Tipping point

With the amount of changes brought about in the sector recently, it is timely in the first month of 2022 to look back even further at the changes the workforce has been through before, which sparks a sense of déjà vu during the current circumstances.

The Virus and the Elephant in the Room: Knowledge, Emotions and a Pandemic—Drivers to Reducing Flying in Academia

This chapter explores individual incentives and barriers to reducing air travel, with the focus on people who have taken a decision to reduce flying due to climate change. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, six semi-structured interviews were performed with academics—three who had already cut down on flying and three who were grounded due to the pandemic. They were compared with a set of interviews with 26 Swedish citizens, performed in 2017–2018, which had shown that internalised knowledge of climate change was an important driver to change behaviour. Awareness led to negative emotions and a personal tipping point where a decision to reduce flying was made. However, among these interviewees, even people with a strong drive to reduce flying felt trapped in practices, norms and infrastructures. The academics reported similar incentives and barriers as the broader group but also specific challenges for them as researchers. Surprisingly, the pandemic was perceived as a testbed for new travel habits, and not as a big obstacle for their scientific work. None believed that they would return to an equally aeromobile lifestyle, and two of them described it as a chance to reconcile habits with their pro-environmental values.

The microdynamics shaping the relationship between democracy and corruption

Physics has a long tradition of laying rigorous quantitative foundations for social phenomena. Here, we up the ante for physics' forays into the territory of social sciences by (i) empirically documenting a tipping point in the relationship between democratic norms and corruption suppression, and then (ii) demonstrating how such a tipping point emerges from a micro-scale mechanistic model of spin dynamics in a complex network. Specifically, the tipping point in the relationship between democratic norms and corruption suppression is such that democratization has little effect on suppressing corruption below a critical threshold, but a large effect above the threshold. The micro-scale model of spin dynamics underpins this phenomenon by reinterpreting spins in terms of unbiased (i.e. altruistic) and biased (i.e. parochial) other-regarding behaviour, as well as the corresponding voting preferences. Under weak democratic norms, dense social connections of parochialists enable coercing enough opportunist voters to vote in favour of perpetuating parochial in-group bias. Society may, however, strengthen democratic norms in a rapid turn of events during which opportunists adopt altruism and vote to subdue bias. The emerging model outcome at the societal scale thus mirrors the data, implying that democracy either perpetuates or suppresses corruption depending on the prevailing democratic norms.

Sewol Ferry Disaster

This chapter provides background information regarding South Koreans’ anger and frustration with the Park Geun-hye administration, which led to a series of candlelight vigils calling for her impeachment. In particular, it analyzes public sentiment surrounding President Park’s handling of the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in which 250 South Korean high school students died. Prior to the revelation of the Park-Choi corruption scandal, the Sewol ferry disaster, caused by human error and poorly managed by the Park government, was the most significant event that contributed to reaching a tipping point for the impeachment movement. The Park-Choi scandal served as a trigger for public outrage, which had been simmering for several years. This chapter analyzes how outrage and embarrassment spread in the information ecosystem at that time and served to motivate people to participate in the impeachment vigils.