A Causality Analysis of Societal Risk Perception and Stock Market Volatility in China

Modern China is undergoing a variety of social conflicts as the arrival of new era with the transformation of the principal contradiction. Then monitoring the society stable is a huge workload. Online societal risk perception is acquired by mapping on-line public concerns respectively into societal risk events including national security, economy & finance, public morals, daily life, social stability, government management, and resources & environment, and then provides one kind of measurement toward the society state. Obviously, stable and harmonious social situations are the basic guarantee for the healthy development of the stock market. Thus we concern whether the variations of the societal risk are related to stock market volatility. We study their relationships by two steps, first the relationships between search trends and societal risk perception; next the relationships between societal risk perception and stock volatility. The weekend and holiday effects in China stock market are taken into consideration. Three different econometric methods are explored to observe the impacts of variations of societal risk on Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index. 3 major findings are addressed. Firstly, there exist causal relations between Baidu Index and societal risk perception. Secondly, the perception of finance & economy, social stability, and government management has distinguishing effects on the volatility of both Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index. Thirdly, the weekend and holiday effects of societal risk perception on the stock market are verified. The research demonstrates that capturing societal risk based on on-line public concerns is feasible and meaningful.     

An Empirical Feasibility Study of Societal Risk Classification Toward BBS Posts

Societal risk classification is the fundamental issue for online societal risk monitoring. To show the challenge and feasibility of societal risk classification toward BBS posts, an empirical analysis is implemented in this paper. Through effectiveness analysis, Support Vector Machine based on Bag-Of-Words (BOW-SVM) is adopted for challenge validation, and the distributed document embeddings of BBS posts generated by Paragraph Vector are applied to feasibility study. Based on BOW-SVM, cross-validations of BBS posts labeled by different groups and annotators are conducted. The big fluctuation of cross-validation results indicates the differences of individual risk perceptions, which brings more challenges to societal risk classification. Furthermore, based on the distributed document embeddings of BBS posts, the pairwise similarities of more than 300 thousands BBS posts from different societal risk categories are compared. The higher similarities of BBS posts in the same societal risk category reveal that BBS posts in the same societal risk category share more features than BBS posts in different categories, which manifests the feasibility of societal risk classification of BBS posts, and also reflects the possibility to improve the performance of societal risk monitoring.     

Generating Storyline with Societal Risk from Tianya Club

Major societal problems affect the social stability. It is necessary to understand the public opinion toward those issues to avoid social conflicts. Nowadays the social media become the major platform to track what the public is concerned about and which may be of the societal risk. However,it is very tough to capture the public attention in short time due to huge flow of user-generated contents.In this paper, we approach this problem by expanding the method of generating storyline with the result displayed by a multi-view graph. One real-world example is illustrated and evaluation is given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

The Corporate Social Responsibility of Ukrainian Agroholdings: the Stakeholder Approach Revisited

The agricultural sector in Ukraine and other transitional and developing countries is distinguished by the prominence of agroholdings, i.e., large-scale industrialized corporations, that offer extensive support to their stakeholders through the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The stakeholder approach as a part of business ethics scholarship explains stakeholder salience in terms of the turbulence of the business environment. Drawing on the Luhmannian theory of complex social systems, the present paper shows this turbulence to be a relative concept that makes sense primarily in relation to the limited ability of dominant formal institutions, such as the function systems, to process the complexity of the societal environment. In line with this argument, the Ukrainian agroholdings are shown to direct their CSR efforts to stakeholders whose salience arises out of the transition-specific institutional shortcomings, such as the imperfections of land and labor markets. Paradoxically, the Ukrainian institutional environment has been conducive not only to the rise of agroholdings but also to the emergence of societal expectations which the agroholdings must face. The broader business ethics implication of the argument is the functional equivalence of the discretionary CSR activities and the quality of the dominant formal institutions, such as the function systems.     

Exploring Evolution of Public Opinions on Tianya Club Using Dynamic Topic Models

Online media have brought tremendous changes to civic life, public opinions, and government administration. Compared with traditional media, online media not only allow individuals to browse news and express their views more freely, but also accelerate the transmission of opinions and expand influence. As public opinions may arouse societal unrest, it is worth detecting the primary topics and uncovering the evolution trends of public opinions for societal administration. Various algorithms are developed to deal with the huge volume of unstructured online media data. In this study,dynamic topic model is employed to explore topic content evolution and prevalence evolution using the original posts published from 2013 to 2017 on the Tianya Zatan Board of Tianya Club, which is one of the most popular BBS in China. Based on semantic similarities, topics are grouped into three themes: Family life, societal affairs, and government administration. The evolution of topic prevalence and content are affected by emergent incidents. Topics on family life become popular, while themes"societal affairs" and "government administration" with bigger standard deviations are more likely to be influenced by emergent hot events. Content evolution represented by monthly pairwise distance matrix is very easy to find change points of topic content.     

The distributed representation for societal risk classification toward BBS posts

The risk classification of BBS posts is important to the evaluation of societal risk level within a period. Using the posts collected from Tianya forum as the data source, the authors adopted the societal risk indicators from socio psychology, and conduct document-level multiple societal risk classification of BBS posts. To effectively capture the semantics and word order of documents, a shallow neural network as Paragraph Vector is applied to realize the distributed vector representations of the posts in the vector space. Based on the document vectors, the authors apply one classification method KNN to identify the societal risk category of the posts. The experimental results reveal that paragraph vector in document-level societal risk classification achieves much faster training speed and at least 10% improvements of F-measures than Bag-of-Words. Furthermore, the performance of paragraph vector is also superior to edit distance and Lucene-based search method. The present work is the first attempt of combining document embedding method with socio psychology research results to public opinions area.     

System–Environment Relations in the Theories of Open and Autopoietic Systems: Implications for Critical Systems Thinking

This short paper revisits Bertalanffy??s open systems theory and Luhmann??s theory of autopoietic social systems in order to highlight the linkage between systemic complexity and the carrying capacity of the environment. Being paradigmatically focused on biological complexity, Bertalanffy??s work shows this linkage to be relatively unproblematic. In contrast, Luhmann argued that autopoietic social systems are likely to develop excessive complexity which overstrains the environment??s carrying capacity. The paper synthesizes these conceptions into a framework of discretionary social decision-making aimed at preventing systemic complexity from becoming excessive. Rooted in the idea of balancing the system and the environment, this framework determines the optimal level of systemic complexity as that level which systems can maximally attain without incurring the risk of self-destruction. The system?Cenvironment balance is shown to be the general systems theory core of Ulrich??s critical systems heuristics and critical systems thinking more generally.     

基于百度热搜新闻词的社会风险事件5W提取研究

当今中国处于经济转型升级的关键时期,社会主要矛盾发生了历史性变化,社会风险事件发生的频率比以往更高,危害社会稳定.将公众在线的搜索和关注数据映射为潜在的社会风险事件,如何有效地自动标注风险事件以及直观、清晰地描述社会风险事件是本文关注的重点.本文尝试定义风险事件的5W框架来结构化的描述社会风险,包括地点(where)、时间(when)、人物(who)、原因(why)和发生内容(what).风险事件的5W抽取可转化为不同的机器学习任务,包括命名实体识别、风险分类以及关键词抽取.依据5W的抽取任务进而探索有效的抽取方法.通过对风险事件5W的自动抽取,将现实中社会风险这种wicked问题转化为结构化问题进行分析,为研究社会风险提供一个新的视角,对政府部门进行舆情分析与风险监测具有重要意义.     

Critical Systems Thinking and “new social movements”: A perspective from the theory of communicative action

The purpose of this paper is to review recent developments in critical theory on the political function of the public sphere and the emancipatory potential of new social movements. This work is shown to be relevant to systemic decisions made under conditions of public conflict. Normative models for the self-understanding of actors engaged in self-limiting emancipatory struggles in modern societies are reviewed and related to the concerns of Critical Systems Thinking.     

Exploring on-line societal risk perception for harmonious society measurement

The nearly 30-year economic growth miracle brings the consequent tremendous poor-rich gap leading strong drives for social transformation in current China. Chinese top leaders have realized to increase the peoples＇ income, improve quality of life and construct a ＂harmonious society＂ as key missions especially in recent 10 years. How to measure a harmonious society is one important topic as different measures may lead to different development policies. This paper outlines over 10 indices relevant to measure a harmonious society. Some are global indicators, while some are contributed by domestic researchers and arouse debates. Most of those indicators require conducting surveys on social attitudes under micro levels, which is always time consuming with problem of data quality. As Internet technology advances provide ways to record and disseminate fresh community ideas and thoughts conveniently, detecting topics or emotions from on-line public opinions is becoming a trend or one supplement way to overcome those data acquisition problems. This paper discusses one approach to on-line societal risk perception using hot search words and BBS posts. Such a trial aims to provide another way to societal risk perception different from those in traditional socio psychology studies. Challenges are also indicated.     

泛在媒体环境下的网络舆情传播控制模型

正逐步形成的泛在媒体环境深刻影响着网络舆情的传播与控制.将传统的传染病模型推广到泛在媒体环境这样一个开放系统中, 建立了新的带直接免疫的SEIR舆情传播控制模型, 新模型克服了已有网络舆情传播模型存在的对网民个体状态处理过于简单, 对舆情传播媒介的处理过于简化等缺陷.证明了模型的传播平衡点及稳定性, 提出了从网络舆情传播环境入手, 在舆情形成初期进行干预的控制方法.据此, 构建了基于Wiki技术的网络舆情传播控制平台, 对该平台的舆情传播控制效能做了仿真剖析, 验证了控制方法的有效性.     

The Pragmatics of Educational Systems Design: A Critical Examination

The author critically examines educational systems design (ESD) through the lens of pragmatism. Examining ESD through a lens of pragmatism draws to the foreground issues related to Banathy's (1991, 1996, 2001) idealized systems design for social and societal systems. The author addresses the complex and dynamic nature of systems design, focusing on the systemic processes in which user-designers are continually challenged to inquire, communicate, and consider choices, and make design decisions concerning the nature of the system being designed. The power of social systems design (SSD) lies in the ability to consider the ideal image of a social and/or societal system, critically and pragmatically in relation to creating a new system that will contribute to the evolutionary betterment of society and a sustainable future for humankind. Following an introduction, the author examines pragmatism. Then the author applies a lens of pragmatism, critically, to examine educational systems design in relation to generating change and creating the ideal educational system. The author then argues the pragmatics of educational systems design, concluding the paper with final reflections on ESD as a process.     

The Application of Cobb-Douglas Function in Forecasting the Duration of Internet Public Opinions Caused by the Failure of Public Policies

Gushes of Internet public opinions may trigger unexpected incidents that significantly affect social security and stability, especially for ones caused by the failure of public policies. Therefore, forecasting this kind of Internet public opinions is of great significance. The duration could be cited as one of the most direct indicators that can reflect the severity of a specific Internet public opinion case. Based on this background, this paper aims to find the factors that may affect the duration of Internet public opinions, and accordingly proposes a model that can accurately predict the duration before the release of public policies. Specifically, an index system including 8 factors by considering four dimensions, namely, object, environment, reality (offline), and the network (online), is established. In addition, based on the dataset containing 23 typical Internet public opinion cases caused by the failure of public policies, 9 prediction models are gained by applying the multivariate linear regression model, multivariate nonlinear regression model, and the Cobb-Douglas function.     

Collaborative Project Management: A Systemic Approach to Heavy Equipment Manufacturing Project Management

Quite often over the last decade, heavy equipment manufacturers are trying to improve their project management performance with the use of effective project management methods. However, the challenges encountered aren’t isolated problems and a systemic approach is required. This paper exemplifies how a systemic approach can be applied to heavy equipment manufacturing project (HEMP) management, through of a multifaceted vision. The findings present in the paper are based on a two-year case study in a metallurgic equipment manufacturing enterprise in China. Based on the analysis of HEMP management problems and the contributions on systemic approach application in project management, the paper enriches existing theory by: (1) interpreting the HEMP management system with the top-down disassembly method; (2) developing the collaborative project management approach with a systems view highlighting the project characteristics management and inter-departmental collaboration; (3) making suggestions for systemic approach application in project management. For practitioners and researchers, the findings are particularly meaningful for manufacturing project management and systemic approach application.     

Designing a Capability-Focused Strategic Management Model for a Turkish Public Hospital: Learning from Failure

This study aims to depict a failed strategic change initiative in a Turkish public hospital by means of an action research and it strives to explain critical factors underpinning the failure, thereby proposing how such factors should be tackled with for similar initiatives elsewhere. The study calls attention to the recent challenges ongoing in the environment of hospitals, which urge them to take on a more strategic focus. In this vein, we discredit accreditation based systems, which emphasize monitoring resources and propose a capability-focused strategic management model for hospitals. A hybrid action research protocol, which combines both traditional and participatory action research methodologies in its design, is employed to formulate and implement the model in a public hospital. The phases of the project and obstacles faced during these phases are discussed. The findings suggest that although the model offers significant potential for competitive success and better resource efficiency, path-dependent characteristics of the public sector governance in Turkey have impeded the adoption of the model in our case. Both macro-systemic characteristics related mainly to the Turkish national culture and management of public institutions and situation-specific characteristics, such as top management’s decision making orientation, professional norms and patronage relationships have blocked the way for the aspired transformation despite positive attitudes of and support from higher order public authorities and internal professional groups.     

Topics and trends of the on-line public concerns based on Tianya forum

Many social events spread fast through the Internet and arouse wide community discussions. Those on-line public opinions emerge into diverse topics along the time. Moreover, the strength of the topics is fluctuating. How to catch both primary topics and trend of topics over the shifting on-line discussions are not only of theoretical importance for scientific research, but also of practical importance for societal management especially in current China. To try the cutting-edge text analytic technologies to deal with unstructured on-line public opinions and provide support for social problem-solving in the big data era is worth an endeavour. This paper applies dynamic topic model （DTM） to explore the changing topics of new posts collected from Tianya Zatan Board of Tianya Club, the most influential Chinese BBS in mainland China. By analysis of the hot and cold terms trends, we catch the topics shift of main on-line concerns with illustrations of topics of school bus and environment in December of 2011. An algorithm is proposed to compute the strength fluctuation of each topic. With visualized analysis of the respective main topics in several months of 2012, some patterns of the topics fluctuation on the board are summarized.     

Revitalizing the Public Sphere: The Current System of Discourse and the Need for the Participative Design of Social Action

Public discourse in Western democracies, particularly in the United States, is far from the Habermasian ideal of citizens engaging in a rational discussion of public affairs. Rather than providing an arena for informed deliberation, the growing expertise of the media, lobbyists, and politicians has sub-optimized the current system of discourse to focus on emotional manipulation and the creation of polarized interests, each competing with each other for dominance. Avoiding a potentially disastrous outcome from this unbalancing of public discourse requires a revitalization of the public sphere and a return of the citizen voice in public decision making. To that end, systems thinkers have a tremendous opportunity and can play an important role. This article will explore the current challenges facing public discourse and outline that potential role.     

创建增进公众理解科学的文化环境的系统观

文化环境对公众理解科学的作用具有积极和消极二重性。建设能增进公众理解科学的文化环境应遵循系统整体原则，首先要明确整体目标，从部分优化做起；其次，要协调要素与要素、系统与环境间的关系，注重整体效益。     

期权在供应链风险管理中的应用

探讨在市场需求不确定的情况下,期权在供应链风险管理中的应用.分析建立在一个单供应商、多分销商的供应链模型上.模型中,每一个分销商既可以从供应商那里直接购买产品,也可以购买期权.期权使得分销商有权选择是否购买额外数量的产品.首先分析了分销商的最优供给策略、供应商的最优生产策略,接着讨论了期权怎样增强信息流、促进风险共享从而提高供应链效率.文章还论述了怎样利用期权来协调供应链各合作伙伴的动机,来提高供应链对市场变化的响应能力.