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The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth understanding of actor engagement (AE) on social media by proposing a holistic and integrative conceptual framework.

Based on a sample of 118 articles, the paper draws on the service-dominant logic (SDL)-based service ecosystem perspective combined with the tenets of relational dialectics as theoretical lenses to inform AE research in social media.

The paper proposes a framework of AE in social media called the TASC model, an acronym of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis-Conflict. TASC introduces the dialectical nature of AE and discusses the contexts and levels of AE in the social media ecosystem and their evolving processes.

Firms can apply the knowledge provided by TASC to gather marketing intelligence and develop marketing strategies to anticipate tensions, motivate the desired AE intensity and valence and reinforce value co-creation in the social media ecosystem.

TASC is a comprehensive framework that, for the first time, explains engagement at all levels of the social media ecosystem by combining the SDL-based service ecosystem view with the relational dialectics perspective.

The global prevalence of social media and its potential to cause polarization are highly debated and impactful. The previous literature often assumes that the ideological bias of any media outlet remains static and exogenous to the polarization process. By studying polarization as a whole from an ecosystem approach, the authors aim to identify policies and strategies that can help mitigate the adverse effects of polarization and promote healthier online discourse.

To investigate online polarization, the authors perform a systematic review and analysis of approximately 400 research articles to explore the connection between cognitive bias and polarization, examining both causal and correlational evidence. The authors extensively evaluate and integrate existing research related to the correlation between online polarization and crucial factors such as public engagement, selective exposure and political democracy. From doing so, the authors then develop a PolarSphere ecosystem that captures and illustrates the process of online polarization formation.

The authors' review uncovers a wide range of associations, including ideological cognition, bias, public participation, misinformation and miscommunication, political democracy, echo chambers and selective exposure, heterogeneity and trust. Although the impact of bias on social media polarization depends on specific environments and internal/external conditions, certain variables exhibit strong associations across multiple contexts. The authors use these observations as a basis from which to construct PolarSphere, an ecosystem of bias-based polarization on social media, to theorize the process of polarization formation.

Based on the PolarSphere ecosystem, the authors argue that it is crucial for governments and civil societies to maintain vigilance and invest in further research to gain a deep comprehension of how cognitive bias affects online polarization, which could lead to ways to eliminate polarization.

The outbreak of COVID-19 is one of the most serious health events in recent times. In the business landscape, its effects may be more detrimental to micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) because they tend to have limited financial and human resources to manage the challenges caused by COVID-19. To help MSMEs enhance their resilience, this paper aims to discuss how they can leverage mass collaboration to build social media-based knowledge ecosystems to manage interactions among internal and external stakeholders for knowledge creation and innovation.

The paper proposes a model for MSMEs to build an online knowledge ecosystem and a standalone text analytics tool to use the advanced data analytics, e.g. topic modeling, to analyze and aggregate collective insights. Design science research methodology is used to develop the model and the tool.

Through mass collaboration using social media and advanced data analytics technology, MSMEs can generate new business ideas, leading to enhanced resilience to meet the challenges caused by COVID-19 or other unexpected or extraordinary circumstances, such as natural disasters and financial crises.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first papers in social media adoption for knowledge creation and innovation research, providing detailed approaches for MSMEs to build a knowledge ecosystem on social media and to use advanced data analytics to mine the meaning of the generated data.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue about the “Impact of the Global Refugee Crisis on the Career Ecosystem” and summarise the key contributions of the included practitioner and scholarly papers which examine refugee business and labour market experiences. The paper also examines the impact of media reports to provide a broader understanding of the context within which the current refugee crisis is evolving.

The authors begin with a delineation of the concept of a career ecosystem in the context of refugee crises. The authors then employ this framing as a backdrop to engage in a basic analysis of business media coverage of the most recent Syrian refugee crisis, and a summary of the practitioner and scholarly papers.

The findings of the media analysis suggest major coverage differences between different groups of countries in the number of documents identified, the proposed aim of business engagement with refugees, and substance of the extracted statements generally.

The analysis of business media coverage is rudimentary and intended only as a prompt for further conversations about how contemporary media commentary impacts on career opportunities for refugees and relevant stakeholder practices.

This paper demonstrates the importance of including broader considerations of refugee careers that explore the interaction and intersection with transnational and local ecosystem of labour markets while paying attention to the sociocultural and political refugee-host community dynamics.

This paper presents a more systems-oriented perspective and provides both practice and scholarly perspectives on the composite and dynamic nature of the refugee crisis on career ecosystems more broadly.

The main purpose of this research is to construct a generalized set of innovation processes that occur at the ecosystem level based on the academic research. The study analyzes the cultural and creativity-driven over-the-top (OTT) platform that encompasses diverse network of ecosystem members by utilizing the four cooperation practices.

This study begins with the literature review that discusses various topics related to ecosystem (e.g. service innovation, innovative ecosystem). Then, this study introduces a new conceptual framework that describes how cooperations occur in the ecosystem. Finally, a qualitative and explorative case study of the OTT platforms in the global context is conducted.

The application of the framework reveals how co-innovative business ecosystems demonstrate co-evolution through different structures and directions. An ecosystem can evolve by incorporating other industries (i.e. horizontal growth or broadening strategy) to deepen and broaden the industry integration.

As an explorative approach that opens the discussion on how co-innovation and co-evolution occur at the ecosystem level, particularly in the culture and creativity-driven industry, the value of this research extends to other similar industries where diverse actors such as technology firms, Internet firms, direct consumers, government and even the society impact the type of product and service and shape the evolution of the entire ecosystem.

The Web 3.0 has been hugely enabled by smartphones and new generation mobile applications. With the growing adoption of smartphones, the use of mobile applications has grown exponentially and so has the development of mobile applications. This study is an attempt to understand the issues and challenges faced in the mobile applications domain using discussions made on Twitter based on mining of user generated content.

The study uses 89,908 unique tweets to understand the nature of the discussions. These tweets are analyzed using descriptive, content and network analysis. Further using transaction cost economics, the findings are reviewed to develop practice insights about the ecosystem.

Findings indicate that the discussions are mostly skewed toward a positive polarity and positive user experiences. The tweeters are predominantly application developers who are interacting more with marketers and less with individual users.

Most of these applications are for individual use (B2C) and not for enterprise usage. There are very few individual users who contribute to these discussions. The predominant users are application reviewers or bloggers of review websites who use the recently developed applications and discuss their thoughts on the same.

The results may be useful in varied domains which are planning to expand their reach to a larger audience using mobile applications and for marketers who primarily focus on promotional content.

The domain of mobile applications on social media is still restricted to promotions and digital marketing and may solely be used for the purpose of link building by application developers. As such, the discussions could provide inputs towards mobile phone manufacturers and ecosystem providers on what are the real issues these communities are facing while developing these applications.

The study uses mixed research methodology for mining experiences in the domain of mobile application developers using social media analytics and transaction cost economics. The discussion on the findings provides inputs for policy-making and possible intervention areas.

Social media is a product that is co-created by consumers and multinational enterprises, that partially manage the customer experience and that has garnered significant attention in the field of international marketing. However, international marketing scholars have yet to address the societal costs of the use of social media, even as academics in other disciplines and business leaders are raising alarm that social media has created a digital ecosystem that may harm individuals within the global market. The objective of this research is to examine the generalizability of the relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression across countries.

Employing social cohesion theory and the social network approach of the strength of ties, this work examines the relationship between the use of social media and time spent on social media at the country level and the prevalence of depression. The authors examine this issue within a 28-country, eight-year, unbalanced panel dataset, accounting for cultural, economic and structural factors.

The authors find that as more people within a country use social media, the prevalence of depression in that country increases. However, the authors also find that as the average time spent on social media in a country increases the deleterious relationship between the use of social media and the prevalence of depression diminishes.

Answering the calls in the international marketing literature for a greater understanding of the externalities (i.e. consumer well-being effects) of marketing activities of multinational companies, this study demonstrates the varying relationships of the use of and time spent on social media and the prevalence of depression at the population level, across a wide variety of countries, thus also contributing to the effort to improving generalizations from multi-country comparisons in international research.

This paper aims to offer practical guidance on teaching about digital extremism – defined here as the intersection of digital disinformation campaigns with political extremism – by highlighting four pedagogical challenges: the danger of unintentionally “redpilling” students; the slippery slope to false equivalency and “bothsidesism” in turbulent partisan waters; the difficulty of separating empirical analyses from prescriptive debates circulating in popular media; and the trouble of getting students to understand digital extremism as a sociotechnical problem rather than as a social-or-technical problem. The conclusion proposes opportunities for educators to integrate practical approaches to confronting digital extremism with digital civics curricula.

This paper reviews pedagogical challenges and outlines a curricular program for teaching about digital extremism drawn from the author’s experience designing undergraduate courses and open teaching modules between 2016 and 2021.

Educators should shift focus from the substance of digital extremism to its tools – social media platforms’ surveillance and data-gathering methods, advertising technologies and monetized user-generated content, personalized recommendation algorithms and media manipulation strategies that amplify some narratives while suppressing others – and the media and political institutions that benefit most from it. Proposed lessons include: how digital extremists manipulate social media metadata; engagement with data creation and targeting practices; and analysis of information production, circulation and consumption exploring media manipulation tools and their effects.

This paper’s added values are the insights and practical recommendations for undergraduate educators teaching on a topic of urgent contemporary concern: digital extremism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely reported remarks, in 2017, as to “what happened last night in Sweden”, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the “no-go zones” held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of “problem areas” is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the paper explores why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately associated with its putative no-go zones in what are termed the “revenge fantasies” of the far-right. Further, it argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment.

The analysis offers the idea of “taboo news” to conceptualise putatively “alternative” news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream.

It argues that examining the increasing importance of “taboo news” as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.

In so doing, it examines the shaping of this racialised imaginary as a digital assemblage taking shape as a commodity in a newly emerging and under-researched field of communicative and ideological action.

This article examines the effect of China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa on the African audiences' perception of China's national image through a case study of the residents of Nairobi. It adopted Joseph Nye's soft power model and sought to address three fundamental questions : What is the extent and objective of China's media diplomacy in Africa? How has China's media “offensive” in Africa impacted African audiences' imagery of China? What are the implications, if any, of China's media diplomacy on the Kenyan public view of China?

This article used a mixed-methods research design, which deployed elements of positivism and interpretivism. It used a deductive approach and deployed the survey strategy, which entailed the collection of data from Nairobi city residents. The secondary data were collected from relevant academic literature sources. The primary data were analyzed empirically using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), while the secondary data were analyzed using discourse analysis.

China's soft power projection through the Chinese media in Africa is aimed at addressing the “misinformation” about China. China seeks its share of representation among the African public to correct negative perceptions of China. Kenyans had a generally positive attitude toward China. South Africa and Angola have “Fairly” positive perceptions of the Chinese media. However, this study did not reveal whether the perception was due to the influence of Chinese media. These findings implied that the African public's positive imagery of China cannot be fully attributed to Chinese media's influence.

This study is groundbreaking in that it is one of the few studies that have focused on China's public diplomacy in Africa and assessed the impact of Chinese media on the African public’s perception of China.