Mobility business models toward a digital tomorrow: Challenges for automotive manufacturers

The development of digital business models is impacting the traditional value chain for mobility, implying changes as well as future challenges for automotive manufacturers. Taking a Global Value Chain approach, this work analyses the recent evolution, short-term direction, and medium- to long-term future vision of the adoption of digital mobility business models by automotive manufacturers. Results suggest that, while the firms analysed are currently incorporating relevant business models through autonomous vehicles, digital platforms, connectivity, and carsharing, they are mostly focused on marketplace exploitation through digital platforms and services related to connectivity. Key elements for the development of future mobility business models include data collection and management as well as interconnection. At the same time, digitalization is expected to reconfigure not only associated business models but also the relationships among actors within the value chain. These relationships will become more complex for automotive manufacturers, who may lose control of value-added activities and acquire dependence on certain actors such as technology and service partners, which are expected to play a pivotal role in meeting new opportunities. As a result, the decision-making power of value chain participants will likely be more widely distributed.Agencia Estatal de Investigación | Ref. PID2020-116040RB-I00Xunta de Galicia | Ref. GPC-ED431B 2022/10Universidade de Vigo/CISU

A Place of Happy Retreat: Benefiting Locals and Visitors Through Sustainable Tourism Practices at Beale Street, Graceland and the National Civil Rights Museum

This interdisciplinary work examines Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum through the lens of sustainable tourism. It specifically examines the value of integrating the culture and history of the host community into the attraction, and using tourist attractions to provide personal and economic development for locals. Chapter One is titled \u27Can I Live\u27 on Beale Street, Chapter Two is titled Opening the Gates of Graceland, and Chapter Three is titled Creating a Public Forum at the National Civil Rights Museum. Memphis has been predominantly African American since 1986, and African American history was significant in the creation of each attraction. Thus, incorporating the concerns and culture of African American Memphians is essential to the sustainability of each site. Guided by measures at the National Civil Rights Museum and other tourist destinations, this work proposes sustainable tourism practices that could help strengthen relationships between African American Memphians and the tourist attractions Beale Street and Graceland. In turn, these sustainable measures could increase the dollars and time spent by African American Memphians at these tourists attractions

Kindles, card catalogs, and the future of libraries: A collaborative digital humanities project

journal articleLibrarianship is a profession that often inspires commentary both from practitioners within the profession and the public who use libraries. For librarians keeping up with the field, the literature is often engaged with predicting the effects of culture, policy or technology on libraries, sometimes with a great deal of hyperbole. For this article, two librarians and a digital humanities researcher formed a research team to determine if the digital humanities technique of distant reading through topic modeling would reveal interesting patterns in a Digital humanities project corpus of library-themed literature engaged in predicting the future and/or demise of libraries

Does Scenario Planning Have a Role in U.S. Graduate Business Schools’ Curriculum?

The literature reports scenario planning is increasingly being used by businesses to help plan more effectively. A potential problem with the existing scenario planning teaching models is they do not appear to support or benefit from scholarly research and practitioners’ action research. The research study rationale is described in detail as well as survey activity in the top rated 100 graduate business schools in the U.S. and also survey participants’ responses. The study, due to a low survey response rate, failed to provide adequate data to answer the study’s primary question. Limitations, recommendations for future research and conclusions are provided

Content Is President: The Influence of Netflix on Taste, Politics and The Future of Television

The evolving television industry relies heavily on the corresponding shift in the audiences that it addresses. New practice for consumption and production, particularly the “disruptive” force of streaming services like Netflix, have been evidenced not only in the methods of the companies themselves but also in the content they have begun to offer. A milestone in the television industry, Netflix’s first original series House of Cards provides an innovative and meaningful installment to the genre of political melodrama, which has its own cultural significance and heritage of mapping audience relations to the media. Analyzing the text, this paper reveals how industrial strategies relate to taste cultures and produce cynical political television drama

Terrorism: A Guide to Resources

Prior to 9/11, terrorism was subject to political, scholarly, and media debates. A large body of literature on the topic reflected researchers’ long-standing interest in the topic. In the near decade since 9/11, terrorism and its threat have only gained urgency. This paper aims to provide a selected bibliography of resources, in print and electronic format, that focus on terrorism. Public and academic libraries have been providing access to terrorism-related resources, but no thematic bibliography has been published in professional journals since 2001. This guide aims to aid librarians in making decisions about developing and maintaining collections on the topic

Storied Subjects: Posthuman Subjectivization Through Narrative in Post-1960 American Print and Televisual Narrative

This dissertation theorizes the ramifications of new media forms of narrative on subjectivization by tracing the evolution of the observer through its permutations as second-order observer, witness, director, and narrative agent and demonstrating the various interacting processes involved in the recursive feedback loops between and among, self, world, and story. In this project, I ex-plore novels by contemporary U.S. authors John Barth, Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace, as well as two televisual texts, Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse. Drawing from several seemingly disparate theories, I situate my argument in the interstices of systems theory (Luhmann, Clarke), psychoanalysis (Lacan, Butler), media theory (Ellis, Fiske, Buonanno), and posthuman theory (Hayles, Badmington), putting forth a theoretical lens I call posthuman narrative onto-epistemology. The study thus fits into overlapping critical conversations. The extended treatment of five contemporary American novels situates Storied Subjects in conversations surrounding postmodernism and posthumanism as well as conversations surrounding these particular authors. For example, in the first chapter, I argue that the John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 incorporate the observer from systems theory into the narrative frame, catalyzing an ontological and epistemological shift. In the second chapter, I show the ways in which Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise and Underworld demonstrate what John Ellis calls the “witness” ontology as well as the evolution of that ontology into what I call the “direc-tor” in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In addition, the chapter devoted to televisual texts intervenes in an important, though often marginalized, conversation surrounding the importance of situating televisual narratives in dialogue with print fiction, arguing that we must attend to TV texts if we are to understand the texture of contemporary print fiction, which is saturated with the language of TV. In the final chapter, I explore the development of the “narrative agent” ontology, examining both form and content of the televisual texts Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse in order to argue that, once second-order observation reaches a prolonged critical awareness, the observer’s observation runs alongside her or his ability to intervene in the narrative, which allows for changing the story itself