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Through an empirical analysis of a consumption community, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the theories of gift-giving, sharing and commodity exchange should not be kept separated but integrated into a unifying model.

The paper provides new evidence about Bookcrossing.com, whose members share and give books as gifts; that is, physical goods rather than digital ones as in most of the communities considered in the literature. This community is analysed with qualitative tools, such as netnography, personal interviews and participant observation.

The main result of the analysis of Bookcrossing is that gift-giving is not the only process responsible for value creation and distribution in consumption communities: sharing and commodity exchange also play a role. Furthermore, the paper provides new evidence about aspects of gift-giving and sharing that have received limited attention in the literature: collective reciprocity and anonymous sharing.

The limitations are related to the intrinsic properties of the methods employed (netnography, personal interviews and participant observation) and to the paper, which analyses only one community and one product category. The implications refer to the role of gift-giving in consumption communities and its relationships with other processes: consumer gift systems are not only gifting platforms, but they and the elements of sharing and commodity exchange need to be integrated.

The empirical evidence and implications matter for the organisation and management of collaborative consumption platforms and the way in which traditional business models could and should interact with these platforms in an increasing number of businesses.

The paper adds new evidence of and original insights into gift-giving and collective forms of exchange. Moreover, it provides managerial implications of the analysed community for the book publishing industry.

The purpose of this study is to attempt a brief presentation of book exchange practices, as these are unfolding around the world. Then, the authors focus on free exchange libraries and analyse different aspects of the phenomenon. Finally, the authors are presenting the first hesitant steps of the phenomenon in Greece, linking it with the crisis that has lately been plaguing the Greek society.

The widespread and constantly surging movement of exchange libraries has attracted thousands of fans around the world; also, it is multifaceted and constantly transforming. In this paper, the authors are attempting to charter the phenomenon generally and specifically in Greece through relevant sources and on-the-spot observation.

The authors believe that free exchange libraries will continue to multiply both globally and in Greece, and that, through this movement, the audience gives an answer to the economic crisis and the crisis of values, making yet another step in the course towards satisfying the demand for a better world.

This paper is one of the few attempts to reflect-charter the phenomenon and probably one of the first to be accomplished under a sociological spectrum.

Aims to present a background to the use of electronic resources, especially e‐books, in public libraries, which appears to threaten some basic activities that define a reading culture dependent on the print book.

There are initiatives afoot which are working to integrate e‐books into the culture and process of resource‐sharing. This paper reviews some of the issues with e‐books, and specifically how the Co‐East partnership proposes to contribute to the initiatives concerned with improving accessibility.

It is important that public libraries do take that first step in implementing an e‐books service and take care in its promotion. Their traditional role, after all, is providing the bridge between rights holders and the public and, with the advent of “disruptive technology”, this role is more crucial than ever.

An important precedent for this project has been the findings from the Essex e‐books project, and especially user feedback. Although no one was asking about e‐books, users from all age groups were curious enough to participate in the project, and forthcoming in offering their opinion, much of it positive, about the reading experience and the mobile technology.

Over the past decade, the rapid evolution of social media has impacted the field of human resource management in numerous ways. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to begin an investigation of the myriad of ways that social media impacts organizations. To date, research evidence on a range of HR-related topics are just beginning to emerge, but are scattered across a range of diverse literatures. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current literature on the study of social media in HRM and to integrate these disparate emerging literatures. During our review, we discuss the existent research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, and summarize key research findings and themes into a coherent social media framework relevant to HRM. Finally, we offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of social media’s impact in organizations.

This study aims to uncover relationships between content communities post language, such as parts of speech, and user engagement.

Analyses of almost 12,000 posts from the content community Reddit are undertaken. First, posts’ titles are subjected to electronic classification and subsequent counting of main parts of speech and other language elements. Then, statistical models are built to examine the relationships between these elements and user engagement, controlling for variables identified in previous research.

The number of adjectives and nouns, adverbs, pronouns, punctuation (exclamation marks, quotation marks and ellipses), question marks, advisory words (should, shall, must and have to) and complexity indicators that appear in content community posts’ titles relate to post popularity (scores: number of favourable minus unfavourable votes) and number of comments. However, these relationships vary according to the category, for example, text-based categories (e.g. Politics and World News) vs image-based ones (e.g. Pictures).

While the relationships uncovered are appealing, this research is correlational, so causality cannot be implied.

Among other implications, companies may tailor their own content community post titles to match the types of language related to higher user engagement in a particular category. Companies may also provide advice to brand ambassadors on how to make better use of language to increase user engagement.

This paper shows that language features add explained variance to models of online engagement variables, providing significant contribution to both language and social media researchers and practitioners.

The objective of this contribution is to pinpoint the practices of users' interactions with sharing economy platforms in Russia, as well as explore the source of motivation to use such platforms on the three cases of sharing economy platforms in Russia: Darudar [Gift-to-gift] (sharing goods), Bank Vremeny [Timebank] (sharing time and services) and Couchsurfing (sharing accommodation and leisure).

Empirical data were gathered from 25 in-depth interviews conducted for active users of the platforms and ethnographic observations of users' offline meetings as well as digital observations.

The results reveal that participants of the platforms tend to establish their own rules and norms of interaction, thus, fostering social connection. Findings suggest that users of sharing economy platforms are driven by the potential of minimising transaction costs and intrinsic motivation, such as getting experiences which have no market alternatives, upcycling and disposal of belongings, self-promotion and self-realisation.

In this study, sharing as based in the sharing economy is conceptualised as a separate principle of resource allocation. The theory was applied to the empirical material of three Russian platforms, which has not been done previously in the paradigm of sharing. The current literature on the sharing economy is largely switched to the for-profit North American platforms, while case studies from other settings are lacking. This article aims to fill this gap by providing insights into non-profit platforms' operation in Russia.