Folding and unfolding : balancing openness and transparency in open source communities

Open source communities rely on the espoused premise of complete openness and transparency of source code and development process. Yet, openness and transparency at times need to be balanced out with moments of less open and transparent work. Through our detailed study of Linux Kernel development we build a theory that explains that transparency and openness are nuanced and changing qualities that certain developers manage as they use multiple digital technologies and create, in moments of needs, more opaque and closed digital spaces of work. We refer to these spaces as digital folds. Our paper contributes to extant literature: by providing a process theory of how transparency and openness are balanced with opacity and closure in open source communities according to the needs of the development work; by conceptualizing the nature of digital folds and their role in providing quiet spaces of work: and, by articulating how the process of digital folding and unfolding is made far more possible by select elite actors’ navigating the line between the pragmatics of coding and the accepted ideology of openness and transparency

Making choices? The lives of vocational college students in China

Vocational education in China is failing to meet the need for upskilling its workforce to support the country’s rapid industrial growth and this is impeding its ability to compete (Stewart, 2015). Recent policy changes to address this problem reflect government concerns (State Council, 2019a; 2019b). Since the start of the Reform Era in 1978, vocational education has been politically and financially neglected in favour of university expansion (Klorer and Stepan, 2015, p. 4). In China, vocational education is seen as inferior to academic routes (Yang, 2004; Zha, 2011) and positioned at the bottom of the educational hierarchy (Mok, 2001, Stewart, 2015). Vocational students are stereotyped as ‘stupid and lazy’ and suffer considerable prejudice in Chinese society (Woronov, 2015). Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, this study investigates the lived experiences of vocational youth in China, their capacity for individual choice, and their aspirations. The primary research question for this project is: How are young people in China exercising “personal agency” in their educational and career choices within the existing social and educational structure? The quantitative data for this study comes from the responses to a small-scale questionnaire survey of vocational education students in two colleges in northern China. The qualitative data was gathered through 8 focus group and 18 interview sessions conducted in these two colleges. Additional interviews were also carried out with four teaching staff. Data was gathered on the students’ choice-making processes, their opinions of their current vocational colleges and programmes, their perceptions of future employment opportunities, and their thoughts on the prevalent stereotyping against them. The findings are analysed and discussed utilising a theoretical framework which draws on three lenses: the individualisation thesis, a Foucauldian perspective, and Marxist political economy. Each with its own unique theoretical attributes, the lenses are utilised to make sense of the findings and inform our understanding of the relationship between personal choice-making and structural pressures within the context of the neoliberal influences on China since the end of the 1970s. The findings reveal that for vocational youth, individual agency has been manufactured and governed with the aid of the mechanisms of examinations and performativity to produce neoliberal subjects. “Choosing” to attend vocational colleges on leaving secondary education can be regarded as a passive response to the increasing demand for educational credentials in China’s Reform Era. Once at the colleges, the students received only fragmented skills training and lacked the confidence and skills readiness to envisage long-term career progression. They were further burdened with the “vocational student” label, which is of itself pejorative, and serves to remind them it is their own failure that renders them unable to gain any sense of worth. This group of young people are managed through a meritocratic system which only values academic routes. The agency of the vocational students—their capacity to make choices and take responsibility—has been constructed and managed to meet the needs of the neoliberal market and China’s export-oriented economy. The Chinese government has been strengthening the focus on vocational education over the past few years to meet a different need now which is to upskill the workforce (State Council, 2017). There is a dissonance between this goal and the neoliberal effects of the Reform Era which has produced vocational students not valued by society and lacking in self-worth

Archetypes of open-source business models

The open-source paradigm offers a plethora of opportunities for innovative business models (BMs) as the underlying codebase of the technology is accessible and extendable by external developers. However, finding the proper configuration of open-source business models (OSBMs) is challenging, as existing literature gives guidance through commonly used BMs but does not describe underlying design elements. The present study generates a taxonomy following an iterative development process based on established guidelines by analyzing 120 OSBMs to complement the taxonomy's conceptually-grounded design elements. Then, a cluster-based approach is used to develop archetypes derived from dominant features. The results show that OSBMs can be classified into seven archetypical patterns: open-source platform BM, funding-based BM, infrastructure BM, Open Innovation BM, Open Core BM, proprietary-like BM, and traditional open-source software (OSS) BM. The results can act as a starting point for further investigation regarding the use of the open-source paradigm in the era of digital entrepreneurship. Practitioners can find guidance in designing OSBMs

Open source software ecosystems : a systematic mapping

Context: Open source software (OSS) and software ecosystems (SECOs) are two consolidated research areas in software engineering. OSS influences the way organizations develop, acquire, use and commercialize software. SECOs have emerged as a paradigm to understand dynamics and heterogeneity in collaborative software development. For this reason, SECOs appear as a valid instrument to analyze OSS systems. However, there are few studies that blend both topics together. Objective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the current state of the art in OSS ecosystems (OSSECOs) research, specifically: (a) what the most relevant definitions related to OSSECOs are; (b) what the particularities of this type of SECO are; and (c) how the knowledge about OSSECO is represented. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping following recommended practices. We applied automatic and manual searches on different sources and used a rigorous method to elicit the keywords from the research questions and selection criteria to retrieve the final papers. As a result, 82 papers were selected and evaluated. Threats to validity were identified and mitigated whenever possible. Results: The analysis allowed us to answer the research questions. Most notably, we did the following: (a) identified 64 terms related to the OSSECO and arranged them into a taxonomy; (b) built a genealogical tree to understand the genesis of the OSSECO term from related definitions; (c) analyzed the available definitions of SECO in the context of OSS; and (d) classified the existing modelling and analysis techniques of OSSECOs. Conclusion: As a summary of the systematic mapping, we conclude that existing research on several topics related to OSSECOs is still scarce (e.g., modelling and analysis techniques, quality models, standard definitions, etc.). This situation calls for further investigation efforts on how organizations and OSS communities actually understand OSSECOs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Digital Marketing and the Culture Industry: The Ethics of Big Data

Instead of the steady march of the one percent growth in ecommerce as compared to total retail revenues in the last decade (to comprise about nine percent of the industry at the close of 2019), we have witnessed leaps now to over twenty percent in just the last year. Scott Galloway marks the pandemic as an accelerant not just of digital marketing posting a year of growth for each month of quarantine but as an accelerant of each major GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) firm from market dominance to total dominance (Galloway 2020). Viewing these trends from the standpoint of critical marketing requires revisiting first-generation critical theorist reflections on the American dominance of the global culture industry. Insofar as GAFA digital marketing practices highlight their transition from mere neutral platforms to shapers, creators, and drivers of cultural content, we need to complement marketing’s praiseworthy achievements in statistical modeling (like SEM) with a sufficiently critical and theoretical contextualization. In this sense, while my investigation of big data will certainly countenance and explore its statistical (as algorithmic) innovations, what I capitalize as Big Data connotes the manners in which these large reserves of behavioral exhaust shape culture—domestic and global, home and workplace, private and public. The focus on ethics in each of these three articles follows not just moral norms, social practices, and associated virtues (or vices), but also the important ethical domains of compliance, basic rights, and juridical precedent. In the first article, I focus most exclusively on the manners in which GAFA algorithmic personalization tends to employ the alluring promise of individual tailoring of service convenience at the social costs of echo chambers, filter bubbles, and endemic political polarization. In the second article, I seek to devise a data theory of value as the wider context for my proposal to advance a new marketing mix. My tentative argument is that the classical subject as constructed by these platform domains has now juxtaposed the consumer and firm relationship. The true value creators of the workforce of the digital marketplace are its users as prosumers: an odd mixture of consumer, producer, and product. While the production era took nature as the collateral damage to its claims upon mining limited raw materials, the onset of a consumption driven economy harvests psychic and behavioral data as its new unlimited raw material with its own trails of collateral damage that constitute the birth of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). In the third article, I turn to systemic racism in American sport with the focus on the performative rituals sanctioned, censored, and sold by the NFL as its foremost culture industry. In this last article, I also seek to develop a revamped epistemology for critical marketing that places a new primacy on the voices and experiences of those most systemically marginalized as the best lens from which to advance theories and practices that can disclose forms of latent domination often hidden behind otherwise an uncritical acceptance of the NFL culture industry as fundamentally apolitical leisurely entertainment

Foundations of Scholarly Writing

Academic research, transcending disciplinary boundaries, mandates adherence to established core principles, ensuring ethical rigor and substantial contributions to knowledge. Comprehensive literature reviews are pivotal in unearthing research gaps, laying the groundwork for investigations that yield novel insights. The alignment of research questions with robust methodologies—be it qualitative, quantitative, or a hybrid—fortifies the validity of outcomes. Meticulous writing and strategic publication approaches are instrumental in effective dissemination and impact generation. A commitment to transparency, ethical integrity, and the acknowledgment of inherent limitations is fundamental to maintaining credibility. In an era where research is continually evolving, particularly with the advent of new technologies, the agility in ethical reasoning is essential to navigate emerging complexities and ethical quandaries. Efforts to minimize potential harms, honor diverse perspectives, and uphold moral principles remain non-negotiable ethical imperatives. Institutional training programs, established protocols, codes of conduct, and vigilant oversight embed a culture of integrity within academic spheres. Recommendations for future research writing include the development of interdisciplinary teams, ongoing training in critical thinking, and ensuring that ethical standards keep pace with the rapid evolution of technology

An empirical study of a cross-industry and cross-sectoral (public-private) open business model : a journey through the value creating open practices and praxis of boundary-spanning practitioners

This study is grounded in the perspective of strategy-as-practice and draws, principally, on literature from strategy, industrial marketing (IM) and business models (BMs). In recent years, the BM concept has attracted increasing attention from scholars in a variety of academic disciplines and areas of professional practice. Much empirical BM research across all disciplines appears to focus on single organisation studies. This approach, arguably, provides a rather parochial view of BMs. In this study, I contend that a BM represents more than just the revenue model of a single firm, but rather views BMs as a broader, pluralistic concept that has the potential to be deployed by practitioners in a network context. I present an early contribution to open business model (OBM) literature - those BMs in which value is created/co-created and captured between actors outside the boundaries of a single firm - in this thesis. The empirical setting for the study is centred on three firms that form a single (focal) cross-industry and cross-sectoral (public-private) OBM (focal OBM). In particular, the three firms, which comprise a lead (hub) firm as an OBM innovator, a supplier firm and a buyer firm, form a supply chain through from upstream supplier to downstream end user. This supply chain takes in and considers a public and private sector downstream dyadic, a vertical upstream supply chain buyer-supplier dyad, as well as the broader strategic network and business ecosystem contexts of the three firms in a solutions provision arrangement. A qualitative, inductive, case study methodology is deployed to examine the three firms as embedded units of analysis. The data sources consist of twenty-five semi-structured interviews supplemented by archives of publications. In this study, I make theoretical contributions to OBM literature by advancing current understanding of OBMs in a cross-industry and cross-sectoral (public-private) context. The underlying assumption that existing studies provide only single-level insight into BMs is challenged. In particular, I contribute to BM literature by offering multi-level insight into an OBM as a regional strategic network, a network that also forms part of a national platform ecosystem. Furthermore, as a challenge to this predominant static understanding of BMs, I also make practical contributions by advancing current understanding by examining OBMs as strategic practice, thus breaking with the rhetorical nature of much BM literature. By focusing on practitioners and their capabilities in OBMs, this approach, therefore, addresses partially the under-socialisation of current BM research and adds insight into the open practices of these practitioners within OBMs. In particular, I offer insight into value creation/co-creation and value capture, as strategic practice. As the focal OBM crosses industry and sectoral boundaries, I also advance knowledge where it is currently lacking into the influence of boundary-spanning practitioners in OBMs.[Includes published article available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2013.05.005