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We analyze the structure and the dynamics of a field, drawing on data from organizational public behavior in the digital sphere. Organizational self-representations afford rich insights into how organizations position themselves with regard to their peers, both in terms of web page language and hyperlink affiliations. Our empirical example is the lively and important discussion of the social impact of nonprofit organizations. We follow how it has evolved from 2011 to 2018 and with what consequences. We begin with portraits of the discursive movements of powerful, individual organizations, where we observe extensive changes. These portraits show how influential organizations alter their public faces. We then analyze discourse at the field level, which is surprisingly stable even though individual organizations change their discursive and relational positions frequently. Finally, we turn to groups of organizations with similar positions and highlight their ability to integrate vocabularies of other groups. Here we observe that a lingua franca increases integration at the field level, while affording distinction with individual organizations’ positioning. We conclude with a discussion of complementary research avenues that can advance the relational and linguistic view we present in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of disease risk in terms of the major signals (i.e. status, reputation and self-representation) on the e-consultation platforms.

In this study, the proposed research hypotheses are tested using the transaction data collected from xywy.com (in Need of Therapy). In fact, xywy.com is one the leading e-consultation service websites in China that provides a platform for the interactions between the physicians and patients (Yu et al., 2016; Peng et al., 2015). Generally speaking, it has all the needed design elements and in other words, a standard e-consultation website should have such items/components as physician homepage, physician review, free consultation, paid consultation and recommendation systems.

The obtained results reveal that all attributes including status, reputation and self-representation have a positive impact on physician’s online order volume. Moreover, there is a positive moderating effect of disease risk onto the online reputation, indicating a higher effect exists for the diseases with high risk. However, the effect of offline status and online self-representation is not moderated by the disease risk, indicating market signals (online reputation) may have a stronger predictive power than seller signals (offline status and online self- representation), and therefore market signals are more effective when/if the disease risk is high.

E-consultation has gradually become a significant trend to provide the healthcare services, in the emerging economy such as China because of shortage of medical resources but having an adequate access in internet usage. The impacts of signals on the health care market have been validated by previous studies. However, the research focusing on the moderating effect of signaling environment in the health care industry is still lacking. As a result, the value of this research helps to bridge the aforementioned research gap.

Official organisational myths and storytelling constitute a powerful, persuasive force in both the public representation and the internal shaping of executive identity. Leaders of corportate culture are aligned with legendary heroes to promote images of the senior manager as a heroic and transformational leader. This process plays upon subconscious images, beliefs and expectations to reinforce the concept of leadership as archetype. Much of the persuasive power of leadership as archetype arises from the continual reclaiming and honouring of past and present leaders, within the ongoing stories of executive identity. For the most part, this process involves an active role of gendering that reiterates a hierarchical and masculinist paradigm of leadership, while it leaves female leadership as absence or “other”. In this paper, rather than focus on the issue of female leadership as “other”, the ongoing, if shifting nature of gendered organisational lives is taken to be a continuing given. From this given, examines the self‐representations of male and female executives within a framework of leadership as archetype. Argues that these self‐representations provide similar and parallel male and female paradigms of leadership, while they depict the “gendered heroes” of executive culture.

Increasingly, organizations in the Asia‐Pacific region are recognizing the importance of cross‐cultural management to the sustainability of their competitive edge. Although the literature is replete with cross‐cultural studies of individualism and collectivism, little information is available on the factors that foster effective individualist–collectivist interaction (ICI) within organizations. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical description of individualists and collectivists at the individual level of analysis, which offers specific testable hypotheses about the effect of self‐representation on prejudice between individualists and collectivists (ICs).

In this paper, a theoretical model is presented in which intergroup prejudices and interpersonal prejudices mediate the effects of ICI and bicultural orientation toward cross‐cultural experiences and, in which, the dissimilarity openness of the climate moderates the level and outcome of prejudices flowing from ICI.

The model depicts that the outcomes of ICI are mediated by the intergroup prejudices of collectivists and the interpersonal prejudices of individualists, which are moderated by the extent of diversity‐oriented HRM policies and practices and individuals’ orientation to cross‐cultural experiences. When workforces become culturally diverse, organizations should modify HRM practices to enable the full use of the range of skills and talents available from the diversity, and to ensure affective and behavioral costs are minimized. As globalization and international competition will continue to increase, organizations including those in the Asia‐Pacific region, should seriously re‐evaluate their HRM policies to adapt and take advantage of an increasingly culturally diverse workforce.

The model provides a useful basis upon which organization researchers and practitioners can base their respective agendas.

Is the sharing economy a field? Answering this question is crucial to understanding how sharing organizations look and behave, as well as how the sharing economy might develop. In this chapter, the authors applied two different field conceptions – organizational field and issue field – as a starting point for an explorative empirical analysis. To capture both field concepts, the authors collected relational data and data on organizations’ self-representations to see how organizations engaged in the debate on the sharing economy relate to each other. The observed network of organizations suggests that the sharing economy is an issue field. In addition, the core of this network shows the relational structure of an organizational field. Surprisingly, it is not an organizational field of the sharing economy. Instead, it is a field of organizations heavily engaged in proselytizing new organizational forms that will change other fields. What the authors observed is a new field configuration – the authors call it a disruptive field – that is, less inward-oriented than other fields but much more engaged in changing other fields’ structures and dynamics. With these insights, the authors contribute to institutional research on field configuration and shed light on the phenomenon of the sharing economy and its potential development.

Visual ethnographic methods are increasingly popular in social science research. Much has been published on their design and use (e.g. Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001; van Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001). Yet little has been written on using video in in-depth interviews, or how such video-interviews might differ from tape-recorded interviews. In this chapter I discuss the video interview, as developed in my research about gender in the sensory home,¹ to reflect on the nature of the ethnographic knowledge about everyday life and experience this method produces. I focus particularly on informants’ uses of narrative as a vehicle for self-representation that reveals and conceals. Video invites informants to produce narratives that interweave visual and verbal representation. In doing so they reference familiar everyday narratives and practices that are in part visual. Here I discuss how three narratives – which I shall call the “Hello magazine,” “estate agent” and “self-analysis” narratives – were developed in an audiovisual research context.²

The purpose of this paper is to examine mothers’ social media accounts that focus on children’s fashion. The authors probed children’s fashion photo practices as representations of the mothers’ extended self and the kind of childhood representations produced by the social media accounts. They also investigated mothers’ perceptions of children’s privacy when engaging in sharenting – the sharing of information about children or parenting online.

The study is based on 16 semi-structured interviews with Finnish mothers who had Instagram accounts focusing on children’s fashion.

Children’s fashion photos play a diverse role in mothers’ identity work. The photos can be used to express a mother’s taste and aesthetic skills, to express values, to fit into peer groups and to store memories of oneself and the children. Through the photos, representations of the prevailing Finnish childhood ideals, such as authenticity, naturalness and playfulness, are reproduced. The mothers perceived the children as part of their extended self and justified sharenting with mother- and child-centered arguments.

Through shedding light on the practices of social media fashion photography, this paper provides insights into how commercialism and social media shape cultural expectations for both motherhood and childhood. The paper contributes to previous research on sharenting, extending it to the context of fashion photography.

Given inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the dual process theory to investigate what social media messages yield audience engagement during a political event. It tests how affective cues (emotional valence, intensity and collective self-representation) and cognitive cues (insight, causation, certainty and discrepancy) contribute to public engagement.

The authors created a dataset of more than three million tweets during the 2020 United States (US) presidential elections. Affective and cognitive cues were assessed via sentiment analysis. The hypotheses were tested in negative binomial regressions. The authors also scrutinized a subsample of far-famed Twitter users. The final dataset, scraping code, preprocessing and analysis are available in an open repository.

The authors found the prominence of both affective and cognitive cues. For the overall sample, negativity bias was registered, and the tweet’s emotionality was negatively related to engagement. In contrast, in the sub-sample of tweets from famous users, emotionally charged content produced higher engagement. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with many followers. Collective self-representation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments and retweets in the overall sample and subsamples.

The authors expand the dominating one-sided perspective to social media message processing focused on the peripheral route and hence affective cues. Leaning on the dual process theory, the authors shed light on the effectiveness of both affective (peripheral route) and cognitive (central route) cues on information appeal and dissemination on Twitter during a political event. The popularity of the tweet’s author moderates these relationships.