Search results

Fewer researchers have investigated the climatic and economic drivers of land-use change simultaneously and the interplay between drivers. This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear and interaction effects of price and climate variables on the rice acreage in high-latitude regions of China.

This study applies a multivariate adaptive regression spline to characterize the effects of price and climate expectations on rice acreage in high-latitude regions of China from 1992 to 2017. Then, yield expectation is added into the model to investigate the mechanism of climate effects on rice area allocation.

The results of importance assessment suggest that rice price, climate and total agricultural area play an important role in rice area allocation, and the importance of temperature is always higher than that of precipitation, especially for minimum temperature. Based on the estimated hinge functions and coefficients, it is found that total agricultural area has strong nonlinear and interaction effects with climate and price as forms of third-order interaction. However, the order of interaction terms reduces to second order after absorbing the expected yield. Additionally, the marginal effects of driven factors are calculated at different quantiles. The total area shows a positive and increasing marginal effect with the increase of total area. But the positive impact of price on the rice area can only be observed when price reached 50% or higher quantiles. Climate variables also show strong nonlinear marginal effects, and most climatic effects would disappear or be weakened once absorbing the expected rice yield. Expected yield is an efficient mechanism to explain the correlation between crop area and climate variables, but the impact of minimum temperature cannot be completely modeled by the yield expectation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the nonlinear response of land-use change to climate and economic in high-latitude regions of China using the machine learning method.

This study aims to develop the understanding of learning processes related to the new ways of interacting in the enforced digital workplace over time.

A multiple, longitudinal case study of knowledge-based workers in three firms located in Sweden has been conducted from March 2020 to March 2023. In total, 89 interviews with 32 employees in three knowledge-based firms have been collected.

The study shows how the intricate interaction between rules and norms for interaction and work must be renegotiated as well as un- and relearned when the physical work environment no longer frames the work context. Furthermore, technology can be viewed as both an enable and a barrier, that is, technology has enhanced collaboration between organizational members yet also created social difficulties, for example, related to communication and interaction. The study emphasizes that individuals learned through trial and error. That is, they tried behaviors such as translating social interactions" to a digital arena, appraised the outcomes and modified the practices if the outcomes were poor.

The present study does have several limitations. First, it is based on interviews with respondents within three organizations in Sweden. To broaden and deepen the understanding of both organizational and learning, future studies can contribute by studying other contexts as well as using a mixed method approach in other countries.

Results from the study can provide a practical understanding of how the rapid change from working at the office to working from home using digital technologies can be understood and managed.

Contributions include combining interaction order and un- and relearning among organizational employees. This insight is important given that the rapid digital transformation of our society has changed how work is performed and how the future workplace will be both structured and organized.

Chatbots represent an innovative channel for retailers to meet young customers' needs anywhere and at any time. Being an emergent technology, however, it is important to investigate more thoroughly how users perceive it, and which are the variables that enhance a positive attitude towards this technology. On this premise, this study applies a social relationship perspective to the design of chatbots addressed to younger consumers.

The study adopts a between-participants factorial design to investigate the effects of visual cues (avatar presence vs avatar absence) and interaction styles (social-oriented vs task-oriented) on social presence and how this, in turn, enhances millennials' perceived enjoyment, trust and, ultimately, attitude towards the chatbot. A survey experiment was employed to conduct the study on data collected from 193 Italian millennials.

The results show that applying a social-oriented interaction style increases users' perception of social presence, while an insignificant effect was found for avatar presence. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis further confirms the hypothesised model.

The adoption of new digital technologies such as chatbots is likely to have a far reaching effect on retailers, consumers, employees and society. For this reason, a broad understanding of the phenomenon is needed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide results from an experimental design in which both interaction style (social- vs task-oriented) and avatar (presence vs absence) of a chatbot are manipulated to directly explore social presence and its effect on trust, perceived enjoyment and millennials' attitude towards a chatbot applied for retailing purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to make a conceptual argument for considering interactive work – i.e. work made up of micro-level exchanges or social interactions with third parties such as customers, patients or citizens – as a distinct analytical category in employment-related research. The argument is underpinned by the core role played by interactive work in valorisation.

This is a conceptual paper, with its argument based on key findings from the debates on symbolic interactionism, service work and interaction work. These are merged and combined with a valorisation perspective.

“Social interactions” and “work” have mostly been considered separately by theoretical sociology and the sociology of work. The author contends however that the two concepts should be viewed together, as social interactions at work are a constitutive feature of many occupations, jobs and tasks. This implies studying both exchange and social relationships between the different parties and their embeddedness in specific (multi-level) contexts. Moreover, there are two reasons why interactive work relates to specific working conditions: first, it involves customers or similar groups as third parties; second, it is key to valorisation. To systematically study interactive work, context-sensitive approaches spanning multiple (analytical) levels are recommended.

The article contributes to advancing the understanding of interactive work as a distinct form of work as yet under-theorised but deserving to be considered as a separate analytical category.

The low number of women in the information technology (IT) field is a concern. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The present work includes a narrative literature review and an exploratory interview study with ten girls and six study guidance counsellors (GCs) from Finnish senior high schools. Using the nexus analysis as a theoretical lens, the authors examined the exclusion of girls from IT.

Earlier literature directed attention to the cultural norms, assumptions and stereotypes still prevalent in society and the lack of role models and positive media as factors contributing to girls excluding themselves from the IT field. In this research study’s data, the authors not only found evidence of the unintentional exclusion of girls from IT by others but also by the girls themselves. Findings of this research study illustrate the various discourses, actors and their interactions, their background and history-related factors affecting girls' career choices. The novelty of this study is in approaching high school as a site of exclusion, where problematic discourses, interactions and histories come together, reproducing exclusion of girls from the IT field.

The authors contribute with a literature review of the research study on gender and IT and the inclusion/exclusion dynamics around IT. Using the nexus analysis, the authors identify the exclusion dynamics in this complex social issue. Several decades of research have shown that the inclusion of women remains low in IT disciplines. In this study, high schools are viewed as sites of exclusion, engendering a prevalent lack of information and education on the field. The authors offer novel insights into the role of curriculum, GCs and online information excluding girls from the IT field.

Big Data introduces high amounts and new forms of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data into the field of accounting and this requires alternative data management and reporting methods. Generating insights from these new data sources highlight the need for different and interactive forms of visualization in the field of visual analytics. Nonetheless, a considerable gap between the recommendations in research and the current usage in practice is evident. In order to understand and overcome this gap, a detailed analysis of the status quo as well as the identification of potential barriers for adoption is vital. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A survey with 145 business accountants from Austrian companies from a wide array of business sectors and all hierarchy levels has been conducted. The survey is targeted toward the purpose of this study: identifying barriers, clustered as human-related and technological-related, as well as investigating current practice with respect to interactive visualization use for Big Data.

The lack of knowledge and experience regarding new visualization types and interaction techniques and the sole focus on Microsoft Excel as a visualization tool can be identified as the main barriers, while the use of multiple data sources and the gradual implementation of further software tools determine the first drivers of adoption.

Due to the data collection with a standardized survey, there was no possibility of dealing with participants individually, which could lead to a misinterpretation of the given answers. Further, the sample population is Austrian, which might cause issues in terms of generalizing results to other geographical or cultural heritages.

The study shows that those knowledgeable and familiar with interactive Big Data visualizations indicate high perceived ease of use. It is, therefore, necessary to offer sufficient training as well as user-centered visualizations and technological support to further increase usage within the accounting profession.

A lot of research has been dedicated to the introduction of novel forms of interactive visualizations. However, little focus has been laid on the impact of these new tools for Big Data from a practitioner’s perspective and their needs.

Informal knowledge sharing interactions (IKSI) are of particular value for innovation projects. This is especially true for unplanned IKSI, because they are even more likely to provide non-redundant knowledge and new perspectives than planned IKSI. Seminal studies have shown that the formation of unplanned IKSI can be explained on the basis of spatial structures. Strictly speaking, however, these studies only explain unplanned encounters. Whether unplanned IKSI result from these unplanned encounters, though, cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of spatial configurations alone. The purpose of this paper is to tackle this explanatory gap by unraveling the fundamental social processes by application of the symbolic interaction theory.

For this purpose, the formation of 132 IKSI on innovation projects from three research and development departments of large companies was recorded in detail using a combination of diaries and interviews. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The analysis reveals that IKSI cause symbolic costs (image damages), and that these costs vary between types of social situations. Because actors anticipate situation-specific costs, their propensity to initiate IKSI can be explained in terms of the situations in which they encounter one another. Furthermore, the analysis reveals six particularly relevant characteristics of situations and further elaborates the basic argument by analyzing their functioning.

The paper complements previous explanations of unplanned IKSI by opening up the social processes underlying their formation.

The purpose of this study is to explore how critical aspects can be defined in a learning study on welding without conducting any pre-tests.

In this study, the authors focus on empirical examples from a learning study on welding conducted in six iterative cycles, with conversation analysis and variation theory approach (CAVTA) as a theoretical basis. The welding lessons have been video-recorded, and in the study, the authors analyze examples where the teachers try to identify critical aspects of a vocational practical object of learning in interaction. CAVTA permeates the complete process, where the analysis has been part of the iterative cycles and further developed when the six cycles were completed.

The results show how critical aspects can be made visible in the interaction between teacher(s) and student(s) in the enacted learning situation. In the process, the authors work with the three concepts expected critical aspects, displayed critical aspects and targeted critical features in relation to a vocational practical object of learning where conducting a pre-test to define critical aspects is not educationally possible.

Teaching vocational practical objects of learning could be seen as something different from teaching other kinds of objects of learning and the use of the traditional pre-tests in learning studies may be problematic. From that follows, that other ways of finding the critical aspects for the students regarding a vocational practical object of learning might be needed. In this study, such a way is presented.

This study aims to analyse the differences between professional interaction mediated by video conferencing and direct professional interaction. The research identifies diverging interests of office workers for the purpose of addressing work ethical and business ethical issues of professional collaboration, competition, and power in future hybrid work models.

Based on 28 qualitative interviews conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, and through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, the study develops explanatory hypotheses conceptualising four basic intentions of professional interaction and their corresponding preferences for video conferences and working on site.

The four intentions developed on the basis of the interviews are: the need for physical proximity; the challenge of collective creativity; the will to influence; and control of communication. This conceptual framework qualifies a moral ambivalence of professional interaction. The authors identify a connectivity paradox of professional interaction where the personal dimension remains unarticulated for the purpose of maintaining professionality. This tacit human connectivity is intertwined with latent power relations. This plasticity of both connectivity and power in direct interaction can be diminished by transferring the interaction to video conferencing.

The application of phenomenology to a collection of qualitative interviews has enabled the identification of underlying intention structures and the system in which they affect each other. This research identifies conflicts of interests between workers relative to their different self-perceived abilities to persevere in competitive professional interaction. It is therefore able to address consequences of future hybrid work models at an existential and societal level.