The Street and Organization Studies

Work and organization increasingly happen in transit. People meet in coffee shops and write emails from their phones while waiting for buses or sitting outdoors on benches. Business meetings are held in airports and projects are run from laptops during travel. We take the street as a place where organizing in transit accumulates. While the organization studies field has been catching up with various related phenomena, including co-working, digital nomadism, and mobile and online communities, we argue that it has overlooked what has historically been the most important site for organizational activity outside of organizations. The street has been both location and inspiration for organizing, whether political, social, or governmental. It is a space of both planning and spontaneity, of silent co-existence and explicit conflict, and therefore offers abundant empirical and methodological opportunities. It is surprising that the street and the experiences it brings with it have remained largely outside the scope of organization studies. We suggest that organization scholars take to the street, and offer recommendations asto how to do so. Specifically, we explore the tensionsthat become apparent when organizing happens in and through the street

Business Models and Technological Innovation

Business models are fundamentally linked with technological innovation, yet the business model construct is essentially separable from technology. We define the business model as a system that solves the problem of identifying who is (or are) the customer(s), engaging with their needs, delivering satisfaction, and monetizing the value. The framework depicts the business model system as a model containing cause and effect relationships, and it provides a basis for classification. We formulate the business model relationship with technology in a two-way manner. First, business models mediate the link between technology and firm performance. Secondly, developing the right technology is a matter of a business model decision regarding openness and user engagement. We suggest research questions both for technology management and innovation, as well as strategy

Building a Winning Business Model Portfolio

Many companies today are operating several business models at once. But despite the potential that business model diversification has for generating growth and profit, executives need to carefully assess the strategic contributions of each element of their business model portfolio

Under the radar: Industry entry by user entrepreneurs

We inductively develop a model of the commercialization process for new products or services user entrepreneurs undertake when entering an industry while drawing on proprietary technology developed in another industry. Extending the growing field of user entrepreneurship, we identify a two-phase approach to industry entry by user entrepreneurs who start "under the radar" of incumbent firms, gain experience, attract a first potential customer base, and then, in a second phase, engage in commercialization. During this process, a community of fellow users is of major importance for the entrepreneur, serving as a knowledge pool for skills development and experimentation with different commercialization paths. We study a nascent group of firms founded by users of video games who became entrepreneurs on entering the animation industry by producing Machinima, a new film genre characterized by shooting film in video games. We explain how user entrepreneurs gain access to complementary assets (video games) for their new use (shooting film), how they deal with intellectual property issues when using other firms' assets, and how user entrepreneurs combine domain knowledge about film production with their experience in video games and the art of Machinima. Our propositions hold implications for management and policy

Communal resources in open source software development

Introduction: Virtual communities play an important role in innovation. The paper focuses on the particular form of collective action in virtual communities underlying as Open Source software development projects. Method: Building on resource mobilization theory and private-collective innovation, we propose a theory of collective action in innovative virtual communities. We identify three communal resources (reputation, control over technology and learning opportunities) that appear as a byproduct while developing open source software. Analysis:Constructs are derived from exiting literature. Empirical data from Freenet, an open source software project for peer-to-peer software, illustrates both the levels of involvement and the communal resources. Results & conclusions: Communal resources are able to solve the collective action dilemma for virtual communities. We show that they increase in value for individuals along with their involvement in the community

On a notion of maps between orbifolds, I. function spaces

This is the first of a series of papers which are devoted to a comprehensive theory of maps between orbifolds. In this paper, we define the maps in the more general context of orbispaces, and establish several basic results concerning the topological structure of the space of such maps. In particular, we show that the space of such maps of C^r-class between smooth orbifolds has a natural Banach orbifold structure if the domain of the map is compact, generalizing the corresponding result in the manifold case. Motivations and applications of the theory come from string theory and the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves in symplectic orbifolds.Comment: Final version, 46 pages. Accepted for publication in Communications in Contemporary Mathematics. A preliminary version of this work is under a different title "A homotopy theory of orbispaces", arXiv: math. AT/010202

Carrots and Rainbows: Motivation and Social Practice in Open Source Software Development

Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation-practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS

Genital Chlamydia trachomatis: understanding the roles of innate and adaptive immunity in vaccine research.

Chlamydia trachomatis is the leading cause of bacterial sexually transmitted disease worldwide, and despite significant advances in chlamydial research, a prophylactic vaccine has yet to be developed. This Gram-negative obligate intracellular bacterium, which often causes asymptomatic infection, may cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), ectopic pregnancies, scarring of the fallopian tubes, miscarriage, and infertility when left untreated. In the genital tract, Chlamydia trachomatis infects primarily epithelial cells and requires Th1 immunity for optimal clearance. This review first focuses on the immune cells important in a chlamydial infection. Second, we summarize the research and challenges associated with developing a chlamydial vaccine that elicits a protective Th1-mediated immune response without inducing adverse immunopathologies

What makes a social practice? Being, knowing, doing and leading

Despite several decades of work on social practice, many open intriguing questions remain about their existence and functions within an organizational context. In this article, we discuss the “inherent logics” of social practice—being, knowing, and doing—to depict the meaning and mainspring of its conservation within an organizational context. We argue that the understanding of social practice in organization and management studies has predominantly focused on the internal workings of social practice, and we propose that a contextualization of the inherent logics of social practice may be a next step in advancing theory and empirical research. We propose a contested coexistence of social practices in organizations and thereby argue that the conservation of social practice protrudes another element belonging to its inherent logics, i.e., leading. We suggest that leadership in distributed and adaptive organizations responds to innovation and competitive challenges with wisdom, care, and fluidity

Targeting endothelial connexin40 inhibits tumor growth by reducing angiogenesis and improving vessel perfusion.

Endothelial connexin40 (Cx40) contributes to regulate the structure and function of vessels. We have examined whether the protein also modulates the altered growth of vessels in tumor models established in control mice (WT), mice lacking Cx40 (Cx40-/-), and mice expressing the protein solely in endothelial cells (Tie2-Cx40). Tumoral angiogenesis and growth were reduced, whereas vessel perfusion, smooth muscle cell (SMC) coverage and animal survival were increased in Cx40-/- but not Tie2-Cx40 mice, revealing a critical involvement of endothelial Cx40 in transformed tissues independently of the hypertensive status of Cx40-/- mice. As a result, Cx40-/- mice bearing tumors survived significantly longer than corresponding controls, including after a cytotoxic administration. Comparable observations were made in WT mice injected with a peptide targeting Cx40, supporting the Cx40 involvement. This involvement was further confirmed in the absence of Cx40 or by peptide-inhibition of this connexin in aorta-sprouting, matrigel plug and SMC migration assays, and associated with a decreased expression of the phosphorylated form of endothelial nitric oxide synthase. The data identify Cx40 as a potential novel target in cancer treatment