Search results

This chapter examines the affordances of social media to understand how groups are experienced through social media. Specifically, the chapter presents a theoretical model to understand how affordances of social media promote or suppress entitativity.

Participants (N=265) were recruited through snowball sampling to answer questions about their recent Facebook status updates. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the goodness of fit for our model.

We validate a model of entitativity as it occurs through the affordances offered by social media. Participant’s knowledge that status update responders were an interacting group outside of Facebook affected their perceptions of interactivity in the responses. Interactivity and history of interactions were the strongest predictors of status update entitativity. Further, status update entitativity had positive relationships with overall Facebook entitativity as well as group identity.

To encourage group identity through social media, managers need to increase employees’ perceptions of entitativity, primarily by enabling employees to see the interactions of others and to contribute content in social media platforms.

This is the only study we know of that empirically examines how groups are experienced through social media. Additionally, we draw from an affordance perspective, which helps to generalize our findings beyond the site of our study.

A long-standing question is how group perception, which is the perception of a whole group, becomes an exaggerated perception of the individuals who comprise the group. The question receives scant attention within computer-mediated communication (CMC), which is increasingly a communication mode for groups and a research tool to study groups. I address this gap by examining bias in group perception when rating copresence, which is the sense of being together, with the group.

I model bias as occurring when perceivers differentially weigh ratings of individual group members on a variable while rating the whole group on the same variable. I analyzed how the degree of bias in participants’ ratings of copresence with a status-differentiated group varied by the availability of visual cues during CMC in an experiment. I also examined how the group’s status hierarchy impacted bias.

Bias increase as the availability of visual cues decreased and ratings of middle status members were weighed more in group perception than ratings of other members.

Middle status was based on possessing inconsistent statuses. Inconsistency, and not status position, may have rendered these members more salient than others.

Interventions that target group perception may benefit from targeting the group’s middle status members. Researchers and practitioners can minimize bias in group perception through increasing the availability of visual cues in CMC.

The findings illustrate the underpinnings of copresence with an entire group. This is important because copresence shapes several group processes during CMC.

Within the context of forced migration, literacy can facilitate liberation and participation, though literacy often serves instead to exclude. Given the ongoing global refugee crisis, literacy researchers must work toward understanding how literacy shapes the livelihoods of those impacted by forced migration. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the ways in which certain literacies were valued or disregarded in the pursuit of a college degree and to uncover the ways that refugee-background students navigated these limitations. Using a multiple case study, this research explored the experiences of six students from refugee backgrounds as they navigated the literacy expectations of the college program. This chapter highlights two themes – our way versus their way and playing the game – that highlight the ways that participants pushed against the literacy constraints that they perceived in the program.

Work-based learning (WBL) has long been recognized and lauded for its transformative capabilities, enriching the knowledge and organizational and cultural impact of its learners. Students deepen understanding of their sector as well as professional interdisciplinarity on work-based academic programs, and in focusing on real-world scenarios in a scholarly way, open up opportunities for improvement and change. However, one of the key challenges in sustaining or continually improving provision for work-based learners in this context is in evidencing impact of enhancement-based, in-program learning and teaching activities. This chapter will examine some of the ways in which WBL values influence academic support delivery at one United Kingdom (UK) Higher Education Institution (HEI) and present examples of the operationalization of some WBL-driving principles in practice. In so doing, this chapter aims to share some of the tenets underpinning WBL practices in the UK in exploring its potential role and contribution as a socially responsible endeavor.

Talking about smart cities also entails talking about new ways of mobility. Various concepts compete for reimagining future mobility, most prominently connected cars, robo taxis, and other forms of shared mobility. New digital technologies, changing customer requirements, but also new competitors are dynamically affecting previous market logics. To stay future-proof in this new world of mobility, the automotive sector, which is an important nucleus for developing such mobility solutions, is currently undergoing fundamental digital transformation processes. Established car manufacturers have to find their path to choose out of the many possibilities on the rise. Against this backdrop, they face the major challenge to find an answer to the question: Who are we and who do we want to be in the future? Therefore, we argue that organizations’ digital transformation is highly entangled with questions on organizational identity and discuss digital transformation as a potential identity threat for established organizations.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of organizational identity. Afterward, we will continue with applying it to the practical context of car manufacturers: After depicting the major trends of digitalization in the mobility and automotive sector, we will focus on the digital transformation processes of established automotive companies and discuss their impact on organizational identity. Empirical illustrations of the Volkswagen case depict our theoretical considerations.

We provide theoretical ideas for better understanding the impact of digital transformation on organizational identity, as well as suggestions for practitioners concerned with organizations’ digital transformation processes.

This chapter analyses the degree to which the UK Higher Education (UKHE) Sector can offer spaces for students to critically reflect on topics relevant to activist criminology such as zemiology or abolitionism as opposed to constructing the criminal justice system (CJS) as a natural solution for crimes and social harms. This chapter argues for the importance of this topic due to deepening institutional links between universities and criminal justice agencies in the name of professionalisation for the latter (Hallenberg & Cockroft, 2017). This chapter proposes that to avoid criminology curricula merely reproducing the priorities and solutions of the CJS, it should turn to the liberatory pedagogy of Paolo Freire (1996). This includes teaching practices to encourage recognition of social movements and resistance against harms of states, corporations, or the CJS as legitimate foci in the criminology curriculum.

The 2008/2009 World Financial Crisis underlined the importance of social responsibility for the sustainable functioning of economic markets. Heralding an age of novel heterodox economic thinking, the call for integrating social facets into mainstream economic models has reached unprecedented momentum. Financial Social Responsibility bridges the finance world with society in socially conscientious investments. Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) integrates corporate social responsibility in investment choices. In the aftermath of the 2008/2009 World Financial Crisis, SRI is an idea whose time has come. Socially conscientious asset allocation styles add to expected yield and volatility of securities social, environmental, and institutional considerations. In screenings, shareholder advocacy, community investing, social venture capital funding and political divestiture, socially conscientious investors hone their interest to align financial profit maximization strategies with social concerns. In a long history of classic finance theory having blacked out moral and ethical considerations of investment decision making, our knowledge of socio-economic motives for SRI is limited. Apart from economic profitability calculus and strategic leadership advantages, this paper sheds light on socio-psychological motives underlying SRI. Altruism, need for innovation and entrepreneurial zest alongside utility derived from social status enhancement prospects and transparency may steer investors’ social conscientiousness. Self-enhancement and social expression of future-oriented SRI options may supplement profit maximization goals. Theoretically introducing potential SRI motives serves as a first step toward an empirical validation of Financial Social Responsibility to improve the interplay of financial markets and the real economy. The pursuit of crisis-robust and sustainable financial markets through strengthened Financial Social Responsibility targets at creating lasting societal value for this generation and the following.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Declaration of Independence, 1776)

With the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, higher education is becoming a more contested and complex space for both teachers and students at different localities and contexts. Such complexities create possibilities as well as challenges for educators who should address these diversities yet maintain the quality of teaching and learning. Both local scholars/educators and transnationally mobile academics/teachers face these challenges in different ways. This chapter focusses on the affordances of the latter: academics who have been engaged in diverse teaching/research contexts and developed certain perceptions of ‘Being’ in ‘intercultural’ spaces within and without boundaries and across time. In particular, the experiences of a female academic, from the Middle East, involved in teaching and researching English Literacy pedagogy transnationally, as a former academic at an Iranian university and then in a Western university, will be examined through autoethnography and in reflection upon her positioning, both as a student and a teacher in these local and global contexts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of insided-ness, outsided-ness, and in-between-ness, and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory (DST) will inform this chapter philosophically. Recent work in higher education on ‘complexity thinking’ and ‘relationality’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018) will ground this chapter too. These conceptual frameworks enable the author to scrutinise diverse perspectives on ‘Being’ and ideologies (ontologies), and diverse formation of knowledge (epistemologies) which result in diverse teaching and learning practices. The author links these diversities to the notion of ‘literacy’ in global times and shows, through her narratives, how her particular cultural, social, historical, and embodied literacies position her pedagogically as a non-Anglo academic in English education within a Western university. This affords her to construct her in-between position by not fully assimilating the target culture, nor fading her Middle Eastern identities. Instead, she brings affordances of her intercultural Being in creation of the ‘third space’ for her own teaching and learning practices. In turn, this has led to how her students across subjects are encouraged not to dissolve into the dominant frame of thinking; but to search for their own ‘Being’ through reviving individual, local stories and to express themselves globally, yet act as ‘glocally’ literate people who are able to make particular changes in their own life and in the lives of others.

This chapter concludes with challenging the implicit ideological position in global higher education which promotes a unified and homogenised epistemology (often Western/Anglo) within the multicultural, multilingual, and even plurilingual context of education. The author, echoing Yun and Standish (2018) specifically questions how internationalisation of education has led to a reductive dichotomisation of local students versus international students (through a deficit lens) rather than of establishing a rich platform for bringing to the fore heterogenous voices, diverse narratives, and plural/multiple knowledge platforms to argue, create, reflect, narrate, and collaborate more fruitfully. Instead she claims for expanding, extending, and extrapolating ways in which knowledge can be (de/re) constructed by people (both learners and teachers) as active agents of change, inter/trans-culturally.