In order for firms to implement the Circular Economy, and close all material and energy cycles, connections are needed not only within but also between multiple Industrial Ecosystems. To enable such complex interconnections, the European Union is preparing legislation to enforce the use of digital product passports (DPPs). These are verifiable collections of data about products’ composition, environmental footprint and opportunities for preventing waste. The notion of the DPP relies heavily on a suitable digital infrastructure, and it opens the possibility of using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), to optimize circular production within and between Industrial Ecosystems. The benefits of DPPs will only be attained if their design, knowledge engineering, and implementation is well-orchestrated. The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of guiding principles for the orchestration of DPPs, based upon a trans-disciplinary analysis, that form a theoretical basis upon which future research can build.
Policymakers and environmental organizations are increasingly implementing gamification because of its ability to stimulate playful learning and transform human attitudes and behavior. Although it has become a prominent development for climate change engagement, the literature does not adequately address how the underlying motivational systems depend upon user-centered design mechanisms. If gamification is to realize its potential for climate change engagement, it is crucial for designers to apply solid user-centered design principles, as suboptimal designs may do more harm than good. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review on gamification for climate change engagement to investigate the application of user-centered design and find key links between design choices and outcomes in 64 articles. We develop the findings into a user-centered design agenda and framework for game-based climate change engagement. This agenda includes design aspects–team multidisciplinarity, context dependence, user involvement, iterative testing, and design choice explication–and outcome aspects–value to users, game mechanics for learning, game content for learning, affective engagement, social engagement, changing real-world behavior, and using game data for research. The agenda is intended to inform gamification academics and practitioners aiming to design effective games for climate change engagement and its recommendations may apply to other complex issues.
Legitimacy theory describes how individuals evaluate an organization’s behavior, form propriety evaluations, and subsequently decide whether to publicly express their legitimacy judgments. These individual judgments are influenced by sources of collective validity, for example, from recognized authority or from peer endorsement. Whereas most research on this topic has focused on the effects of authority, we study the influence of peer endorsement on the public expression of legitimacy judgments. Additionally, we assess evaluators’ preparedness to expend cognitive effort, that is, their evaluative mode, as an important condition under which judgment expressions are made. We present a set of three vignette experiments and one field study, all situated in social media that are quickly becoming the dominant setting for the expression of legitimacy judgments. This research provides new evidence that peer endorsement stimulates evaluators to express their judgments, particularly for evaluators who expend limited cognitive effort. Additionally, we find that evaluators in the active and passive evaluative modes act differently when their propriety evaluations are based on instrumental, moral, or relational considerations. These findings extend current legitimacy theory about how peer endorsement functions as a source of validity and when individual evaluators decide to publicly express their legitimacy judgments. This is important because individuals’ public expressions can bring about a cascade of judgments that change the consensus on an organization’s legitimacy, potentially contributing to institutional change. History: This paper has been accepted for the Organization Science Special Issue on Experiments in Organizational Theory. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1604 .
The Circular Economy, as a guiding model for business processes, is attracting interest due to its potential for aligning business and societal goals as it offers companies the opportunity to simultaneously focus on economic value creation and on the mitigation of environmental damage. It is becoming increasingly clear that digital technologies are an essential component of this model as they enable transparency and efficiency in closing material and energy cycles. Additionally, digitalization leads to efficient business models that revolve around adapting the value proposition to the insights gained from the continual analysis of data, shifting the emphasis of Product-Service Systems towards the service end of the spectrum. As such, these new business models are categorized as forms of Servitization. Despite the increasing importance of Servitization and digitalizing business processes, such as the move towards what is referred to as Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing industry, the associated transition towards widespread adoption of the principles of the Circular Economy is slow. This explorative study investigates key themes and challenges in transitioning towards digitally-enabled Servitization in the manufacturing industry and the relationship with the Circular Economy. Through interviews with experts from the realms of digital technology, Industry 4.0, and business sustainability, a set of research questions is developed that forms a research agenda.
Both bottom-up and top-down initiatives are essential for addressing climate change effectively. These include initiatives aiming to achieve widespread behavioral change towards reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as pursuing education regarding adaptation measures. While awareness of the issue of climate change is now pervasive, and actions are being taken at all levels of society, there is still much to do if international goals are to be met. Games and gamification offer one approach to foster both behavioral change and education. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art of game-based climate change engagement through a systematic literature review of 64 research outputs comprising 56 different gamified approaches. Our analysis of the literature reveals a trend of promising findings in this nascent and growing area of research, suggesting the potential to impact multiple engagement dimensions simultaneously, as well as create an engaging gameful experience. Overall, the corpus appears to offer a fruitful balance in foci between climate science, mitigation, and adaptation, as well as a variety of formats in game-based approaches (i.e. digital, analog, and hybrid). However, shortcomings were also observed, such as geographic and demographic imbalances and the short duration of interventions. The reviewed studies yield a large number of results indicating climate change engagement through gamification, especially in the form of cognitive engagement, affect towards climate change-related topics, and in-game behavioral engagement with others. Nevertheless, heterogeneity in terms of contexts, designs, outcomes, and methods, as well as limited rigor in research designs and reporting, hinders drawing overall conclusions. Based on our review, we provide guidelines regarding contexts, interventions, results, and research quality and internal validity for advancing the space of game-based interventions for climate change engagement.
The internet of everything (IoE), connecting people, organizations and smart things, promises to fundamentally change how we live, work and interact, and it may redefine a wide range of industry sectors. This conceptual paper aims to develop a vision of how the IoE may alter business models and the ways in which individuals and organizations create value. We review literature on networked business models and service ecosystems, and show that a clearer understanding is needed of how the IoE will impact on the ways that organizations go about their business at the micro, meso and macro levels. Combining this with an inductive, vignette-based approach, we present a new taxonomy of smart things based on their capabilities and their connectivity. We derive their implications for business models and conclude the paper with propositions that form a research agenda for business researchers.
Healthcare users and providers increasingly utilize social media to interact with one another. For a future understanding of when and how these interactions supplement or replace offline doctor-patient interactions, it is essential to understand who interacts, about what, and how these interactions can be categorized in a taxonomy. We draw on affordance theory and employ a mixed-methods approach to study social media interactions among healthcare users and providers. We first engage in qualitative content analysis, which is followed by cluster analysis. We identify five archetypal interactions and categorize these in a taxonomy that adds to current literature on how social media is utilized in the healthcare context. We also provide a clear and systematic overview of the interactions in different social media categories that can stimulate future research regarding doctor-patient interactions. Furthermore, we identify a new and distinct type of social media enabled interaction in healthcare, namely lifestyle support, focusing on prevention.
Welke invloed heeft de digitalisering van de maatschappij op de gepercipieerde legitimiteit van de politie? In een drieluik analyseren David Langley, Jose Kerstholt, Arnout de Vries en Caroline van der Weerdt de uitwerking van verschillende aspecten van digitalisering. Deel 1: social media en maatschappelijke verschuivingen.
Maker technologies, including collaborative digital fabrication tools like 3-D printers, enable entrepreneurial opportunities and new business models. To date, relatively few highly successful maker startups have emerged, possibly due to the dominant mindset of the makers being one of cooperation and sharing. However, makers also strive for financial stability and many have profit motives. We use a multiple case study approach to explore makers’ experiences regarding the tension between sharing and commercialization and their ways of dealing with it. We conducted interviews with maker initiatives across Europe including Fab Labs, a maker R&D center, and other networks of makers. We unpack and contextualize the concepts of sharing and commercialization. Our cross-case analysis leads to a new framework for understanding these entrepreneurs’ position with respect to common-good versus commercial offerings. Using the framework, we describe archetypal trajectories that maker initiatives go through in the dynamic transition from makers to social enterprises and social entrepreneurs.
Protests that target firms' socially irresponsible behavior are increasingly organized via digital media. This study uses two methods to investigate the effects that online protests and mitigating firm responses have on shareholders' and consumers' evaluation. The first method is a financial analysis that includes an event study which measures the effect of online protests on the target firm's share price, as well as an investigation of the boundary effects of protest characteristics. The second method is an online experiment that assesses the effect of an online protest campaign on consumers' perception and purchase intention, as well as any mitigating effects that a firm's response may have. Contrary to recent studies suggesting that participation in online protests is only token support without any substantive effects, our results show that online protests do hurt. Firms can expect to suffer financial, reputational, and sales damage when an online protest campaign mobilizes consumers successfully. We also show that online protests are more likely to take firms by surprise than offline protests. Firms can exacerbate or reduce the damage by their response. We find that although firms may repair the damage to consumers' purchase intentions, the negative effects on a brand's image are harder to rectify. The results have valuable implications for protest organizers and managers faced with the task of responding.
Due to the increasing prevalence of IT-mediated communication between firms and their stakeholders in digital ecosystems, it is particularly important to add to theory in the Information Systems area on firm reactions during online anti-firm episodes (AFEs). Specifically, the current study addresses both (a) whether firm interventions during a crisis have an effect on the AFE, both in terms of the growth of the episode and the sentiment expressed by the social media users, and (b) how different firm intervention strategies affect the AFE. Drawing from the research area of conflict management from psychological science, we apply the Situational Crisis Communication Theory to develop hypotheses on four relational styles which firms may apply in their IT-mediated crisis management activities. Analyzing 325 AFEs, we show that firm responses can be a double-edged sword. The firm runs the risk of attracting extra attention to the crisis, but is at least able to influence the sentiment of the discussion in its favor. A wholly new finding is that when a firm’s reaction avoids the specific criticism of an ongoing crisis, instead aiming to bolster the firm’s reputation, this is most beneficial to the firm, both for reducing AFE growth and increasing pro-firm sentiment.
Social media represent specific types of technologies that are end-user driven and end-users are able to drive disruptive change giving little time to organizations to react. With rapid and powerful emergence of social media communities in healthcare, this sector is faced with new and alternative avenues to the traditional healthcare provision. These are offered from both firm-hosted and patient-hosted social media health communities. But, what are the effects of these developments on the healthcare providers and how do they react to different social media disruptive changes? To address these important questions, we draw on the disruptive innovation and information processing perspectives to explore the effects of social media disruptive change on business models, strategic responses and social media strategies of healthcare providers. We conceptualize social media as disruptive innovation and explore yet unknown differences in effects from firm-hosted and patient-hosted social media health communities. In this way, we address recent calls for research on social media and business models as well as go beyond traditional topics in healthcare information systems (IS) research, which were focused on privacy, interoperability and resistance to change. We plan to conduct our research through survey of healthcare providers in different healthcare systems. Garanti; Palgrave Macmillan; Turkish Electro Technology (TET)
Social media enable patients to communicate with a large number of their peers, share experiences, and provide each other with emotional and informational support. In this way, social media using patients develop a new logic in healthcare, which we propose as social media logic. This raises the question what this social media logic means and how it interconnects with traditional clinical logic. To address this question, we draw on interview data with participants from two online health communities to examine how this new social media logic emerges and how it interconnects with clinical logic. We provide preliminary findings through five themes showing that that patients favour experiential knowledge, feel need to connect with others, safely share information, feel empowered and either substitute or complement offline healthcare provision. As a next step, we plan to supplement our data with interviews from doctors and platform managers. We aim to contribute to the healthcare information systems research by addressing recent calls for research on emerging role of social media in healthcare. Garanti; Palgrave Macmillan; Turkish Electro Technology (TET)
We explore the suitability of online social media (OSM) for influencing the public's decision-making process regarding a vaccination to protect girls against HPV, a virus associated with cervical cancer. Parents of girls in the target cohort were invited to online discussion forums where they could discuss their opinions on the vaccination. They were exposed to promotion of the vaccination in one of four different ways, and coming from one of two different sources, i.e., peers or government health representatives. Following the health belief model (HBM), these messages served as cues to action. Using a novel network analysis approach, we find that the HBM does not adequately account for influence via OSM. Specifically we show that vaccination decisions are not taken in social isolation, a fact thus far ignored by various forms of the HBM. Implications for studies assessing the use of online channels for health communication are discussed.
Background: Since the emergence of social media in 2004, a growing percentage of patients use this technology for health related reasons. To reflect on the alleged beneficial and potentially harmful effects of social media use by patients, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the extant literature on the effects of social media use for health related reasons on patients and their relationship with healthcare professionals.Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review on empirical research regarding the effects of social media use by patients for health related reasons. The papers we included met the following selection criteria: (1) published in a peer-reviewed journal, (2) written in English, (3) full text available to the researcher, (4) contain primary empirical data, (5) the users of social media are patients, (6) the effects of patients using social media are clearly stated, (7) satisfy established quality criteria.Results: Initially, a total of 1,743 articles were identified from which 22 were included in the study. From these articles six categories of patients' use of social media were identified, namely: emotional, information, esteem, network support, social comparison and emotional expression. The types of use were found to lead to seven identified types of effects on patients, namely improved self-management and control, enhanced psychological well-being, and enhanced subjective well-being, diminished subjective well-being, addiction to social media, loss of privacy, and being targeted for promotion. Social media use by patients was found to affect the healthcare professional and patient relationship, by leading to more equal communication between the patient and healthcare professional, increased switching of doctors, harmonious relationships, and suboptimal interaction between the patient and healthcare professional.Conclusions: Our review provides insights into the emerging utilization of social media in healthcare. In particular, it identifies types of use by patients as well as the effects of such use, which may differ between patients and doctors. Accordingly, our results framework and propositions can serve to guide future research, and they also have practical implications for healthcare providers and policy makers.
The online environment offers a fertile breeding ground for anti-brand herds of disgruntled consumers. Firms are often caught off guard by the unpredictability of such herds and, as a consequence, are forced into a reactive, defensive stance. We conduct a social media analysis that aims to shed light on the formation, growth, and dissolution of online anti-brand herds. First we expand on the concept of environmental turbulence to advance core properties unique to online herd behavior. Next, based on evidence gathered from 40 online anti-brand herd episodes targeting two prominent firms from the Netherlands, we develop an analytical model to investigate drivers of herd formation, growth, and dissolution. Finally, combining environmental turbulence literature with our empirical findings, we derive a novel typology of online anti-brand herd behaviors, and put forward six propositions to guide theory development in this area.