The instrumental benefits of firm’s CSR activities are contingent upon the stakeholders’ awareness and favorable attribution. While social media creates an important momentum for firms to cultivate favorable awareness by establishing a powerful framework of stakeholder relationships, the opportunities are not distributed evenly for all firms. In this paper, we investigate the impact of CSR credentials on the effectiveness of social media as a stakeholder-relationship management platform. The analysis of Fortune 500 companies in the Twitter sphere reveals that a higher (...) CSR rating is a strong indicator of an earlier adoption, a faster establishment of online presence, a higher responsiveness to the firm’s identity, and a stronger virality of the messages. Incidentally, the higher CSIR rating is also found to be associated with the stronger virality. Our findings also suggest that socially responsible firms can harvest proactive stakeholders’ participation without investing more resources. As the first study that conceptualizes the social media as a proponent of CSR, this paper contends that “being socially responsible” makes more practical sense for firms with the rise of social media. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a panoply of new forms of ‘social’ government, as manifest in ‘social enterprise’ and ‘social media’. This follows an era of neoliberalism in which social logics were apparently being eliminated, through the expansion of economic rationalities. To understand this, the article explores the critique of the very notion of the ‘social’, as manifest in neoliberal contributions to the socialist calculation debate from the 1920s onwards. Understood as a zone lying between market and state, the (...) social was accused by Mises and Hayek of being both unaccountable (lacking any units of measurement) and formless (lacking instruments of explication). The article then asks to what extent these critiques still retain their purchase, following recent developments in hedonic measurement and data analytics. The argument is made that new post-neoliberal forms of ‘social government’ may now be entirely plausible, though focusing on the corporation rather than the state. (shrink)

Reputation is often seen as central to the coordination of transactions in sharing economy platforms. Participants perform a double role regarding reputation management: while engaging in exchanges with other peers, they build their individual ‘reputation capital’ and simultaneously execute community oversight. In Couchsurfing (CS), a network often cited as paradigmatic of the sharing economy, there is, however, a clear bias for positive references. In the digital economy literature, participants’ friendly behaviour is understood as motivated by self-interest and an incentive to (...) maintain a positive reputation. Social research on reputation in CS attributes the bias to fear of retaliation, but also hints at norms of reciprocity leading travellers to require positive feedback for hospitality. This article analyses the lived experience of reputation management in CS and argues that participants seek to reconcile direct and general reciprocity. It proposes breaking these practices down into boundary-work and creative avoidance and argues these result in insufficient protection of inexperienced participants against problematic members. (shrink)

This article has already been published, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License in Ephemera – Theory & Politics in Organization, 2019 volume 19 : p. 513-536. We thank William Davies for the permission to republish it here. abstract : In the context of ubiquitous data capture and the politics of control, there is growing individual and managerial interest in ‘pulse', both in the literal sense of arterial pulse - Rythmes des corps – Nouvel article.