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Digital technologies, and the affordances they provide, can shape institutional processes in significant ways. In the last decade, social media and other digital platforms have redefined civic engagement by enabling new ways of connecting, collaborating, and mobilizing. In this article, we examine how technological affordances can both enable and hinder institutional processes through visibilization – which we define as the enactment of technological features to foreground and give voice to particular perspectives and discourses while silencing others. We study such dynamics by examining #SchauHin, an activist campaign initiated in Germany to shine a spotlight on experiences of daily racism. Our findings show how actors and counter-actors differentially leveraged the technological features of two digital platforms to shape the campaign. Our study has implications for understanding the role of digital technologies in institutional processes as well as the interplay between affordances and visibility in efforts to deinstitutionalize discriminatory practices and institutions.

Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations’ ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the “decidability” of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective’s mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges’ governance success while the emergence of “non-decidability” of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Swedish Advertisers’ Association's role in the institutional development of Swedish international advertising during 1955–1972.

A qualitative analysis of business association sources is used to explore the institutional development of international advertising.

A new postwar paradigm that focused on a consumer-oriented brand ideology enabled marketing executives in the Swedish Advertisers’ Association to develop a new discourse on international advertising in Sweden, which then was institutionalized within a national network on export promotion. The institutionalization process was supported by a corporatist system typical of smaller export dependent postwar European economies.

While based on a national case, this study points to the importance of understanding how advertising concepts are embedded within other economic, political and cultural systems than in those they originated in and how this contributes to a heterogenous implementation of similar ideas and practices. This study also illustrates how members can use their association to institutionalize a new discourse on marketing and network with other actors to enhance the use and reputation of its ideas and practices.

By highlighting the importance of analyzing both internal and external organizational relations, this study contributes to the research on history of marketing by making salient the importance of an institutional perspective to understand key processes in marketing. In practice neither the institutional perspective nor the explanatory power of discourse has received much attention, therefore the study results should be both interesting and valid for practitioners as well.

The study of the historical development of international advertising is limited and often descriptive. This study contributes to the literature by using a theoretical and methodological approach to make salient how the interaction between discourse, marketing associations and other collective actors propelled the institutionalization of international advertising within a specific national context.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of internet users attempting to report and prevent online child sexual exploitation (CSE) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the absence of adequate intervention by internet service providers, social media platforms, and government. The chapter discusses the history of online CSE, focusing on regulatory stances over time in which online risks to children have been cast as natural and inevitable by the hegemony of a “cyberlibertarian” ideology. We illustrate the success of this ideology, as well as its profound contradictions and ethical failures, by presenting key examples in which internet users have taken decisive action to prevent online CSE and promote the removal of CSAM. Rejecting simplistic characterizations of “vigilante justice,” we argue instead that the fact that often young internet users report feeling forced to act against online CSE and CSAM undercuts libertarian claims that internet regulation is impossible, unworkable, and unwanted. Recent shifts toward a more progressive ethos of online harm minimization are promising; however, this ethos risks offering a new legitimizing ideology for online business models that will continue to put children at risk of abuse and exploitation. In conclusion, we suggest ways forward toward an internet built in the interests of children, rather than profit.

Salesperson performance is accepted as a relevant factor of retailing success. However, scarce studies reveal the relationship between sales performance and brand relationship. The purpose of this study is both, from one side, to empirically demonstrate the impact of salesperson brand attachment (SBA) on sales performance and, on the other side, to identify the mediators of this relationship in small retailing.

A survey was conducted with a sample of 206 small retailers from different sectors of an emerging country. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares–structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS3.

The results demonstrated that SBA is relevant to driving sales performance through two relevant paths – one following SBA–satisfaction–performance and one path following the SBA–commitment–performance. The model was able to explain 63% of the outcome performance.

Regarding small retailers, where the owners, employees and managers have higher levels of interaction than the large national retail chains, the marketing executives must invest in improving the attachment to the brand and create emotional bonds and cognition between marketers and the brand. They must develop strategies to promote job satisfaction and organizational commitment because they determine performance.

Despite the relevance of small businesses for economies worldwide and the importance of salesperson brand relationships, no study has been developed to demonstrate the impacts of such relationships on salesperson performance in retailing. Furthermore, in addition to the central role of organizational commitment in the sales research, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore how to mediate the relationship between brand attachment and sales performance.

El rendimiento del vendedor se acepta como un factor relevante para el éxito del comercio minorista. Sin embargo, los estudios que revelan la relación entre el resultado de las ventas y la relación con la marca son escasos. El propósito de este estudio es, por un lado, demostrar empíricamente el impacto del apego a la marca del vendedor (SBA) en el resultado de las ventas y, por otro lado, identificar los mediadores de esta relación en el comercio minorista.

Se realizó una encuesta con una muestra de 206 vendedores de pequeños minoristas provenientes de diferentes sectores de un país emergente. El modelo estructural se analizó mediante ecuaciones estructurales basada en mínimos cuadrados (PLS-SEM) utilizando SmartPLS3.

Los resultados mostraron que el SBA es esencial para impulsar el resultado de las ventas a través de dos caminos relevantes: uno siguiendo el SBA-satisfacción-rendimiento y la otra dirección siguiendo el SBA-compromiso-rendimiento. El modelo fue capaz de explicar el 63% del rendimiento.

Con respecto a los pequeños minoristas, donde los propietarios, empleados y gerentes tienen niveles más altos de interacción que las grandes cadenas minoristas nacionales, los ejecutivos de marketing deben invertir en mejorar el apego a la marca y crear vínculos emocionales y cognitivos entre los vendedores y la marca. Deben desarrollar estrategias para promover la satisfacción laboral y el compromiso organizacional ya que determinan el rendimiento.

A pesar de la relevancia de las pequeñas empresas para las economías de todo el mundo y la importancia de las relaciones de marca en los vendedores, no se ha desarrollado ningún estudio para demostrar los impactos de tales relaciones en el rendimiento de los vendedores en el comercio minorista. Además, aparte del papel central del compromiso organizacional en la investigación en ventas, este es el primer estudio que explora cómo media la relación entre el apego a la marca y el resultado de las ventas.