Epoch, Epistemology and the Virtual Organization

This paper engages with contemporary discussions of ?the virtual organization?. Starting with some influential accounts that were published in the 1990s, the paper highlights the continued significance of control ration alities in the increasingly dispersed and disaggregated organizations of the advanced industrial societies. The paper also takes issue with the ?epochalist? tendency to equate virtuality with the ?end of organization?, and it puts the case for a more historically situated view of technology in ?post bureaucratic? or ?virtualised? organizational settings

Information Technology in the Service Economy: Challenges and Possibilities for the 21 st Century

Abstract Advances in information technolog

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

In the future, toward death: Finance capitalism and security in Don DeLillo’s ‘Cosmopolis’

This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo’s novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism

Users\u27 understandings of the virtual economy in social virtual worlds: consumption and entrepreneurship of virtual goods

Social virtual worlds (SVWs) such as Second Life have gained immense popularity during the last decade. Their popularity is reflected in the explosive growth of the in-world economy, which is mainly supported by users’ consumption of virtual goods and entrepreneurial behavior. Users’ economic behavior has increased the size of the virtual economy to reach over $1B in the United States in 2009 (Nicholson 2009). Given that virtual consumption and entrepreneurship have become an important part of everyday virtual life in SVWs, understanding these two types of economic activities is an essential aspect to understanding user behavior in SVWs. This research aims at investigating the meanings of virtual consumption and entrepreneurship for users. The research consists of two independent essays. In the first essay about virtual consumption, I examine users’ understandings of virtual consumption through core-periphery analysis of its social representation. 154 Second Life users participated in the web-based survey for this study. I also identify user goals for virtual consumption by using means-end chain analysis, based on interviews with 93 Second Life users. The second essay on the topic of virtual entrepreneurship examines the collective meanings of virtual entrepreneurship and their relationship with the collective meanings of SVWs. To understand the meanings of virtual entrepreneurship, the core-periphery structure of social representations of virtual entrepreneurship is analyzed, based on interviews with 24 Second Life entrepreneurs. The meanings of virtual entrepreneurship are explained and compared with the central meanings of SVWs, identified from 101 newspaper articles on SVWs from 2005 to 2009. The results show that virtual consumption penetrates extensively into the virtual life of users and make their virtual experience in SVWs much richer; that virtual entrepreneurship is institutionalized in SVWs, and the key meanings of SVWs are well translated into the meanings of virtual entrepreneurship. This research contributes in providing fundamental knowledge about virtual consumption and entrepreneurship and further suggests potential theoretical frameworks for future research. Implications for SVW service providers and producers and sellers of virtual goods are also identified. Another contribution of the research is to demonstrate alternative qualitative research approaches combined with quantitative analyses

Do digital hugs work? Re-embodying our social lives online with digital tact

The COVID-19 pandemic led to social restrictions that often prevented us from hugging the ones we love. This absence helped some realize just how important these interactions are to our sense of care and connection. Many turned to digitally mediated social interactions to address these absences, but often unsatisfactorily. Some theorists might blame this on the disembodied character of our digital spaces, e.g., that interpersonal touch is excluded from our lives online. However, others continued to find care and connection in their digitally mediated interactions despite not being able to touch. Inspired by such contrasting cases, we ask if ‘digital hugs’ can work? We use the Mixed Reality Interaction Matrix to examine hugging as a social practice. This leads us to several claims about the nature of our embodied social interactions and their digital mediation: (1) all social interaction is mediated; (2) all virtual experiences are embodied; (3) technology has become richer and more supportive of embodiment; and (4) expertise plays a role. These claims help make the case that quality social connections online are substantially dependent upon the dynamic skilful resourcing of multiple mediating components, what we term digital tact. By introducing and developing this concept, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of our digital embodied sociality and the possibilities for caring connections online.journal articl

Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time

Digital technologies globally interlink finance, production, consumption, mass communication, and cyberculture. The processes of interlinkage generate the sense that time is accelerating towards instantaneity. Promoters and critical observers of such developments have created a proliferating discourse of ‘real time’. This key phrase and its associated terminology covers a diversity of referent spaces (e.g. cyberculture, financial flows, supply-chain management, on-line selling, live media events). In the context of global capitalism, discursive constructions of ‘real time’ are interrelated with new temporal constructions of systemic power. The nature of this interrelationship is obscured by the ideological features of ‘real time’ terminology. Here, this argument will be developed with references to popular business literature and (supposedly) critical academic writings. I conclude with a set of preliminary requirements for an effective critique of ‘real time’

The Social Embeddedness of Industrial Networks in the Age of the Internet: A Tale of Two Regions In China

In this article we examine the extent to which theoretical views of social embeddedness of economic development that were developed from the study of regional industrial networks continue to be relevant in cases of entrepreneurial networks that are formed in developing countries through the use of internet-based platforms and business services. We frame our research against the background of current libertarian discourse regarding the internet as an enabler of social networking which changes the institutional bearings of production and economic activity of modernity. We draw data from two cases of industrial networks of micro-entrepreneurs in China. Our research shows that although important relationships of the industrial network are virtual, conducted through the electronic tools and services, the networks are strongly socially embedded, sustained through close relationships with the corporation that provides the internet platform as well as the governmen