Big Data in Organizations and the Role of Human Resource Management

Big data are changing the way we work. This book conveys a theoretical understanding of big data and the related interactions on a socio-technological level as well as on the organizational level. Big data challenge the human resource department to take a new role. An organization’s new competitive advantage is its employees augmented by big data

Forecasting modeling and analytics of economic processes

The book will be useful for economists, finance and valuation professionals, market researchers, public policy analysts, data analysts, teachers or students in graduate-level classes. The book is aimed at students and beginners who are interested in forecasting modeling and analytics of economic processes and want to get an idea of its implementation

Academic Librarians and the Space/Time of Information Literacy, the Neoliberal University, and the Global Knowledge Economy

This qualitative research study explores how academic librarians working in Canadian public research-intensive universities experience the space/time of information literacy, the neoliberal university, and the knowledge economy. Information literacy lies at the intersection of higher education and the knowledge economy: it became a priority for librarians in Anglo-American countries in the 1980s in the context of neoliberal educational reforms intended to better prepare skilled workers for the “information society” (Behrens, 1994; Birdsall, 1994). The shift from Fordist modes of production to flexible accumulation, characterized by the expansion of capital into new markets, flexible workers, and just-in-time inventories, made possible by new information and communication technologies, occurred around the same time, impacting the relationship between space, time, and work, and intensifying and accelerating our everyday experience of time (Castells, 1996; Harvey, 1989). Temporal labour in the knowledge economy is gendered, raced, and classed (Sharma, 2014). Time serves a form of social control: some workers’ temporal experiences are normalized whereas others’ are recalibrated (Sharma, 2014). In the workplace, time enables, regulates, and constrains performance, attitudes, and behaviours (Adam, 1998). This study explores how academic librarians, members of a feminized profession (Harris, 1992) and marginal educators on campus, experience the space/time of higher education’s globalizing agenda across their roles and responsibilities. The theoretical framework for this research draws from diverse disciplines and critical perspectives. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with twenty-four librarians. Thematic analysis within a constructionist framework was used to analyze the data. Findings suggest time is a key mechanism through which neoliberal governmentality is enacted in Canadian academic libraries. Just-in-time service models and pedagogical approaches and future-oriented corporate strategies and practices characterized the library’s timescape. Librarians experienced time as accelerated and intensified. Time for scholarship iii was rare. Librarians used multiple technologies of the self in order to regulate and recalibrate themselves. Some engaged in self-censorship in order to comply with corporatized institutional values and priorities. As a result, librarians experienced stress and considerable emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983). This study makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on time in the neoliberal university and the conditions of academic librarians’ work

Hustle and flow! : an analysis of Naspers’ operationalization as reported by prominent South African newspaper publications over a three-year period.

Master of Social Science in Centre for Communication, Media, Society. University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Durban, 2017.This thesis deals with two pertinent questions. It examines the shift in business operations Naspers has undertaken to become a predominantly e-commerce based global conglomerate. Secondly, it examines the media coverage, specifically the reportage by the fraternity of the most popular South African financial newspapers. Literature published on Naspers has revealed that since its inception the company has been able to reinvent itself through a series of acquisitions, and start-ups throughout the historical stages of South African history until its early footprint into e-commerce. This thesis predominately adopted the political economy of communication by drawing upon certain principles encompassed in the model. This thesis purposively collected one hundred archival articles from four of the most prominent South African newspaper publications and proceeded to implement an inductive and deductive textual analysis. The thesis highlighted that Naspers’ transition into an e-commerce-based company was fuelled by the business acumen of their chief executive officers and their investment into Tencent while still enabling the ‘old guard’ to remain in power. Secondly, the media coverage of Naspers’ transition was predominately favourable towards them, especially the coverage on Koos Bekker. However, the media did reportage their scepticism on Naspers’ being over reliant on Naspers’ investment in Tencent

The impossible feast of the uncanny technowoman : a plural feminist cyborg writes of the possibilities for science fiction and potent body politics : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū Campus, New Zealand

This research embodies Donna Haraway’s (1991) feminist cyborg as a potent political figure for women and their bodies in the 21st century West. The violences done to women all too often define them (Malabou, 2011), confining them to the heterosexual matrix characterised by their objectification and ‘excesses.’ The multiplicities and pluralities of ‘woman’ disrupt traditional psychological science that counts and categorises. Re-routing psychology through the hybridity and non-fixity of the science fiction genre, new possibilities for psychological knowledge production emerge, including figures (such as cyborgs), art installations and hyperdimensional arachnids through which to think new thoughts (Haraway, 2016). Through the figure of a feminist cyborg, ‘woman’ can be understood as politically potent through her multiplicities, partialities, simultaneities and contradictions. After rendering Haraway’s feminist cyborg through the science fiction genre, the thesis takes on a creative form to re-think the notion of apocalypse, re-theorise the uncanny, then explore a potently networked series of figures, internet users and movements (such as Human Barbies, internet folklore, pro-rape forums) that structure women’s bodies in ways that re-assert the heterosexual matrix, as well as in ways that re- build women outside of the heterosexual matrix. Re-figuring ‘woman’ outside of the heterosexual matrix could perhaps open new spaces in which to think women’s body politics differently in perpetually networked, ever-expanding technoworlds