Consumer Types versus Stereotypes: Exploring Social Tensions in the Luxury Market of South Africa

This paper investigates the behavior and perceptions of luxury consumers in a situation where groups are competing to own status symbols. It uses the South African luxury market as the context to demonstrate how established elites attempt to prevent status deprivation by inhibiting the misappropriation of their status symbol. In South Africa, the legacies and redresses of apartheid have led to a racial divide between the established elite (the whites) and the emerging elite (the previously disadvantaged blacks). Affirmative action policies have lead to socioeconomic shifts, resulting in contestations for status. Using a mix method of survey and cluster analysis, media analysis, interviews and observations, results are triangulated to capture the shifting luxury consumer landscape in South Africa. Four distinct clusters of consumers are distinguished, and their experiences with, and motivations for, luxury consumption explored. Findings indicate that the “competition” to “own” the luxury status symbol has given rise to stereotypes that debase the black luxury consumer. Consequently, the stereotype-threat influences the behavior of black consumers. These dynamics raise market segmentation and promotional mix issues

Explaining ICT Infrastructure and E-Commerce Uses and Benefits in Industrial Clusters-Evidence from a Biotech Cluster

The literature on industrial clusters has not focused heavily on the role of the ICT infrastructure, nor on the potential implications of electronic commerce. In this paper, we examine the theoretical bases for bringing these research streams together, and develop expectations for how firms in an industrial cluster might utilize and derive benefit from a public, broadband ICT infrastructure, particularly in support of e-commerce applications. A case study of a successful biotech cluster in Denmark and Sweden – the Medicon Valley – provides a preliminary test of these expectations. Distinctions in uses and benefits based upon firm size are considered. A key finding is that small firms that would not otherwise be expected to gain from global e-commerce can rely on the cluster "brand " to enable trade with unknown and distant partners

Boundary Spanning through Enterprise Social Software: An External Stakeholder Perspective

Recent boundary spanning literature has recommended a shift toward assessing the role of virtual tools—such as social media. Simultaneously the proliferation of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) points to the need to theorize and investigate the supra-individual usage of these tools. This exploratory study responds to both mandates through a longitudinal, multi-method investigation of ESS’ effects on boundary spanning by virtual research teams within a worldwide provider of workplace solutions. Combining survey, ESS log, and content data, this study complements the dominant internal focus of the boundary spanning literature with an external stakeholder perspective to analyze the types of boundary spanning activities enacted through ESS, the perceptions of these activities by external parties, as well as the effect of ESS hereon. Disentangling ESS’ effects on boundary spanning not only extends our current understanding of the potential role of social media, but can further inform the design of supportive tools

Spanning the Boundary: Measuring the Realized and Lifecycle Impact of Distinct Boundary Spanning Activities on Project Success and Completion

For work teams to be effective, maintaining communication ties with other individuals and teams elsewhere in the organization—an activity typically referred to as team boundary spanning—is necessary for obtaining resources critical to project success. Within the literature on boundary spanning, the positive relationship between a team’s boundary-spanning activities and their performance has been validated repeatedly, but primarily through the use of self-reports from managers and team members. Thus, neither objective data exists to support these claims nor a longitudinal understanding of how various boundary-spanning activities may play different roles at various stages of project work. Similarly, with the proliferating use of enterprise social media (ESM) technologies in organizations, the empirical link between the increased visibility of communication ties in ESM and more effective boundary spanning has been largely assumed, but has received only limited empirical validation. In this study, drawing on log and content data from 169 projects in an ESM of a large multi-national corporation, we aim to objectively assess the effect of boundary spanning on project success as well as provide a qualitative path model of the evolution of boundary-spanning activities throughout the lifecycle of a project through a comparison of successful versus unsuccessful projects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed

Intra-Organizational Boundary Spanning: A Machine Learning Approach

With the ubiquity of data, new opportunities have emerged for the application of data science and machine learning approaches to help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge management. With the growing use of social media technologies in enterprise settings, one specific area of knowledge management warranting the use of big data analytics involves cross-boundary knowledge creation and management. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a machine learning approach that can assist knowledge managers in detecting three types of intra-organizational boundary spanning activities with the goal of predicting and improving such important outcomes as team effectiveness, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation