Co-creation of Value in IT Service Processes Using Semantic MediaWiki

Abstract: Enterprises are substituting their own IT-Systems by services provided by external providers. This provisioning of services may be done in an industrialized way, separating the service provider from the consumer. However, using industrialized services diminishes the capability to differentiate from competitors. To counter this, collaborative service processes based on the co-creation of value between service providers and prosumers are of huge importance. The approach presented shows how the co-creation of value in IT-service processes can profit from social software, using the example of the Semantic MediaWiki

The ethics of uncertainty for data subjects

Modern health data practices come with many practical uncertainties. In this paper, I argue that data subjects’ trust in the institutions and organizations that control their data, and their ability to know their own moral obligations in relation to their data, are undermined by significant uncertainties regarding the what, how, and who of mass data collection and analysis. I conclude by considering how proposals for managing situations of high uncertainty might be applied to this problem. These emphasize increasing organizational flexibility, knowledge, and capacity, and reducing hazard

Shipping as a Knowledge Industry: Research and Strategic Planning at Ocean Group

This chapter approaches the question of how transformations in the world of shipping relate to wider trends in business and general history through the lens of knowledge. It will investigate how technological and managerial knowledge was created, developed and exploited as a corporate resource from the 1950s onwards in Ocean Transport and Trading, one of the UK’s leading liner shipping firms. The chapter will, first, briefly discuss the resource-based view of the firm and the importance of knowledge as a corporate resource. It will then examine Ocean’s use of technological and operational knowledge in the post-war era. The following section examines the introduction of modern management concepts at Ocean from the late 1960s and their impact on corporate strategy. In conclusion, the chapter will argue that the introduction of managerial concepts of knowledge contributed to Ocean’s gradual withdrawal from shipping and transformation into a provider of global logistics services and that analyzing shipping as a knowledge industry helps make sense of the transformation of the industry

The pursuit of happiness: the social and scientific origins of Hans Selye’s natural philosophy of life

© The Author(s) 2012. Open access article.In 1956, Hans Selye tentatively suggested that the scientific study of stress could ‘help us to formulate a precise program of conduct’ and ‘teach us the wisdom to live a rich and meaningful life’. Nearly two decades later, Selye expanded this limited vision of social order into a full-blown philosophy of life. In Stress without Distress, first published in 1974, he proposed an ethical code of conduct designed to mitigate personal and social problems. Basing his arguments on contemporary understandings of the biological processes involved in stress reactions, Selye referred to this code as ‘altruistic egotism’. This article explores the origins and evolution of Selye’s ‘natural philosophy of life’, analysing the links between his theories and adjacent intellectual developments in biology, psychosomatic and psychosocial medicine, cybernetics and socio-biology, and situating his work in the broader cultural framework of modern western societies.Wellcome Trus

Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time

So-called social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and LinkedIn are an expression of changing regimes of time in capitalist society. This paper discusses how corporate social media are related to the capitalist organization of time and the changes this organization is undergoing. It uses social theory for conceptualizing changes of society and its time regime and how these changes shape social media. These changes have been described with notions such as prosumption, consumption labour, play labour (playbour) and digital labour. The paper contextualizes digital labour on social media with the help of a model of society that distinguishes three subsystems (the economy, politics, culture) and three forms of power (economic, political, culture). In modern society, these systems are based on the logic of the accumulation of power and the acceleration of accumulation. The paper discusses the role of various dimensions of time in capitalism with the help of a model that is grounded in Karl Marx’s works. It points out the importance of the category of time for a labour theory of value and a digital labour theory of value. Social media are expressions of the changing time regimes that modern society has been undergoing, especially in relation to the blurring of leisure and labour time (play labour), production and consumption time (prosumption), new forms of absolute and relative surplus value production, the acceleration of consumption with the help of targeted online advertising and the creation of speculative, future-oriented forms of fictitious capital

Anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience

Anticipation is increasingly central to urgent contemporary debates, from climate change to the global economic crisis. Anticipatory practices are coming to the forefront of political, organizational, and citizens’ society. Research into anticipation, however, has not kept pace with public demand for insights into anticipatory practices, their risks and uses. Where research exists, it is deeply fragmented. This paper seeks to identify how anticipation is defined and understood in the literature and to explore the role of anticipatory practice to address individual, social, and global challenges. We use a resilience lens to examine these questions. We illustrate how varying forms of anticipatory governance are enhanced by multi-scale regional networks and technologies and by the agency of individuals, drawing from an empirical case study on regional water governance of Malaren, Sweden. Finally, we discuss how an anticipatory approach can inform adaptive institutions, decision making, strategy formation, and societal resilience

Good to be bad : should we be worried by the sharing economy?

We develop the notion of a legitimacy tipping point to demonstrate how informal economy practices are being utilized by innovative sharing economy ventures to gain a competitive advantage that is subsequently leveraged to reconfigure formal institutional arrangements. Companies who are able to scale rapidly can afford to contravene regulations, provided they have public support. When they reach a certain size, in terms of investment and customer numbers, regulators are forced into a reactive position where novel business models are legitimized. This raises an important question for regulators and entrepreneurs as to whether subverting business regulation is being viewed as a viable source of competitive advantage by scaling firms