Corporate Social Responsibilityin the Blogosphere

This paper uses social network analysis to examine the interaction between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in a virtual community, we show the potential of online platforms to document corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and to engage with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware stakeholder base. The results of this study show that stakeholder involvement via sustainability blogs is a valuable new practice for CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. It also opens new horizons for communicating CSR issues to key constituencies onlin

Social Media — Herausforderungen für den Journalismus

Zusammenfassung: Das journalistische Geschäftsmodell steckt in einer Krise. Nicht nur die Leserzahlen sinken, sondern auch die Werbeeinnahmen — sowohl die Leser als auch die Werbegelder wandern ab ins Internet. Doch genau dort bietet das Internet mit den sozialen Medien dem Journalismus auch eine Chance, sich neu zu definieren. Durch ein neues Rollenverständnis und ein verändertes Verhältnis zwischen Lesern und Journalisten kann der Journalismus beweisen, dass er noch immer Mehrwerte schafft, die nicht ersetzt werden könne

Emotional Labor in the Sharing Economy

The peer-to-peer nature of the sharing economy encourages participants to alter their behavior in ways that resemble traditional notions of emotional labor. A key element in this shift lies in the coercive nature of feedback mechanisms which condition both providers and consumers to perform emotional labor during service encounters. Using survey data from 207 sharing economy consumers in the US, we show how different facets of the feedback mechanisms employed by sharing economy services influence consumers’ emotional labor. In addition, we show how platforms and their policies matter in encouraging emotional labor, indicating the need to analyze the topic on a fine-grained level. We conclude by deriving propositions for future research and practical recommendations

The Pursuit of Empowerment through Social Media: Structural Social Capital Dynamics in CSR-Blogging

With the emergence of participative social media, the ways in which stakeholders may interact with companies are changing. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies change gatekeeping mechanisms and the distribution of information. In consequence, organizations must realize that they are structurally embedded in online networks of interconnected and equitable actors. In this paper, we analyze how this change in today's information and communication technologies may affect Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) action. We utilize social network analysis to investigate the CSR blogs of three IT firms: Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel. The analysis reveals that their Internet-enabled social networks exhibit patterns of power law distribution and an uneven distribution of structural social capital among the actors involved, especially on the corporate side, which fails to fully engage with the network. We conclude by indicating the research implications of shifting social capital dynamics and by deriving implications for management and practic

Aller Künste Wissenschaft

Johann Friedrich von Uffenbach was a wealthy scion of a Frankfurt patrician family, of hereditary nobility, and the younger brother of Zacharias Conrad (1683-1734), one of the greatest book collectors and manuscript specialists of his time. He first studied under the mathematical rationalist Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff (1679-1754) in Halle before earning a law degree from the University of Strasbourg in 1714. As a European traveler, he kept detailed travel diaries and lived in Frankfurt as a private scholar with technical, natural history and artistic interests, a collector of books, instruments, paintings, drawings and prints. His enthusiasm for everything technical, measurable and newly invented led to experimental learning in a wide variety of fields, but - since there was no compulsion to earn a living - rarely to long-term employment. Practical evidence of Uffenbach's activities are, for example, a renovated bridge over the Main, various large fireworks, diverse music and an opera as well as some copperplate engravings. His scientific activities are documented in handwritten records, such as more than 8,000 pages of travel diaries, five volumes of minutes of meetings of his learned society founded in Frankfurt, numerous letters and manuscripts of unpublished writings: Uffenbach enjoyed traveling, learning, reading and testing, but the breadth of his studies was more important to him than their depth. Uffenbach's own handwritten catalogs and inventories of the collections correlated manuscripts with printed books in the library, instruments, models, drawings, and copper engravings. The result was a complex, multi-part working tool that he bequeathed in 1736 to the newly founded University of Göttingen, which received it after his death in 1770. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version

Deep Learning Meets Deep Democracy: Deliberative Governance and Responsible Innovation in Artificial Intelligence

Responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) calls for public deliberation: well-informed “deep democratic” debate that involves actors from the public, private, and civil society sectors in joint efforts to critically address the goals and means of AI. Adopting such an approach constitutes a challenge, however, due to the opacity of AI and strong knowledge boundaries between experts and citizens. This undermines trust in AI and undercuts key conditions for deliberation. We approach this challenge as a problem of situating the knowledge of actors from the AI industry within a deliberative system. We develop a new framework of responsibilities for AI innovation as well as a deliberative governance approach for enacting these responsibilities. In elucidating this approach, we show how actors from the AI industry can most effectively engage with experts and nonexperts in different social venues to facilitate well-informed judgments on opaque AI systems and thus effectuate their democratic governance