At CAIS I am advancing two collaborative scholarly projects, both investigating how the rules and routines of organizations shape digital social systems, which in turn contribute to individual and collective outcomes.
Social Affordances for Health(y) Conversations Online
In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Laura Black of Ohio University, Prof. Dr. Gregor Petric and Prof. Dr. Sara Atanasova, both of University of Ljubljana.
We study governance practices in online communities– such as norms, rules, and moderation practices that shape interaction, and how interaction shapes outcomes such as empowerment, gratitude, awareness of shared grievances, and political radicalization. We collect conversations from online health communities (OHC) in reddit and the largest OHC in Slovenia. Output of this project will be a dataset combining qualitative comments with measures context, content, and structural measures.
Evolving Beyond the New Digital Age
A book length collaboration with Eric P. Gleave of the Social Media Research Foundation.
We investigate how organizational rules of ownership and control shape the design of digital social systems. We focus on how these digital systems alter the structure and context of social interaction, and thus alter individual and collective outcomes. We ask:
How do different digital systems shape strategic interaction?
How can digital social systems support collaboration based on cooperative rather than coercive principles?
How can we use current digital systems to grow capacity and demand for systems that result in higher levels of cooperative collaboration?
We draw on sociological and economic studies of organizations and institutions; especially formal rules of ownership and agency in decision making and control. These are combined with recent advances in the studies of the evolution of cooperation that address the role of relatedness and structural constraints in transitions to higher levels of organization based on cooperative collaboration. Output of this project will be a chapter outline and drafts of 3 chapters.
Main Research Topics
- digital social systems
- social evolution
- organizations
- cooperation
Curriculum Vitae
Ohio University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
- 2023 Professor
- 2013 Associate Professor
- 2007 Assistant Professor
Cornell University, Institute for the Social Sciences
- 2006-07 Post-Doctoral Researcher
Microsoft Research, Community Technologies Group
- 2003-06 Research Contractor
Publications and Presentations
- Howard T. Welser and Edgar V. Kiser. (2018) “Agents beyond control? Organizational design, distributed digital systems and the problem of corruption.” American Sociological Association, Philadelphia, PA.
- Welser, Howard T. (2015) “Breaking the iron law of oligarchy: Computational institutions, organizational fidelity, and distributed social control.” Edited by Elisa Bertino and Sorin Adam Matei, Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (pp. 121-144) New York: Springer Publishing.
- Black, Laura W., Howard T. Welser, Dan Cosley and Jocelyn M. DeGroot. (2011) “Self-governance through group discussion in Wikipedia: Measuring deliberation in online groups.” Small Group Research. 41(5):595-634.
- Welser, Howard T., Eric Gleave, and Deborah Vaughan. (2007) “Cultural evolution, disproportionate prior exposure and the problem of cooperation.” Rationality and Society. 19(2): 171-202.
- Kiser, Edgar and Howard T. Welser. (2007) “The Relationship between theory and history in evolutionary biology: A model for historical sociology?” European Sociology Conference, Glasgow.