Cultures in Community Question Answering

CQA services are collaborative platforms where users ask and answer questions. We investigate the influence of national culture on people's online questioning and answering behavior. For this, we analyzed a sample of 200 thousand users in Yahoo Answers from 67 countries. We measure empirically a set of cultural metrics defined in Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Robert Levine's Pace of Life and show that behavioral cultural differences exist in community question answering platforms. We find that national cultures differ in Yahoo Answers along a number of dimensions such as temporal predictability of activities, contribution-related behavioral patterns, privacy concerns, and power inequality.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'15

Employees on social media: A multi-spokespeople model of CSR communication

Increasing societal and stakeholder expectations, along with easy access to information through social media, means corporations are asked for more information. The traditional approach to CSR communication, with corporations controlling what and how much to share with stakeholders has been restructured by social media, with stakeholders taking control. As legitimacy on social media is created through the positive and negative judgements of stakeholders, corporations must plan how to meet stakeholder demands for information effectively and legitimately, and this includes choosing appropriate spokespeople. Corporations in India have now turned towards their employees as CSR spokespeople. By encouraging employee activity on social media, these corporations are attempting to meet stakeholder demands and generate legitimacy through spokespeople whom stakeholders perceive as equals. This article examines that strategy and discusses its viability of using employees as spokespeople for CSR communication and engagement with stakeholder

Usage of Online Social Networks in Cultural Adaptation

Online social networks (OSN) have become an important part of every individual’s social support network. This makes OSNs, particularly important to the sojourner who will have to constantly resort to social support sources to cope with the difficulties and psychological stress of cross-cultural adaptation. Nevertheless, the use of OSNs in the context of cultural adaptation is an under explored area. This study draws upon social network theory, adopts a qualitative research approach with multiple case design, to investigate how international students use OSNs to adapt to a new culture. Three themes emerged from our findings. OSNs can be leveraged to 1) enable socialization, 2) facilitate knowledge exchange, and 3) alleviate acculturative stress in adapting to a new culture. We believe our study contributes to the sparse literature on the impact of OSNs on cross-cultural adaptation and serves a foundation for future research in this vital area of OSN usage

Information Sharing and International Taxation

The sharing between national tax authorities of taxpayer-specific information has emerged over the last few years as a-probably "the"-central issue in the formation of international tax policy.Yet this refocusing of the debate on international taxation-away from parametric tax coordination and towards strengthening information exchange-has gone largely unnoticed in the public finance literature.This paper gives an overview of this increasingly important area of international taxation, reviewing the key economic, legal and practical concepts and issues bearing on the analysis and implementation of information exchange, and providing an account of recent policy initiatives and emerging theoretical insights.International tax evasion;tax competition;tax information exchange;tax treaties;money laundering;savings tax directive

THE PERSONALIZATION-PRIVACY PARADOX EXPLORED THROUGH A PRIVACY CALCULUS MODEL AND HOFSTEDE’S MODEL OF CULTURAL DIMENSIONS

The Personalization-Privacy Paradox is a relevant issue for companies today, as it deals with the paradox of customers who on the one hand want to keep their personal data private, but on the other hand desire the personalization benefits that can be gained by giving up that privacy. Many studies in the past have observed the Personalization-Privacy Paradox, but not thoroughly through the lens of a privacy calculus model. This paper uses a privacy calculus model to examine the Personalization-Privacy Paradox using Hofstede’s Six Dimensions of Culture and examines the United States, Germany, and China as case studies of three different cultures. These three cultures all have a great deal of influence in the world and are world opinion leaders but have vast differences in cultural values and beliefs. This paper shows the importance for marketers, designers, and implementers of personalization services to understand diverse cultures and how their varied idioms, beliefs, and values affect how they will perceive benefits and costs of personalization services in their internal privacy calculus. The marked differences in cultural scores and how those cultural beliefs affect the perceptions of personalization and privacy demonstrate that companies looking to expand their services and applications into new markets cannot rely on universal approaches

Software of the Mind - A Review of Applications of Hofstede\u27s Theory to IT Research

We review applications of Hofstede’s cultural theory to IT research. The objective of this paper is to integrate disparate applications of Hofstede’s framework in IT research and provide a detailed synthesis of the existing literature grouped by specific IT areas across each of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. In this review we carry out an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative analysis of articles that applied Hofstede’s framework to IT-related research and find that, despite inherent limitations, a national culture perspective has proven useful to all areas of IT-research. We also identify gaps in the existing literature and propose several streams of potential research. Some gaps are due to recent developments in Hofstede’s framework. Long-Term Orientation, for example, is a recent development and has been applied to IT-research in only a few instances. Other gaps are due to the sporadic and seemingly random application of Hofstede’s framework to IT-research. There are only a few instances, for example, of applications of Hofstede’s framework to software development research. The findings of this review will benefit IT researchers wishing to conduct cultural research and will allow researchers to uncover differences and similarities in complex populations that characterize today’s IT-enabled workforce. By using value-based cultural indicators, such as the dimensions developed by Hofstede (2001), researchers can readily examine a variety of important issues facing the field of IT in today’s global environment

The Impact of National Culture on Mobile Commerce Adoption and Usage Intensity

The usage of mobile commerce increases around the world. However, little is known about why adoption and usage of mobile commerce services differ across countries. We address this question by analyzing the impact of national culture on mobile commerce adoption and usage intensity. Using a dataset that comprises individual consumer survey data from 43 countries across six continents and country-level data on Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions, we study cross-cultural adoption and usage patterns pertaining three mobile commerce services, i.e. mobile banking, mobile shopping and mobile payment. Our results show that adoption and usage intensity are indeed affected by different cultural dimensions. Specifically, the adoption of mobile commerce services is negatively influenced by a country’s level of uncertainty avoidance, while consumers’ usage intensity is driven by indulgence. This implies that providers of mobile commerce services need to tailor their market entry and market cultivation strategies accounting for each country’s specific culture

HCI in e-Government and e-Democracy

This chapter introduces the application of HCI design processes and design principles in e-government and e-democracy. We elaborate on HCI design processes and six HCI design principles in the context of e-government and e-democracy, including citizen-centered design, usability, accessibility, access to information, transaction efficiency, and security and privacy. Then, we present two cases to demonstrate the value of applying the HCI processes and design principles in developing and deploying e-government and e-democracy. Finally, we highlight the challenges faced by e-government and e-democracy as well as the future trends. In conclusion, HCI can help the success of e-government and e-democracy and their future growth

A Model for the Evaluation of Society’s Progress Towards Cashlessness: A Comprehensive Analysis of the World and Norway

Master's thesis in Business administration (BE501)The purpose of this thesis is to determine Norway as well as other countries in terms of the progress in cashless societies. When it comes to payment services, there are constantly new and better innovations that suppliers are attempting to find solutions for and that are easily available to consumers. The main aim of this thesis is to determine which phases a society is in by using a model for cashless society phases. As there are no fitting models for analyzing such cashless societies, we introduce a new model of cashnessless, and use it as the base of the analysis. Some countries with advanced technology and rising markets are discussed to see what kind of payment methods the country provides to its citizens. The benefits and drawbacks of establishing a cashless society are also presented to determine which groups will be most affected, as well as determining the importance of physical money to the public