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The ability to analyze social action as it unfolds on micro time scales – particularly the 24-hour day – is central to understanding group processes. This chapter describes a new approach to this undertaking, which treats individuals’ involvement in specific activities at specific times as bases for: (1) sequential linkages between activities; as well as (2) connections to others who engage in similar action sequences. This makes it possible to examine the emergence and internal functioning of groups using existing network analysis techniques.

We illustrate this approach with a specific application – a quantitative and visual comparison of the daily activity patterns of employed and unemployed people. We use data from 13,310 24-hour time diaries from the 2010–2013 American Time Use Surveys.

Employed and unemployed people engage in significantly different types of activities and at different times. Beyond this, network analyses reveal that unemployed individuals experience much lower levels of synchrony with each other than do employed individuals and have much less organized action sequences. In short, there is a chronic lack of prevailing norms regarding how unemployed people organize the 24-hour day.

Future research that uses time-stamped data can employ network methods to analyze and visualize how group members sequence and synchronize social action. These methods make it possible to study how the structure of social action shapes group and individual-level outcomes.

Given the complexity of inclusive business (IB) to combine social contribution and business sustainability, companies make strategic choices. One multinational corporation (MNC) avoided interconnections with villagers and used only market-based relations with stimulants and incentives in the market. Another one delegated management completely to local partners, succeeding in stimulating the poor’s self-initiated economic activities. MNCs seem to have difficulties in handling institutional interconnections. In such cases, market-based relations or delegating management to the local partners were found to be highly effective for covering missing capabilities. One foreign NGO, despite its well-developed institutional interconnections with the locals, is struggling to develop markets for its social enterprises. In contrast, one local trust successfully cooperated with many local partners, appealing to local institutions (values and beliefs). Also, poor farmers felt the social contributions of two local companies by being incorporated into the companies’ supply chains backed by their corporate social responsibility (CSR) orientations and activities. Hence, both foreign and domestic organizations seem to succeed in IB by embedding their projects to their original institutions and developing diverse mechanisms to compensate for missing capabilities. One exception is a local company which successfully coordinated MNCs’ CSR activities, local communities, and governments. However, its success is owing to governmental regulation for CSR contribution. In general, though restricted by institutional backgrounds and business orientations, each case tried to create a fit between business models and its contingencies, achieve scale (at the level of communities, nations, or the global market) and business sustainability, and generate socioeconomic effects.

Research into the library as place investigates the role of public library buildings as destinations, physical places where people go for various reasons ranging from making use of the library's resources and services or seeking to fulfill an information or reading need to less easily identified reasons that may include using the library's building as a place to make social or business contacts, to build or reinforce community or political ties, or to create or reinforce a personal identity. This study asks: How are one rural US public library system's newly constructed buildings functioning as places? The answer is derived from answers to sub-questions about adult library users, user, and staff perceptions of library use, and observed use of library facilities. The findings are contextualized using a framework built of theories from human geography, sociology, and information studies.

This case study replicates a mixed-methods case study conducted at the main public libraries in Toronto and Vancouver in the late1990s and first reproduced in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006. It tests methods used in large urban settings in a rural, small-town environment. This study also expands on its antecedents by using thematic analysis to determine which conceptualizations of the role of the public library as place are most relevant to the community under investigation.

The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data collected via surveys and interviews of adult library users, interviews of library public service staff members, structured observations of people using the libraries, and analysis of selected administrative documents. The five sets of data are triangulated to answer the research sub-questions.

Thematic analysis grounded in the conceptual framework finds that public realm theory best contextualizes the relationships that develop between library staff members and adult library users over time. The study finds that the libraries serve their communities as informational places and as familiarized locales rather than as third places, and that the libraries facilitate the generation of social capital for their users.

This chapter offers a re-description of knowledge organization in light of genre and activity theory. Knowledge organization needs a new description in order to account for those activities and practices constituting and causing concrete knowledge organization activity. Genre and activity theory is put forward as a framework for situating such a re-description.

By means of genre and activity theory, the chapters argues that understanding the genre and activity systems, in which every form of knowledge organization is embedded, makes us capable of seeing how knowledge organization, as a genre, both can be a tool and an object in genred human activities.

In contrast to much research into knowledge organization, this chapter does not emphasize techniques, standards, or rules to be the sole object of study. Instead, an emphasis is put on the genre and activity systems informing and shaping concrete forms of knowledge organization activity. With this, we are able to understand how knowledge organization activity also contributes to construct genre and activity systems and not only aid them.

Our research identifies political explicitness as a variable property among free spaces and its implications for the role that such spaces can potentially play vis-à-vis social movement mobilization. Specifically, spaces where politics are implicit (i.e., where political goals and values are not an explicit part of associative principles) can serve as sites where identities with affinities to social movements are cultivated while remaining open to those who do not already hold sympathetic views – representing free and open spaces. Our research draws on previously unexplored links between social movement research and leisure activity research, which explains processes of socialization across participant levels as a central dynamic in shaping collective values and individual participant identities. We illustrate our argument by exploring those processes within American belly dance as an example of a gendered leisure activity, and their influence on participants’ gender identity and related political attitudes. Findings are based on survey research of 103 dancers in the Salt Lake City, Utah, region. Data indicate wide acceptance of gender norm challenges, and affirm expectations of leisure activity research regarding community dynamics that promote such challenges.

Organizations are increasingly confronted with legitimacy threats related to the perceived social costs of their business activities. Despite a significant amount of research on the responses of individual organizations, surprisingly limited attention has been paid to the collective activities firms may engage to address such issues. In this paper, we use institutional theory as a lens for an exploratory case study of Issue-Based Industry Collective (IBIC) action in the alcohol industry. Our findings identify a new organizational form, the IBIC and inspire new research avenues at the intersection of business collective action, social issues, and institutional theory.

This study provides evidence that financial performance becomes a foundation of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities, and it will be appreciated positively by the market through the firm value. This examination is triggered by different views of ESG activities, such as philanthropy, doing business ethically, the indirect benefit for shareholders, or maintaining reputation. Therefore, it causes differences in ESG activity appreciation by market. Meanwhile, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity is voluntary in Indonesia, so this activity aims to maintain reputation or avoid risk allegations according to environmental and social abuse. This study predicts that a stable firm’s financial performance concerns environmental and social issues. This study uses 139 companies from Indonesian Stock Market Data from 2013 to 2019, which fulfill the criteria of Thompson Reuters for ESG score. The empirical evidence shows that firm financial performance influences ESG score consistently as the antecedent. Further, ESG performance mediates the effect of firm financial performance on firm value. This research contributes to stakeholder theory, CSR practice, and good governance.

The aims of this article are threefold. First of all, to show the concept of value to customers as a determiner of a company’s competitive advantage. Second, to explain the changing role of marketing activities toward social responsibility. Third, to assess the influence of social marketing activities on a company’s image and the resulting value to customers.

By drawing on existing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing literature, the achievements and gaps of socially responsible marketing (SRM) can be demonstrated. In addition, the literature review focuses on showing the relationship between SRM and value to a customer. In order to achieve the purposes of the chapter, an analysis of market research based on secondary data as well as qualitative interviews has been conducted.

Marketing activities should accomplish both economic and social objectives as well as aim at delivering expected value to customers. Nowadays value comes not only from lower prices or a better product range. According to research, customers are becoming increasingly sensitive to evil and to social injustice, damage to the environment, as well as the increasing level of poverty. This makes companies develop new strategies for creating value for customers. These should come from socially responsible activities the company is undertaking. Thus, companies, which implement a concept of SRM, are more likely to count on increased interest and loyalty from their customers.

This chapter offers a fresh approach to the study of the evolution of marketing toward social responsibility and the impact on the value for customers.

The current study examines the role of social media for designing effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategy for modern business organisation to engage their stakeholders.

A structured survey questionnaire is used to collect data from multiple stakeholders through social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. The data is collected from employees, customers and investors of different companies in Pakistan. The data is analysed to examine the perceptions of different stakeholders towards effectiveness of social media for CSR communication.

The results indicate that the majority of respondents think that social media is very important platform to communicate CSR activities. Overall, respondents believe that social media is a trustworthy tool to communicate CSR activities and engage stakeholders. Customers believe that communication of CSR activities through social media influence their buying behaviour positively. We found strong intentions among employees to work for socially responsible corporations who are successful in communicating their CSR initiatives to their employees through social media.

The study collected data from Pakistan only, a larger sample from different countries can provide more interesting results. The study didn’t used sophisticated statistical tests; the future studies can develop a rigorous theoretical model explaining how use of social media as communication strategy can influence the behaviour of diverse stakeholders.

Since social media is becoming an effective communication platform, corporations should pay more focus on using social media. The corporations should encourage stakeholders’ views related to CSR communication on social media and carefully address their suspicions in order to engage them.

There is sparse research in literature that examine the use of social media to engage organisational stakeholders. The current study provides a direction to future researchers to explore this area and explain the use of social media as CSR communication strategy in better way.