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1 – 10 of 768Jonathan David Schöps, Christian Reinhardt and Andrea Hemetsberger
Digital markets are increasingly constructed by an interplay between (non)human market actors, i.e. through algorithms, but, simultaneously, fragmented through platformization…
Abstract
Purpose
Digital markets are increasingly constructed by an interplay between (non)human market actors, i.e. through algorithms, but, simultaneously, fragmented through platformization. This study aims to explore how interactional dynamics between (non)human market actors co-codify markets through expressive and networked content across social media platforms.
Design/methodology/approach
This study applies digital methods as cross-platform analysis to analyze two data sets retrieved from YouTube and Instagram using the keywords “sustainable fashion” and #sustainablefashion, respectively.
Findings
The study shows how interactional dynamics between (non)human market actors, co-codify markets across two social media platforms, i.e. YouTube and Instagram. The authors introduce the notion of sticky market webs of connection, illustrating how these dynamics foster cross-platform market codification through relations of exteriority.
Research limitations/implications
Research implications highlight the necessity to account for all involved entities, including digital infrastructure in digital markets and the methodological potential of cross-platform analyses.
Practical implications
Practical implications highlight considerations managers should take into account when designing market communication for digital markets composed of (non)human market actors.
Social implications
Social implications highlight the possible effects of (non)human market co-codification on markets and consumer culture, and corresponding countermeasures.
Originality/value
This study contributes to an increased understanding of digital market dynamics by illuminating interdependent market co-codification dynamics between (non)human market actors, and how these dynamics (de)territorialize digital market assemblages through relations of exteriority across platforms.
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The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.
Design/methodology/approach
The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis.
Findings
The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data.
Originality/value
This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential individual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy.
Peer review
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174
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Outlines some of the topics addressed at the sixth annual Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series, entitled "Crossing Boundaries: Collecting and Collaborating Globally"…
Abstract
Outlines some of the topics addressed at the sixth annual Fiesole Collection Development Retreat Series, entitled "Crossing Boundaries: Collecting and Collaborating Globally", held in March 2004. The conference covered issues in international scholarship, shared preservation and collection strategies, and funding.
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Ahmed Zaky, Hassan Mohamed and Gunjan Saxena
This study aims to conceptualise the panic buying behaviour of consumers in the UK during the novel COVID-19 crisis, using the assemblage approach as it is non-deterministic and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to conceptualise the panic buying behaviour of consumers in the UK during the novel COVID-19 crisis, using the assemblage approach as it is non-deterministic and relational and affords new ways of understanding the phenomenon.
Design/methodology/approach
The study undertakes a digital ethnography approach and content analysis of Twitter data. A total of 6,803 valid tweets were collected over the period when panic buying was at its peak at the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020.
Findings
The panic buying phase was a radical departure from the existing linguistic, discursive, symbolic and semiotic structures that define routine consumer behaviour. The authors suggest that the panic buying behaviour is best understood as a constant state of becoming, whereby stockpiling, food waste and a surge in cooking at home emerged as significant contributors to positive consumer sentiments.
Research limitations/implications
The authors offer unique insights into the phenomenon of panic buying by considering DeLanda’s assemblage theory. This work will inform future research associated with new social meanings of products, particularly those that may have been (re)shaped during the COVID-19 crisis.
Practical implications
The study offers insights for practitioners and retailers to lessen the intensity of consumers’ panic buying behaviour in anticipation of a crisis and for successful crisis management.
Originality/value
Panic buying took on a somewhat carnivalesque hue as consumers transitioned to what we consider to be atypical modes of purchasing that remain under-theorised in marketing. Using the conceptual lenses of assemblage, the authors map bifurcations that the panic buyers’ assemblages articulated via material and immaterial bodies.
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Demosthenes Akoumianakis and George Ktistakis
Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling…
Abstract
Purpose
Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.
Design/methodology/approach
Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.
Findings
The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.
Practical implications
Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.
Originality/value
Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.
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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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis offers the idea of “taboo news” to conceptualise putatively “alternative” news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called Scratch.
Design/methodology/approach
The author completed an 18-month descriptive case study with 5 early adolescent participants. The research design included a multimodal analytic analysis of participant artifacts and inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews and transcription frames.
Findings
Participants embedded meaning to achieve four primary purposes, namely, to guide visitors through exhibits, to story, to engage in conversation and to game. To achieve each goal, the participants embedded unique semantic cues within specific Scratch structures.
Research limitations/implications
Questions for how researchers in literacy and learning can further explore meaning-making within programming-as-writing are suggested.
Practical implications
Connections to the supportive structures within Scratch are discussed in the context of programming-as-writing. Considerations regarding the use of Scratch to promote programming-as-writing are provided for educators.
Originality/value
The findings in this study provide an introductory step toward an enhanced understanding of the ways in which youth embed meaning into digital media as they engage in programming-as-writing. Although coding has been researched within the context of computer science, the use of coding in multimodal composition should be explored as it relates to literacy practices.
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Hisham Abusaada and Abeer Elshater
Over the coming decades, the widespread application of social distancing creates challenges for the urban planning and design profession. This article aims to address the…
Abstract
Purpose
Over the coming decades, the widespread application of social distancing creates challenges for the urban planning and design profession. This article aims to address the phenomenon of boredom in public places, its main influences that generate change in repetition, monotony and everyday lifestyle, whether positive, negative or both – depending on the binding and governing rules of urban shape variations and daily lifestyles.
Design/methodology/approach
This viewpoint relied on literary narration to discuss the phenomenon of boredom vis-à-vis urban design and placemaking solutions in the face of social distancing. It builds its orientation by analyzing the works of nine scholars and five of their relevant theories.
Findings
Evidence from previous studies helped develop three-pillar guidelines that can produce better results for post-pandemic development in the face of boredom. These pillars include recommendations for the trinity of heterogeneity for metamorphosis in urban form, changes in public life and digital transformation in a time of uncertainty on how to confront (un)seen boredom in public spaces. Practitioners should develop new insights into the relationship between people and place by reviewing existing paradigms in urban studies to avoid repetition, monotony and change in everyday life after a pandemic.
Originality/value
The added value here is in underlining boredom as one of the consequences of social distancing and lockdown applications building on the phenomenon's theorizers. The key contribution of this work is the three-pillar recommendation for confronting the boredom in public spaces that happens because of social distancing and lockdown.
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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to further develop Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” by examining the socio-material forces that are shaping data movements in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to further develop Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” by examining the socio-material forces that are shaping data movements in the cases of research data and online communications data, second, to articulate a politics of data friction, identifying the interrelated infrastructural, socio-cultural and regulatory dynamics of data friction, and how these are contributing to the constitution of social relations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper develops a hermeneutic review of the literature on socio-material factors influencing the movement of digital data between social actors in the cases of research data sharing and online communications data. Parallels between the two cases are identified and used to further develop understanding of the politics of “data friction” beyond the concept’s current usage within the Science Studies literature.
Findings
A number of overarching parallels are identified relating to the ways in which new data flows and the frictions that shape them bring social actors into new forms of relation with one another, the platformisation of infrastructures for data circulation, and state action to influence the dynamics of data movement. Moments and sites of “data friction” are identified as deeply political – resulting from the collective decisions of human actors who experience significantly different levels of empowerment with regard to shaping the overall outcome.
Research limitations/implications
The paper further develops Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” beyond its current application in Science Studies. Analysis of the broader dynamics of data friction across different cases identifies a number of parallels that require further empirical examination and theorisation.
Practical implications
The observation that sites of data friction are deeply political has significant implications for all engaged in the practice and management of digital data production, circulation and use.
Social implications
It is argued that the concept of “data friction” can help social actors identify, examine and act upon some of the complex socio-material dynamics shaping emergent data movements across a variety of domains, and inform deliberation at all levels – from everyday practice to international regulation – about how such frictions can be collectively shaped towards the creation of more equitable and just societies.
Originality/value
The paper makes an original contribution to the literature on friction in the dynamics of digital data movement, arguing that in many cases data friction may be something to enable and foster, rather than overcome. It also brings together literature from diverse disciplinary fields to examine these frictional dynamics within two cases that have not previously been examined in relation to one another.
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This paper argues that this animal surveillance has the potential for considerable function creep going far outside the scheme's original objectives and acts as a conduit for more…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper argues that this animal surveillance has the potential for considerable function creep going far outside the scheme's original objectives and acts as a conduit for more problematic surveillance of humans. This results in social sorting of people with subsequent unforeseen consequences leading to discrimination and curtailment of freedoms for both animals and their owners. Ultimately this opens people up to further intrusive targeting by commercial interests and, more alarmingly, scrutiny from law enforcement agencies.
Design/methodology/approach
An empirical study examining an initiative involving the collection of canine DNA sources data from publicly available Cabinet, Select Committee and Scrutiny Committee records from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD). It also draws on news media sources, publicity material from the company running the scheme and from this and other local authorities. Methods include analysis of documents, semiotic and discourse analysis.
Findings
This paper highlights the importance of animals to surveillance studies and examines the extent to which animals are a part of the surveillant assemblage in their own right. It also demonstrates how nonhuman animals extend the reach of the surveillant assemblage.
Social implications
The scheme was called a badge of considerate dog ownership, yet it is one that can be franchised to tie up with diverse income streams being described as advantageous in the age of austerity. In 2017, it was reported that this scheme was to be rolled out in other areas and was moving from being voluntary to being mandatory with the enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs). These have been described as “geographically defined ASBOS” that have come into force under the Anti-social Behaviour and Policing Act (2014); they often work to criminalise activities that were not previously considered illegal.
Originality/value
In the theorising of surveillance, animals have been largely overlooked. Epidemiological studies proliferate, yet the role of animals in many aspects of everyday surveillance has been neglected.
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