Looking into the Environmental Factors Affecting the Performance of Ubiquitous Technologies Deployment: An Empirical Study on Chinese Information and Communication Technology Companies

Effective deployment of ubiquitous technologies can help companies improve the business efficiency, especially for those ICT (Information communication technology) companies who are involved in M-business, M-commerce, and etc. However, there are many factors could affect the performance of the ubiquitous technologies deployment, such as the company’s management, the employee’s coordination, and etc. In this paper, we are focused on the environmental factors that would have an impact on the performance of organizations which have deployed or is deploying ubiquitous technologies, and investigate more than 50 Chinese ICT companies. According to our findings, in the context of China, a sensible, dependent, and interactive business relationship with the outside environment will have a positive impact on their ubiquitous technologies deployment’s performance, while the decentralization and hierarchism within organizational structure in the inside environment will have a negative impact on their ubiquitous technologies deployment’s performance

Essays on Chinese Culture and Accountability

This thesis comprises three empirical essays revolving on the influence of socio-cultural space on organisational accountability practices. The first essay is entitled 'An exploratory study of corporate social responsibility in Chinese private enterprises', which adopts a post-disciplinary control theoretical perspective to discuss the interactions and interplay between enterprises and the government on CSR activities, and to analyse the motivational logic of spontaneous CSR production and change in Chinese private enterprises. The second essay, entitled 'Revisiting possibilities and limits of accountability through the lens of Chinese drinking culture', explores the influence of the institutional setting on the forms of accountability, and analyses the widespread phenomenon of social accountability in Chinese accounting practices in the light of the works of Roberts (1991) and Messner (2009), enriching the understanding of the possibilities and limits of accountability. The third essay entitled 'A gender perspective on accounting accountability: the implications of Chinese drinking culture', is an extension of the second essay based on accounting accountability, explores how the socio-cultural context influences and constructs gendered accounting accountability workplaces. The three pieces employ qualitative research through interviews and field observations, to examine the characteristics of accountability practices from both CSR and accounting accountability aspects in Chinese enterprises. It analyses the interactions and tensions between the institutional environment and the accountability relationship, providing empirical experience through the lens of socio-cultural space for the relevant accounting accountability production literature

The return of social government: From ‘socialist calculation’ to ‘social analytics’

In recent years, there has been a panoply of new forms of ‘social’ government, as manifest in ‘social enterprise’ and ‘social media’. This follows an era of neoliberalism in which social logics were apparently being eliminated, through the expansion of economic rationalities. To understand this, the article explores the critique of the very notion of the ‘social’, as manifest in neoliberal contributions to the socialist calculation debate from the 1920s onwards. Understood as a zone lying between market and state, the social was accused by Mises and Hayek of being both unaccountable (lacking any units of measurement) and formless (lacking instruments of explication). The article then asks to what extent these critiques still retain their purchase, following recent developments in hedonic measurement and data analytics. The argument is made that new post-neoliberal forms of ‘social government’ may now be entirely plausible, though focusing on the corporation rather than the state

A toolbox for managing organisational issues in the early stage of the development of a ubiquitous computing application

In this paper, we present a toolbox for the prospective management of organisational issues in ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing applications are developed to enable new services and new ways of working, to increase management control and to improve safety. However, they may also interfere with established work practices and may have unforeseen consequences for organisations. Despite their importance, such organisational issues are rarely addressed in ubiquitous computing innovation projects. Drawing on socio-technical design approaches and existing research on organisational issues in ubiquitous computing, we have developed a toolbox containing three tools for managing organisational issues of ubiquitous computing applications in the early stage of development. The toolbox supports the realisation of hoped-for benefits of ubiquitous computing in organisations and the management of unwanted organisational issues. The "work process tool” supports the description of envisioned work processes, including flexibility and variability requirements, changing responsibilities and different points of view. The "work system tool” analyses the alignment between a ubiquitous computing application and work systems task completeness, independency and the fit between regulation opportunities and requirements. The "human controllability tool” assesses how the control capabilities of workers are enabled or constrained by the new ubiquitous computing application. We show the applicability of the toolbox using a case study of an early stage ubiquitous computing technology innovation project, where the toolbox contributed to the set-up of the field trial and the development of application guideline

Everyday Automation

This Open Access book brings the experiences of automation as part of quotidian life into focus. It asks how, where and when automated technologies and systems are emerging in everyday life across different global regions? What are their likely impacts in the present and future? How do engineers, policy makers, industry stakeholders and designers envisage artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) as solutions to individual and societal problems? How do these future visions compare with the everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities in which AI and ADM are experienced? What do people know about automation and what are their experiences of engaging with ‘actually existing’ AI and ADM technologies? An international team of leading scholars bring together research developed across anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies and ethnology, which shows how by rehumanising automation, we can gain deeper understandings of its societal impacts

Everyday Automation

This Open Access book brings the experiences of automation as part of quotidian life into focus. It asks how, where and when automated technologies and systems are emerging in everyday life across different global regions? What are their likely impacts in the present and future? How do engineers, policy makers, industry stakeholders and designers envisage artificial intelligence (AI) and automated decision-making (ADM) as solutions to individual and societal problems? How do these future visions compare with the everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities in which AI and ADM are experienced? What do people know about automation and what are their experiences of engaging with ‘actually existing’ AI and ADM technologies? An international team of leading scholars bring together research developed across anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies and ethnology, which shows how by rehumanising automation, we can gain deeper understandings of its societal impacts

Activism, refusal, expertise: responses to digital ubiquity

In this thesis I explore if and how digital technologies capture human potential in terms of economic value, and how this shapes imaginaries, subjectivities, and forms of relationality. I investigate ‘digital ubiquity’ as both an epistemological and material condition, and how this is manifest in the discourses that theorise, narrativise, advocate and oppose digital technologies in their many facets. I relay these considerations to Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism, and address how and where digital technologies - as extensions of capital - materialise capitalist realism as a ubiquitous force in everyday life (2009, p. 2). I consider how these dynamics influence imaginaries for the future, and whose politics and futures are privileged via the epistemic and material conditions of contemporary digital environments. The thesis is comprised, chiefly, of three critical case studies, each offering a response to various dynamics associated with ‘digitally ubiquity’. The first case study explores an ethnography I undertook at a ‘digital detox’ camp, which was a space that invited its participants to relinquish use of their digital devices and discussion of their professions for a four-day period. Here, I examine the pertinence of why a ‘detox’ from digital technology and work were encompassed with one another, and how the participants of the ‘digital detox’ understood digital technologies - or the lack thereof - to influence their behaviours, interpersonal relationships, and senses of self. The second case study explores prospective ‘blockchain for good’ initiatives, which are often offered as forms of techno-solutionism to issues surrounding financial inclusion and digital identity. I focus primarily upon how relationships between bodies and digitality are articulated within ‘blockchain for good’ discourses, and how these relationships speak to specific structures of power: not simply in terms of an intensification of big data by Western apparatuses, but also in terms of the epistemological and ideological ‘erasures’ that emerge when populations are rendered digitally legible in this way (Vazquez, 2011). The final case study explores the discourses employed by a left-wing think-tank entitled Autonomy, who critique the role of work within the UK and pose suggestions for prospective ‘post-work’ futures. Here, I continue my considerations around interrelationships between work and identity formation. I further explore if and where neoliberal discourse is invoked within Autonomy’s work, reflecting upon how this relates to articulations of ‘radical’ politics within a cultural context of ‘capitalist realism’

Making Life Work: Work and Life in Coliving

This thesis explores how life is made to work. This means, firstly, understanding how life enters the relations of production and how it is made to expend energy and produce value. Secondly, this means understanding the arrangements and practices that make life work in the sense of reproducing it, maintaining it and preventing it from falling apart. This theme was explored through an ethnographic study of coliving - a purpose-built accommodation for professionals and entrepreneurs - which strives to create conditions most conducive to professional success. The thesis analysed the ways in which personal and domestic life is redesigned and rearranged in relation to the ideals of productivity and how new ways of living can simultaneously offer mutual support and assistance among workers while also normalising practices of overworking, precarity and (self)exploitation. This research is pertinent to debates about the impact of work and economic practices on contemporary life and argues that academic and political debates must go beyond the focus on work-life balance and address the multiple pressures on personal and domestic life both within and outside of the workplace. The thesis develops a series of wider theoretical arguments and recommendations for future research. Firstly, it is argued that to understand the preference for modifying personal and domestic life, social analysis must go beyond ideological and discursive factors. It should consider the combination of discourse, attributes of the job situation, and characteristics of social reproduction that together produce a particularly intense commitment to work. Secondly, the thesis argues that in addition to focusing on how life is balanced with or colonised by work, the social analysis should focus on the social and material arrangements that maintain working lives. Thirdly, it argues for the importance of studying reflective and evaluative operations undertaken by social actors that question but ultimately reproduce intensive work-lives