CooPS - Towards a method for coordinating personalized services

This paper presents CooPS, which is a method for Coordinating Personalized Services. These services are primarily offered to mobile users. The concept of services is the object of intense investigations from both academia and industry. However, very little has been accomplished so far regarding first, personalizing services for the benefit of mobile users, and second, providing the appropriate methodological support for those (i.e., designers) who will be specifying the operations of personalization. Various obstacles still exist such as lack of techniques for modeling and specifying the integration of personalization into services, and existing approaches for service composition typically facilitate orchestration only, while neglecting contexts of users and services. CooPS consists of several steps ranging from service definition and personalization to service deployment. Each step has some representation techniques, which aim at facilitating the specification and validation of the operations of coordinating personalized services. © Springer-Verlag 2006

Becoming a Platform in Europe

Emerging out of the collaborative work conducted within the Working Group “Mechanisms to activate and support the collaborative economy” of the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy”, the book questions the varied set of organizational forms collected under the label of “collaborative” or “sharing” economy —ranging from grassroots peer-to-peer solidarity initiatives to corporate owned platforms— from the perspective of what is known as the European social values: respect for human dignity and human rights (including those of minorities), freedom, democracy, equality, and the rule of law. Therefore, the edited collection focuses on the governance of such economic activities, and how they organize labour, cooperation and social life. From individual motivations to participating, to platform use by local groups, until platform design in its political as well as technological dimensions, the book provides a comparative overview and critical discussion on the processes, narratives and organizational models at play in the collaborative economy. On such a basis, the volume offers tools, suggestions and visions for the future that may inform the designing of policies, technologies, and business models in Europe

A multivariate analysis of conflict in the franchisee-franchisor relationship.

Open Acces

Becoming a Platform in Europe

Emerging out of the collaborative work conducted within the Working Group “Mechanisms to activate and support the collaborative economy” of the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy”, the book questions the varied set of organizational forms collected under the label of “collaborative” or “sharing” economy —ranging from grassroots peer-to-peer solidarity initiatives to corporate owned platforms— from the perspective of what is known as the European social values: respect for human dignity and human rights (including those of minorities), freedom, democracy, equality, and the rule of law. Therefore, the edited collection focuses on the governance of such economic activities, and how they organize labour, cooperation and social life. From individual motivations to participating, to platform use by local groups, until platform design in its political as well as technological dimensions, the book provides a comparative overview and critical discussion on the processes, narratives and organizational models at play in the collaborative economy. On such a basis, the volume offers tools, suggestions and visions for the future that may inform the designing of policies, technologies, and business models in Europe

The New Hampshire, Vol. 73, No. 41 (Apr. 8, 1983)

The student publication of the University of New Hampshire

Final Report: Informal Worker Organizing as a Strategy for Improving Subcontracted Work in the Textile and Apparel Industries of Brazil, South Africa, India and China

[Excerpt] Recent tragedies in Bangladesh and Pakistan have led to greater public attention on the garment and textile industry. Hence, this study is timely and provides insights into the current working conditions, organizing efforts, and the changing organization and structure of the industry in question. Our central question in this study is the extent to which worker organization can improve monitoring and enforcement of labor standards in subcontracted and home-based work in the garment and textile sectors in Brazil, China, India, and South Africa. Existing research literature suggests that in at least some cases of informalized and casualized work, formation and mobilization of worker organizations can do much in this regard. The research has particularly pointed to the importance of innovative and alternative forms of organization that depart from standard trade union models—in line with the departure of whole sections of the world of work from standard forms of work organization. While suggestive, this literature has been dominated by cases of a single organization in a single country, or in some cases convenience samples of organizations from one or a range of countries. This report thus makes two distinctive contributions. First, it spotlights a set of specific sector-country combinations that have received limited attention at best in previous research. Second, it assembles a systematic comparison of organizing activities in a single sector (apparel and textile) across four countries with very different economies, institutional structures, and histories. This comparison points to some possibilities for generalization to a broader range of countries. At the same time, the study design, itself centered on case studies, builds in important limitations. The four countries in question range in size from large to very large, including the two largest countries in the world by population, China and India. The garment and textile sector, as the conjunction “and” signals, combines a variety of economic units and activities ranging from huge, highly automated textile mills producing standardized outputs to individual home-based seamstresses carrying out custom work. Narrowing the focus to subcontracted and home-based work limits this variety somewhat, but as we will see in all four countries, given the current pervasiveness of subcontracting in this industry, it is not a major narrowing. At the same time, the case study nature of the research, and its limited scale and duration, necessitates a focus on a small number of organizations in countries where organization is relatively advanced (India and South Africa), or on a single productive region in countries where organizations are still at an early, experimental stage (China and Brazil, though in the latter case we were able to supplement the in-depth regional study with a look at organization in a different region as well). The organizations and regions are chosen because of their importance as distinctive examples, and because in their entirety or in key aspects they have remained understudied in previous research. The resulting cases are valuable in their own right, but degree of generalizability across the full clothing and textile sector and the full countries in question is unknown