Search results

We are living in a multi‐level reality that is reflected within ourselves. On the one side, we are part of families, clans and tribes; of communities, nations, humanity; of ecosystems, professions and peer groups, institutions, civilizations and cultures. On the other side, we incorporate within ourselves the steps taken by evolution on its way toward higher complexity, from subatomic particles, atoms and molecules through nucleus‐free prokaryotic cells, now forming the organelles within the more eukaryotic cells, to cell tissue, organs and the entire organism, and further to the various steps of mentation introduced by the evolving brain.

The purpose of this study is to rethink the issue of publicity from a cross-cultural and evolutionary perspective.

Assuming that there is a dominant paradigm in the studies of the public sphere centered on Habermas’ ideas, media theory (and especially Luhmann who is considered as a media theorist) is selected as a new context that provides different concepts, ideas, language games and metaphors that allow the re-foundation of the study of publicity.

Publicity as a social structure emerges – and acquires different forms during history – out of the complex dynamics resulting from the interaction between success media, such as power, and different kinds of dissemination media.

A research into the forms of publicity not only promotes awareness of the ubiquity of the phenomenon across cultural evolution, but also offers tools to make new discoveries and systematize what is already known about the subject and its ramifications.

To unlock social media’s value, this study aims to integrate insights from several theoretical perspectives and the relevant literature, developing an extended social media analytics framework. It identifies the stages underlying the social media analytics process and tests the framework in three important and interconnected areas: social media (Twitter), new product adoption (iWatch and Google Glass) and social media analytic techniques (text mining and sentiment analysis).

Based upon a systematic review of different research approaches, theories and media types, this paper presents and tests an extended framework in three important and interconnected areas mentioned above.

This paper offers a theory-driven social media analytics framework. It validates the framework by providing concrete processes, examples, evidence and insights related to three chosen areas mentioned above, thereby helping managers create effective and efficient social media and new product development strategies.

This paper integrates insights from theories of the middle range (Merton, 1949), Campbell’s (1965) model of sociocultural evolution and Fan and Gordon’s (2014) social media analytics framework, developing its own extended social media analytics framework and validating it in three important and interconnected areas mentioned above. This paper demonstrates not only how the proposed framework can be applied to the context of new product development, but also how social media are transforming research approaches (qualitative, quantitative and mixed method) and the very nature of business itself (increased importance of digital business).

The purpose of this paper is to unpack an Asian-born celebrity culture in which celebrities become everyday necessities for global consumers’ identity struggle, prototypes for global branding strategy, contents for the media industry, and agents for sociocultural transformation.

In order to better elucidate such a significant phenomenon, the authors also introduce two mostly palpable and more relevant domains of celebrity culture to global consumer culture literature − politics of aesthetics and memetics − as analytical tools. Observations and publicly available narratives are also incorporated to enhance the review and critique of the global celebrification process. Psy’s Gangnam Style (GS) is chosen as an archetype, due to its exceptionally vulgar but highly replicable nature.

The specific case of GS exposes three unique qualities of kitsch − exaggeration, disconcertment, and subversive sensibility − that are substantially commensurate with prototypical characteristics of globalized online memes − ordinariness, flawed masculinity, theatricality, and ludic agency. Polysemy and optimism also facilitate the celebrification process in global participatory culture.

The “radical intertextuality” of online memes sustains the participatory culture in which kitsch becomes a global icon through a reproductive process. Korean popular culture cultivates reverse cosmopolitanism through a nationalistic self-orientalization strategy that paradoxically indigenizes western pop-culture and transforms power relations in global pop culture.

This paper presents further elaboration of current discourses on global-celebrity culture by incorporating popular concepts and practices, such as kitsch, meme, parody, and sharing, which synergistically advance aesthetic liberation on a global scale.

One major aspect of T.D. Wilson’s research has been his insistence on situating the investigation of information behaviour within the context of its occurrence Ö within the everyday world of work. The significance of this approach is reviewed in light of the notion of embodied cognition that characterises the evolving theoretical episteme in cognitive science research. Embodied cognition employs complex external props such as stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings to reduce the cognitive burden on the individual and to augment human problem‐solving activities. The cognitive function of the classification scheme is described as exemplifying both stigmergic structures and cognitive scaffoldings. Two different but complementary approaches to the investigation of situated cognition are presented: cognition‐as‐scaffolding and cognition‐as‐infrastructure. Classification‐as‐scaffolding views the classification scheme as a knowledge storage device supporting and promoting cognitive economy. Classification‐as‐infrastructure views the classification system as a social convention that, when integrated with technological structures and organisational practices, supports knowledge management work. Both approaches are shown to build upon and extend Wilson’s contention that research is most productive when it attends to the social and organisational contexts of cognitive activity by focusing on the everyday world of work.

The purpose of this paper is to identify complementarities between the approaches of population ecology and evolutionary economics in order to contribute to a synthesis of organizational evolutionary dynamics and its implications for a strategic management research model. Using the metatriangulation technique to construct theories, we attempt to entwine these two perspectives. The proposed model is structured in two dimensions: the environmental selective system and the corporate adaptation process. The environmental selective system gathers together the complementary factors presented by evolutionary economics and ecology: technological innovation, demographic processes, environmental dynamism, population density and other institutional processes, and interpopulation dynamics. As ecology does not encompass the corporate adaptation process (generation, selection, and propagation of variations), the proposed model adopts the theoretical grounds underpinning evolutionary economics. The model offers three main contributions for future research into strategic management. First, it allows the development of descriptive and normative studies of the relationship among the environmental selection factors and the different types of enterprise strategies. Second, the proposed conceptual framework may be very beneficial for studies of interorganizational learning. Third, the model has the advantage of responding to the criticism of strategy theories in terms of their inability to generalize.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.

The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.

The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.

In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.

To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.

Various theoretical studies were carried out which attempted to identify impacting factors of cultural changes; however, these studies ignored the correlation among other affecting factors all together. In this paper, the authors aim not only to discuss the hidden layers that trigger the cultural changes but also to answer the questions of how to identify the main factors in each layer based on casual layered analysis (CLA), which could have a strong impact in shaping other layers’ factors? What are the dominant metaphors and worldviews that human beings are telling themselves about our universe that influences the future cultural changes?

To answer the questions of “how to identify the main factors in each layer,” the CLA methodology was used to investigate the underlying reasons. CLA takes into account four layers (litany, social systems, dominant discourse and worldviews and metaphors), which could be a tremendous help in identifying the mentioned factors.

The analysis shows that there are some contributing factors such as economy, technology, politics, society, environment, mass media, globalization and migration at the second layer – “social systems layer” – which may trigger cultural changes in first layer “litany”; in addition, in the third and deeper layer two dominant worldviews – materialist/secular and religious affecting the contributing factors in the second layer – were identified. Such worldviews are, in turn, supported by metaphors or perfect stories/myths of the deepest layer.

It can be concluded that because the cultural changes as a reality is composed of different layers, it is important to dig into different layers of reality to comprehend the significant shaping factors of that reality to visualize and make the better future.

The conceptual synthesis of the accepted bodies of knowledge in a culture provides a sense of meaning in existence, a viable image of the future, and individual and collective motivations. In our age, the dominant bodies of knowledge are fragmented and, although they are more accurate than ever before in limited domains, they fail to guide the imagination and inspire purposive action. To rectify this situation we need to develop a coherent and explicit conceptual synthesis that is based on science but extends beyond the current range of validated scientific theories, overcoming the noxious separation of the factual and the moral, the empirical and the mystical, the sensate and the affective. General systems theory, a metadiscipline created specifically for the purpose of integrating scientific research and theories, is a highly qualified instrument for promoting the required science‐based conceptual synthesis. Efforts in this direction are aided by the intrinsic tendency within science to correct for overspecialization and fragmentation through a search for integrative general theories, and by the rising perception of societal need for integrated bodies of knowledge, capable of coping with the increasing complexity of contemporary problems.

This paper aims to explore and demonstrate how the meme of aspiration can help guide human cultures through an epochal transformation triggered by a global megacrisis and leading to sustainable maturation of human cultures.

Aspirational futures process, intuition-based visioning and “Type II” thinking that has high credibility for knowledgeable experts but low credibility to most others.

Megacrisis is a Type II wild card needing anticipatory mitigation via strategies such as are suggested. While descent paths may be a suitable meme for technical professionals, ascent paths to higher levels of civilizational maturity are a better guiding image for the public. Aspirational methods whose core involves intuition-based creativity, wisdom and co-creative emergence are a vital complement to rational/analytic futures methods, especially in times of epochal change and uncertainty when a new “regime” of guiding world views, institutional processes and innovative technologies may emerge.

Results represent a high degree of uncertainly as well as “fringe” thinking needing to be more widely considered.

Strategic suggestions based on Type II thinking are a unique category for “leading edge” funding and application.

The Type II perspective offered here is unique and offers a promising approach for transformative megacrisis mitigation.