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The purpose of this paper is to explore how rating mechanisms encourage emotional labor norms among sharing economy consumers.

This study follows a mixed-methods research design. Survey data from 207 consumers were used to quantify the impact of three distinct rating dimensions on a consumer behavioral outcome (emotional labor). In the second step, 18 focus groups with 94 participants were used to investigate the conditioning functions of ratings in more depth.

Rating mechanisms condition consumers toward performing socially desirable behaviors during sharing transactions. While consumers accept the necessity of bilateral rating mechanisms, they also recognize their coercive nature. Furthermore, the presence of bilateral rating mechanisms leads to negative outcomes such as annoyance and frustration.

This study contributes to sharing economy literature by examining bilateral rating mechanisms as a means of behavioral conditioning for consumers. This study points to improvements in platform design and informs theory on tripartite markets as well as trust.

A growing number of research report positive effects of gamification, that is the introduction of game elements to non-game contexts, on stakeholder intentions and behaviors. Hence, gamification is proposed as an effective tool for organizations to educate their stakeholders about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability-related topics. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this paper, the authors ask whether gamification can communicate matters of social and environmental concern. Based on three consecutive experimental studies, the authors show that there are boundary conditions to the effectiveness of gamified communication on stakeholder attitude, intention and behavior.

The authors find positive, negative and insignificant effects of gamification on pro-environmental attitude, intention and behavior. Based on these ambiguous results, the authors conclude with a call for more rigorous forms of designing gamified experiences to foster stakeholder learning and highlight and develop several such future research and engagement opportunities.

The study is the first to apply gamification to the context of corporate and in particular CSR communication. It is furthermore one of the first studies that actually research the effects of gamification empirically, and in controlled experimental conditions.

Online gig labor platforms bring together a global and fast-growing workforce to complete highly granular, remote and decontextualized tasks. While these environments might be empowering to some workers, many others feel disenfranchised and removed from the final product of their labor. To better understand the antecedents of continued participation in forms of crowdsourced digital labor, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between worker’s ability to create a narrative of their work mattering regardless, and their continued work engagement (WE) in these work setups.

The authors approach the relationship between individual mattering and digital WE through a longitudinal study among workers on the crowdworking platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. The authors further provide qualitative insight into individual perceptions of mattering based on essay data.

The authors develop a measure of mattering in crowdworking with four dimensions: reliance, social recognition, importance and interaction. Reliance is the most pronounced dimension, followed by interaction, importance and social recognition. In the final longitudinal model, only importance affects WE positively, while the other three mattering dimensions do not have a significant effect.

The findings indicate that individuals who feel that they themselves and their work “count” and “make a difference” will be more engaged in their digital labor. By clarifying the dimensionality of mattering in crowdwork and studying its differentiated effect on WE, the paper makes a contribution to research on crowdwork and the future of work. Beyond the theoretical contributions, the finding that perceived importance fosters WE has important implications for task and platform design.

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emotional labor practices and about how sharing economy platforms enforce emotional labor practices among independent actors, such as guests, hosts, drivers, or passengers. To address this research gap, we follow a mixed methods approach. We combine survey research among Airbnb and Uber users with content analysis of seven leading sharing economy platforms. The findings show that (1) users perform emotional labor despite not seeing is as necessarily desirable and (2) platforms actively encourage the performance of emotional labor practices even in the absence of direct formal control. Emotional labor practices are encouraged through (hard) design features such as mutual ratings, reward systems, and gamification, as well as through more subtle (soft) normative framing of desirable practices via platform and app guidelines, tips, community sites, or blogs. Taken together, these findings expand our understanding of the limitations of peer-to-peer sharing platforms, where control over the service experience and quality can only be enforced indirectly.

In this paper, the authors aim to identify a range of non‐financial factors that play a role in the formation of a company's image, and ultimately its valuation, on capital markets. By identifying and highlighting their relative importance to the perceptions of equity analysts, the authors seek to show that investor relations are best understood as a strategic communication function rather than a mere purveyor of pure financials.

The findings are based on a two‐tiered approach, relying on qualitative interview data collected among 42 equity analysts and a subsequent exploratory factor analysis performed on data obtained from a survey among 134 buy‐ and sell‐side analysts.

The authors argue that equity analysts consider the following eight categories of non‐financial information when forming an impression of a company: the stakeholder relations of an organization, its corporate governance, its corporate social responsibility, its reputation and brand, the quality of its management, and its strategic consistency. One of the most important factors, however, is the quality of a company's communication, which underscores the strategic role that the investor relations function should play in fostering positive capital market relations.

Being explorative in nature, the categories and scales proposed need further validation. Furthermore, in future research, it would be worthwhile to explore not only the role of non‐financials in image formation but also the interplay between financials and non‐financials in image formation.

Investor relations professionals should consider the factors presented in this study in their work in order to ensure that they cater to the actual information needs of capital market participants. The consideration of non‐financial factors enhances the quality of financial communications. It also enriches the understanding of the strategic communication tasks of the investor relations department.

This paper describes an empirical analysis of the management of corporate relationships with financial audiences, a stakeholder group increasingly focused on by communications research. It represents a contribution to the further establishment of investor relations as a strategic communication function.

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a quantitative investigation into the major working fields of European communication professionals.

The paper build upon previous work done in roles research, but follow a grounded approach in using an explorative cluster analysis on a sample of 1,410 communicators from 30 different European countries.

The paper identifies five typologies into which the working fields of European communication practitioners can be categorized: negotiators, brand officers, policy advisors, internal communicators, and press agents. These clusters are distinctively different in terms of education, salary, and career, as well as job satisfaction.

This paper is focused on the typologies of the European communication profession, whereas differences regarding the cultural or national context of the communication profession as well as the particularities of the respective media systems are not discussed.

Following the five clusters, the research maps the field of professional communication on a European level and shows the various roles communication practitioners take, as well as their integration within organizations.

The study elicits on the state of the communication profession in Europe and brings forth five different roles communication professionals exert. In line with Dozier's and Broom's manager technician dichotomy the paper identifies two manager and three technician roles, whereas the technical activities to a small extent also contain some policy elements.

Recent years have seen resurgent interest in professionalism in public relations, with several initiatives to enquire about the state of the communication profession and its part in organizational strategy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a quantitative investigation into the work roles of European communication professionals. In particular, the research investigates different professional roles, as developed in previous roles research, while taking a particular look at managerial role enactment.

The authors report the findings of an explorative study among 551 European communication professionals. The measures are used in this study are closely aligned with previous roles research, but modernized. The authors analyzed the data with factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The authors unfold four distinct contemporary managerial tasks (“diagnosis,” “coaching,” “liaison,” and “execution”), extending previous research rooted in distinguishing these managerial tasks from more technical ones. As a result the authors show that managerial role enactment is predominately determined by education and work experience, with a diminishing gender gap when it comes to performing managerial tasks alone, and that these roles just partly relate to salary but highly relate to job satisfaction, particularly when it comes to taking part in management decision making (tasks that require responsibility, accountability, job diversity, and also an analytical, strategic mindset).

The results of the study point to the further transformation of the PR Roles’ concept, turning a more execution oriented job profile into a more managerial and strategically oriented profession.

In this chapter we discuss the implications social media have for the self-representation and identity formulation of professionals within organizations. Under the assumption that new, technology-mediated networking possibilities call for a reformulation of the boundaries between the professional and the private, we propose several avenues of investigation. The concept of “online personae” is also introduced in order to describe how managers may strive for equilibrium while balancing on and offline identities with impression management efforts.

Proceeding conceptually, we review the existing literature and practice of managerial social media use and delineate the challenges, or “tensions” professionals have to mitigate while expressing themselves online. This allows for a full exploration of digital interaction as a quest for equilibrium, between one’s professional and personal self-expression, but also between the management of one’s impression, and the emotional attachment to a social media profile.

We argue that social media may challenge current conceptions of managerial identity and work practices to a degree. Social media may demand different forms of representation both to inside and outside audiences, which can lead to the mediatization of both the professional and the organization, and call for a more conscious formulation of identity and management of impressions. We argue in particular that, within this context, online personae may serve as entities (through single or multiple accounts) delineating boundaries between the various roles managers are asked to perform within their professional and personal lives.

Managerial awareness toward a tool such as online personae may help in critically reflecting the embeddedness of managerial practice within social networks. A critical management of personae can also help in formulating identity-based strategies for gaining access and improving the quality of connections and interactions. Ultimately, as social media become a tool for workplace collaboration, the strategic thinking behind online personae might take a progressively larger importance for the success of individuals, and for organizations at large.

The chapter introduces a managerial point-of-view to the field of digital identities, widely analyzed on samples of adolescents and young adults. This allows to investigate matters proper of a professional life, such as the management of work/life boundaries, which become increasingly blurry in the online world. The chapter also introduces the concept of “online personae,” which aims at describing with more specificities the message and audience consequences behind the choice of one single social media profile, or several coexisting ones.

The rise of social media has caused a shift in organizational practices, giving rise, in some cases, to genuinely “mediatized” organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how communications managers employ social media to influence their professional impressions.

Analyzing a sample of 679 European communications professionals, the authors explore with factor and cluster analysis these emerging impression management tactics as well as how managers promote, involve, assist and reproach using social media.

The authors distinguish four patterns of online impression management: self-promotion, assistance seeking, peer support and authority. Because different professional duties may require different approaches to impression management, the authors furthermore cluster for managerial roles, showing that in the shaping of formal or informal online roles, communication professionals convey different impressions depending on their degree of online confidence and strategic purpose for using social media.

This contribution enriches the existing literature first by shedding light on impression management tactics used for social media within a professional context, concurrently exploring the effect of variables such as the extent and purpose of social media activity, the privacy concerns of managers and their roles within the organization. Second, it proposes a typology of social media impression management tailored to the reality of managers, with the aim of presenting a specific tool for understanding managerial self-communication through social media, classifying and predicting professional behaviors.