Coding and gold standards

Fascinating to see how worlds collide in project MONA in which I am involved – computer scientists and social scientists are working together to see how we can make sense of large datasets to understand activist groups’ tactics and their targets’ responses. Clearly, not a question for which a ready-made package is available so we’re working hard to assemble helpful tools and to provide some well-coded bits of data to serve as gold standards for the tools. Once again we note how complicated language can be – but we’re making progress, using a sample data set on oil drilling in the arctic that gives enough food for (coding) thought…

EGOS Working Group on Business & Society – new website

Although not really complete yet, please find a link to our new website-in-progress. Mid-January extended abstracts can be submitted for EGOS 2013, sub-theme ”Corporate Responsibility: Towards Inclusive Development”. More information can be found at the EGOS Website as well.

Social Media and Civic Engagement

A quick note… Earlier this month I visited Denmark to attend two workshops on social media and civic engagement. First I was at Copenhagen Business School to present our ideas about the MONA project (Mapping Online Networks of Activism) and then I continued to Vejle where I gave a talk about my work in a broader sense at the Network for Social Innovation and Civic Engagement. In both workshops many ideas were exchanged on ways to trace civic engagement through social media, considering issues like sentiment analysis, network mapping, discourse analysis and many more. Interesting to see how a topic like this can bridge various disciplines and curious to see the follow-up!

Some more information about both workshops can be found on our MONA-pages.

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Annual Review of Social Partnerships

A quick update: the 7th Annual Review of Social Partnerships just appeared. The ARSP is focused on research on Cross Sector Social Partnerships and is edited by several researchers, including May Seitanidi and many more. The review also contains insights of partnership academics and practitioners, including a small note of mine. an interesting publication to get an overview of research in this area.

 

CfP on workers’ cooperatives

On Orgtheory.net I read a link to a call for papers for the journal Organization on “Worker cooperatives as an organizational alternative: Challenges, achievements and promise in organizational governance and ownership.”

The rise of these alternative organizational forms fits with the perspective Frank den Hond and I listed as the “radical reformist” approach to corporate social change in our 2007 AMR paper. Where we were puzzling for a while to come up with a variety of good examples of this form at the time of writing, nearly 8 years ago, we now see these forms of organizing actually being applied more and more.

Should be an interesting special issue!

The Forest of Advocacy

At the Complexity and Social Networks blog, David Lazer posted this interesting video on “The forest of advocacy”, using big data to analyze how several actors tried to impact US politics. A nice example of powerful visualizations (and of powerful acts of advocacy…).

 

Collaboration with NGOs

Although it has been online for a little while already, I’d like to advertise a new paper Frank den Hond, Jonathan Doh and I had accepted for publication in Business and Society. It’s titled: “What prompts companies to collaboration with NGOs? Recent evidence from the Netherlands” and can be found here. The paper examines factors that influence the propensity of corporations to engage with NGOs, based on a survey of Top 500 firms in the Netherlands on their interactions with NGOs. Comments are welcomed!