Search results

In recent years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become incredibly popular in homes and offices alike. Consumers need to search for relevant information to help solve purchasing problems on various Web sites. Although there is no question that great numbers of WWW users will continue using search engines for information retrieval, consumers still hesitate before making a final decision, often because only rough and limited information about the products is made available. Consequently, consumers need the help of data mining in order to help them make informed decisions. Herein we propose a new approach to integrating a search engine with data mining in an effort to help support customer‐oriented information search action. This approach also illustrates how to reduce the consumer’s information search perplexity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and what drives corporate social responsibility (CSR) in host communities of mining companies in developing countries.

To address this knowledge gap, this paper used Ghana as a test case and conducted 24 in-depth interviews with participants drawn from mining host communities.

The paper discovered that while CSR is broadly understood and encompasses six thematic categories in the mining host communities, there are emphases on philanthropic and environmental responsibilities. Contrary to the evidence found in other studies, this paper discovered that CSR rhetoric plays a more positive/significant role than so far explored in CSR research, as it incentivizes the host communities to push for the fulfilment of their CSR expectations and/or CSR initiatives proposed by mining companies.

Quantitative studies are needed to strengthen the findings from the present paper.

Because developing countries share similar socio-economic and geo-political realities, the findings of this paper may be applicable not only for CSR advocates, but also for policy-makers in developing countries.

The paper provides new inputs from a developing country perspective to the current debate about the CSR performance of the extractive industry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex and shifting relationship between the Anglo American Corporation (Anglo) and the South African State (“the State”) as reflected in Anglo’s annual reports.

This paper builds on research on the role of annual reports in ideological conflict. To examine the ongoing relationship between Anglo and the State, the authors read all the annual reports published by Anglo American from 1917 to 1975, looking for instances in which the corporation appeared to be attempting to address, criticise, compliment, or implore the State.

During the period under study, despite the apparent struggles between the South African State and Anglo American, the relationship between the two was primarily symbiotic. The symbolic confrontation engaged in by these two behemoths perpetuated the real, physical violence perpetrated on the oppressed workers. By appearing to be a liberal opponent of apartheid, Anglo was able to ensure continued investment in South Africa.

The examination of decades’ worth of annual reports provides an example of how these supposedly neutral instruments were used to contest and sustain power. Thereby, Anglo could continue to exploit workers, reap enormous profits, and maintain a fiction of opposition to the oppressive State. The State also benefited from its support of Anglo, which provided a plurality of tax revenue and economic expansion during the period.

This paper provides insights into the ways the State and other institutions sustain each other in the pursuit of economic and political power in the face of visible and widely condemned injustices. Although they frequently contested each other’s primacy, both benefited while black South African miners suffered.

In this age of extremely well-developed social media, it is necessary to detect any change in the corporate image of an enterprise immediately so as to take quick action to avoid the wide spread of a negative image. However, existing survey-based corporate image evaluation methods are costly, slow and static, and the results may quickly become outdated. User comments, news reports and we-media articles on the internet offer varied channels for enterprises to obtain public evaluations and feedback. The purpose of this study is to effectively use online information to timely and accurately measure enterprises’ corporate images.

A new corporate image evaluation method was built by first using a literature review to establish a corporate image evaluation index system. Next, an automatic text analysis of online public information was performed through a topic classification and sentiment analysis algorithm based on the dictionary. The accuracy of the topic classification and sentiment analysis algorithm is then calculated. Finally, three internet enterprises were chosen as cases, and their corporate image was evaluated.

The results show that the author’s corporate image evaluation method is effective.

First, in this study, a new corporate image evaluation index system is constructed. Second, a new corporate image evaluation method based on text mining is proposed that can support data-driven decision-making for managers with real-time corporate image evaluation results. Finally, this study improves the understanding of corporate image by generating business intelligence through online information. The findings provide researchers with specific and detailed suggestions that focus on the corporate image management of emerging internet enterprises.

Recent attention to the developments focusing on the educational services has been noteworthy, with the educational environment specifically the smart campus emerging both as a domain and as an opportunity. As a domain worthy of exploration, a number of research efforts are being conceptualized around smart campus initiatives. The existing bouquet of research publications on smart campus provides a testimony of the enthusiasm and also exposes the heterogeneous attempts the domain has witnessed to date. The available evidence is still inadequate to provide clarity on the thrust areas of research around smart campus.

Given the understanding, this study intends to decode the domain to get an early impression of the focus of the research concentration around smart campus. Thereby the study resorts to an automated text-mining approach using Python on contents shortlisted systematically, and published between the period 2010 and May 2022, from select databases.

Based on the analysis it was possible to identify eight themes (i.e. smart campus characteristics, smart campus stakeholders, smart campus frameworks, smart campus technologies, smart campus infrastructure, smart campus evaluation, smart learning environment and smart campus applications) characterizing research efforts within the smart campus literature.

The themes around the smart campus showcase the thrust areas receiving attention. These characterize extant research endeavours in the smart campus domain and can offer useful pointers to researchers going forward. This awareness can also be beneficial to institutional leadership and technology providers intending to implement smart campus initiatives, contributing to the development of the educational environment.

This literature review is on advanced computer analytics, which is a major trend in the field of Human Resource Management (HRM). The authors focus specifically on computer-assisted text analysis (CATA) because text data are a prevalent yet vastly underutilized data source in organizations. The authors gathered 341 articles that use, review, or promote CATA in the management literature. This review complements existing reviews in several ways including an emphasis on CATA in the management literature, a description of the types of software and their advantages, and a unique emphasis on findings in employment. This examination of CATA relative to employment is based on 66 studies (of the 341) that bear on measuring constructs potentially relevant to hiring decisions. The authors also briefly consider the broader machine learning literature using CATA outside management (e.g., data science) to derive relevant insights for management scholars. Finally, the authors discuss the main challenges when using CATA for employment, and provide recommendations on how to manage such challenges. In all, the authors hope to demystify and encourage the use of CATA in HRM scholarship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why environmentally-sensitive companies still face criticism despite the extensive disclosures in their annual reports. This paper explores the extent of site-specific social, environmental and ethical (SEE) reporting by mining companies operating in Ghana.

The authors conduct an interpretive content analysis of the annual/integrated reports of mining companies for the years 2009–2014 to extract site-specific SEE information relating to the companies’ mining operations in Ghana. The authors also theorise these actions using the existentialist work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular his work on “bad faith, nothingness and authenticity”.

The findings suggest that SEE information disclosure at site-specific level remains problematic because of bad faith and inauthenticity by mining companies attempting to placate a range of stakeholders. Bad faith represents a form of self-deception or internal denial which manifests in corporate narratives. Inauthenticity is a self-awareness that culminates in the denunciation of corporate identity and the pursuit of external expectations. The effect is the production of inauthentic corporate accounts that is constrained by the assumption made on stakeholder expectation.

The authors apply a Sartrean lens to explore site-specific SEE. Furthermore, the authors seek to expand the social accounting research domain by drawing on Sartre’s work on “bad faith” and “nothingness”. Sartre’s work to the best of the authors’ knowledge is not explored in social accounting research.

This paper investigates the use of graphs, selection of variables to graph and construction of graphs in prospectuses issued by Australian companies making their initial public offering (IPO) of shares to the Australian capital market. The paper formulates and tests hypotheses concerning selectivity in the use of graphs and distortion in the construction of graphs presented in IPO prospectuses, as well as providing descriptive evidence about the use of graphs in such prospectuses. Results show that firms enjoying improving profit performance are significantly more likely to include graphs of key financial variables in their prospectuses than firms suffering deteriorating profit performance. Thus, similar to studies of graphs in annual reports, evidence of selectivity in the inclusion of graphs is found. No significant relationship is found between performance on the variable being graphed and distortion in the construction of the graph. When the graphs are split between those covering key financial variables and other variables, a significant relationship is found in both categories. For graphs of other variables, a significant positive association is found between performance and distortion. However, the relationship for key financial variables is in the opposite direction to that suggested by impression management. Further analysis identifies significant sub‐period differences in selectivity and distortion which are consistent with the view that the major regulatory and institutional changes outlined in the paper, reduced the extent of selectivity and graphical distortion in the post‐1991 period. As far as we are aware, this is the first study reported in the literature to investigate the use of graphs in prospectuses. The results also have policy implications for the regulatory authority in Australia.

The purpose of this study is to examine how social disclosures by one of the world’s largest producers of Platinum Group Metals are used to maintain and repair legitimacy in the context of South Africa’s prevailing socio-economic conditions and in response to the immediate challenge to legitimacy posed by violent worker demonstrations taking place at its operations in Marikana during August 2012. This is done to highlight how legitimacy strategies take account of the temporal characteristics of a threat to legitimacy and how these, in turn, may constrain the need for far-reaching organisational change.

Suchman’s (1995) outline of legitimacy theory and Laughlin’s (1991) model of organisational change provide a frame of reference for a detailed thematic content analysis which identifies the use of different strategies by an organization to respond to threats to its credibility and how these impact, resulting changes to business philosophies, policies and systems.

The study highlights the temporal dimension of legitimisation strategies. Social-related disclosures provided by the case entity in response to labour unrest are aimed at addressing both the episodic and continual threat to legitimacy resulting from the unfavourable event. These also have the effect of limiting the extent of internal changes to select business policies and sub-systems. Carefully managing legitimacy allows the case entity to avoid the need to reformulate its business ethos.

The study deals only with a single case organisation. Although the emphasis is on highlighting themes and principles, results are not necessarily applicable in different contexts. Related to this, although the study deals with a major South African mining company, it does not prove the relevance of local cultural differences to the legitimisation process.

The study dispenses with the use of proxies, such as frequencies of disclosures, to demonstrate how organisations use non-financial reporting to secure legitimacy. Instead, it offers a detailed account of how different sub-sets of legitimacy are being mobilised in corporate reports response to long-term and episodic legitimacy considerations. In addition, the study offers one of the first interpretive accounts of how strategies used to manage legitimacy may constrain the potential of a material external shock resulting in internal organisational change. Finally, the study offers one of the first examples of the operation of legitimacy and organisational change theory from the African Continent.

The video-sharing website YouTube encourages interaction between its users via the provision of a user comments facility. This was originally envisaged as a way for viewers to provide information about and reactions to videos, but is employed for other communicative purposes including sharing ideas, paying tributes, social networking, and question answering. This study seeks to examine and categorise the types of comments created by YouTube users to highlight the various ways in which this interactive feature has been employed as a means of communication and self-expression.

By conducting a content analysis of 66,637 user comments on YouTube videos the authors created a classification schema which may be used to categorise the types of comments users leave.

The schema reveals ten broad categories, and 58 subcategories which reflect the wide-ranging use of the YouTube comments facility.

As YouTube continues to evolve, new types of comments that do not appear in the scheme outlined will appear. However, this schema will provide an initial structure upon which other investigations can build when analysing the ongoing use of the YouTube comments feature as a communication device.

This scheme may be used for researchers in a variety of disciplines who are interested in using user-generated content. The scheme will aid in the description and mining of this content and provides a way of structuring this content into categories representing user intent.

This study highlights the variety of purposes to which the user commenting facility of YouTube is employed. These include purposes such as reminiscence, grieving, giving advice and communication.

This is the first detailed, content-based analysis of the types of comments created by YouTube users. The classification scheme facilitates the analysis of these comments for a variety of purposes, including marketing, communication studies and studies of information seeking.