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This chapter explores the role that social media can play to support entrepreneurs in managing complex interfirm communities. As companies increasingly operate in highly connected environments, it is important to move beyond corporate networks, and understand and build corporate social communities (CSCs) that underpin organizations.

The authors conducted 14 case studies at member firms of GS1 Australia — a not-for-profit association dedicated to the development, implementation, and promotion of information technology standards to improve supply chain management.

The gathered data illustrate a number of common challenges managers typically encounter in their supply chain operations. In response to these challenges, the authors propose distinct ways in which CSCs can leverage and transform interfirm relationships and support operational goals.

The empirical investigations were limited to the supply chain context, and Australian companies. The benefits pertinent to CSCs were only explored conceptually. Further studies should address these limitations.

We provide empirical evidence supported by theoretical insights that CSCs are powerful tools that community designers and managers can leverage to transform business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

The originality of this study resides in advancing theoretical understanding and providing practical managerial guidance on how to best deploy CSCs in a supply chain context. Additionally, we consider the role CSCs play in different stages of B2B relationships, and the reasons why most managers are hesitant to adopt CSCs.

This paper argues that contemporary executions by lethal injection represent spectacles of death. This spectacle of death upholds the sovereignty of the liberal state by evoking a sense of fear among the citizens. The State uses the apparently “painless” and “humane” form of execution by lethal injection to legitimize the death penalty in the U.S. I take the example of McVeigh’s execution to suggest that spectacles of execution continue in modern society, along with disciplinary processes that the liberal state depends on for its legitimacy. This paper, thus, aims to contribute towards a rethinking of a Foucauldian notion of power.

With continued growth in tourism, demand for guided local excursions, sightseeing, and entertainment has increased rapidly, particularly in European tourist destinations cities. Many touristic sights can often be viewed best from the water. Operators offer a variety of sightseeing cruises on motor barges along rivers, canals, lakefronts, or ports. In many tourist destination cities and around urban heritage sites, however, increasing boat traffic and the associated air pollution from diesel-powered engines have become a local environmental concern. Based on complaints from residents and visitors, several cities have already announced plans for (mandatory) tourist boat emission reductions. Today, electric mobility offers alternative options for safely and conveniently powering commercial tourist boats, that may contribute to mutually beneficial solutions for local operators, tourist visitors, and residents alike. However, the technology is still expensive and new businesses may also face considerable challenges when entering established local competitive tourism markets. Focusing on the local waterways of the city of Berlin, Germany, the authors have conducted a local case study, including interviews with several operators of (electric) tour boats, as well as an initial empirical survey of their tourist customers. The authors point out the viewpoints of the various stakeholders, identify opportunities, discuss constraints, and offer policy recommendations with a view to enhance the sustainability of waterborne transport in tourist destination cities.

This chapter provides an ethnographic look at higher education strategic planning through the lens of Williams College’s 2018–2020 effort to develop a 20-year plan for the institution. The critical analysis of Williams’ multi-community engagement contributes to studies of higher education and to literature in the sociocultural anthropological field of “policy as a practice of power” by applying core tenets of the field to strategic planning analysis. Drawing on 12 months of participation-observation and documentary research, the investigation brings into focus Williams’ heterarchical leadership structure and the negotiation practices that contributed to establish the legitimacy and appropriation of William’s strategic plan values. The chapter also shifts toward a contextualized perspective of strategic planning, highlighting campus community divides and the practices that contributed to bridge these fault lines and foster trust during the Fall 2019 campus-wide outreach process. Through the chapter, the analysis re-interprets beliefs of strategic planning and implementation as a top-down, normative imposition, and brings an ethnographic lens to reveal practices of negotiation, convergence, and value appropriation.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).

The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York City in 1888. Foucault argues that institutional power is organized into dually ordered system of truth and power. Using text data describing the clients and institutional technologies (organizational “power signatures”) of 168 organizations, we apply structural equivalence methods to unpack speech activity, showing that as Foucault suggests, there may be dually ordered sub-domains of truth and power that help define the underlying logic of this institutional field.