs. The future development of service automation will require a balance between the delivery of a personalised and smarter customer experience and technology applications that are unobtrusive and which do not pose any ethical or privacy concerns.

Every employee embodies manifestations of every demographic that attach to him or her different minority and majority statuses at the same time. As these statuses are often related to organizational hierarchies, employees frequently hold positions of dominance and subordination at the same time. Thus, a given individual’s coping strategies (or coping behavior) in terms of minority stress due to organizational processes of hierarchization, marginalization, and discrimination, are very often a simultaneous coping in terms of more than one demographic. Research on minority stress mostly focuses on single demographics representing only single facets of workforce diversity. By integrating the demographics of age, disability status, nationality, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and religion into one framework, the intersectional model proposed in this chapter broadens the perspective on minorities and related minority stress in the workplace. It is shown that coping with minority stress because of one demographic must always be interpreted in relation to the other demographics. The manifestation of one demographic can limit or broaden one’s coping resources for coping with minority stress because of another dimension. Thus, the manifestation of one demographic can determine the coping opportunities and coping behavior one applies to situations because of the minority status of another demographic. This coping behavior can include disclosure decisions about invisible demographics. Therefore, organizational interventions aiming to create a supportive workplace environment and equal opportunities for every employee (e.g., diversity management approaches) should include more demographics instead of focusing only on few.

In this chapter, we examine the unique and heightened negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through tracing how the preexisting social conditions of exclusion and precarity in which many disabled people live, effected access to safe, affordable, and accessible housing in Canada. We then illustrate the reverberating impacts housing choices have on how people with disabilities lived, lived well, and how they faced barriers to living well during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using an intersectional livelihoods approach, we analyzed semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 32 diverse people with disabilities, 12 key informant semi-structured interviews, as well as academic and community literature and a social media scan of key disability advocacy organizations in Canada.

Pandemic-related policies in Canada often excluded people with disabilities, either overlooking barriers to access and safety, which exacerbated the already precarious livelihoods of people with disabilities or over-emphasized the usefulness of social adaptions such as work from home. These exclusions had more profound consequences for people with disabilities from historically marginalized groups, as they often faced increased barriers to livelihoods pre-pandemic, and disability- or care-specific policies failed to consider intersectional experiences of discrimination. People with disabilities formed communities of care to meet their needs and those of their loved ones.

To achieve a responsive policy response that addresses the cascading impacts of risk and care, it is necessary for governments to engage, early and often, with people with disabilities, disability leaders and organizations in emergency planning and beyond.

Purpose – We make a case for bridging two types of logics – analytic and dialectic – for explaining processes of social-historical change, and maintain that a successful bridge between these two logics depends on a variety of conditions and most especially the type of analytic logic or model one employs for capturing dynamic processes.

Methodology/approach – Conventional models of social change processes typically presuppose ergodic social worlds and are problematic as analytic approaches generally and most certainly are not fertile grounds for feeding dialectic theorization. Instead, we propose modeling dynamic processes that begin by assuming a nonergodic social world – one in flux, one that is nonrepeating, one within which model process and parameter structures are historically contingent and change with time, one that is autocatalytic, creating and changing its own possibilities.

Findings – We develop the line of thinking adumbrated above and illustrate these modeling strategies with empirical examples from US labor movement history. Results from these examples lend much weight to our proposals. Thus, this chapter demonstrates that concerns about the use of ergodic assumptions and about greater use of dialectical reasoning when studying social processes are not idle speculations within theoretical commentaries but have practical consequences in the conduct of research and the building of better theory.

Research limitations/implications – To approximate such an approach, social scientists should avoid cross-sectionalist and longitudinal modeling strategies that presuppose stability and homogeneity in parameter and process structures. Homogeneity and stability in parameter and process structures should be demonstrated, not assumed.

Originality/value – Rather than accepting the alienated spheres of social science analytics and dialectic theory, our proposal presupposes nonergodic social worlds and takes pragmatic steps for estimating analytic models that are more amenable to dialectic reasoning. Models that take nonergodicity seriously not only have the potential to produce better, historically grounded analytics but are also best suited to bridge with dialectic logic, thus taking advantage of the strengths of both forms of logic.

Many companies produce environmentally friendly goods and offer their products with varied attractive marketing mix strategies. One of the company's potential target markets is millennials because the growing number of this community has become enormous. In terms of behavior, millennials have a high level of consumption compared to other generations. However, there are big questions about the willingness of millennials to consume green products. This study aims to acknowledge the green product buying behavior among millennials, especially premium green products. The variables expected to influence the millennial's willingness to pay premium include environmental concern, reference group, and pro-environmental attitude. Data collected through a survey of 250 respondents. The hypothesis framework was tested using PLS-SEM modeling to evaluate the measurement and structural models with the assistance of Warp PLS version 7.0. This study found that millennials who consider the importance of preserving the environment and have a reference group that solicitude to the environment will have a pro-environmental attitude and willing to buy the green product, even though it has a higher price. Green product's management can use the result to formulate an effective green marketing strategy to target the millennials. Regarding the need for millennials' environmental behavior clearer picture in a developing economy, the present study inflicts the literature by describing the antecedents of millennials' willingness to pay premium green products. The results also give practical implications by shedding light on millennials’ green behavior variables. It helps green entrepreneurs conceive their strategic marketing management, and thus can boost the green economy and economic growth.

Our chapter focuses on the situation of children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their families in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the results of a qualitative study aimed at outlining the state of policies dedicated to individuals with ASD prior to and during the global health crisis. We conducted desk research based on documents published by third sector organisations dedicated to individuals with ASD and categorised in our study as epistemic communities. Next, we carried out interviews with parents and professionals on the social practices of supporting children and adolescents with ASD during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region of Lesser Poland [PL: Małopolska]. The discourse of NGOs enabled us to identify the greatest challenges of individuals with ASD and their families and solutions introduced prior to and during the pandemic. Based on the accounts of parents and professionals, we found that as many as every single person with ASD struggled with the epidemic in an individual manner, ceasing pre-pandemic habits, adapting to the new school context, and missing contacts with peers were the major difficulties.