Achim Oberg

The sharing economy as an emerging field is characterized by unsettled debates about its shared purpose and defining characteristics of the organizations within this field. This study draws on neo-institutional theory to explore how sharing organizations position themselves vis-à-vis such debates with regard to (1) the values these organizations publicly promote to present themselves as “good” sharing organizations and (2) the business model features they make visible to appear as having the “right” organizational model. This study examines the online self-representations of 62 prototypical sharing organizations in Germany with regard to value propositions and business model features. A semantic network analysis of the features reveals two distinct categories of sharing organizations: grassroots initiatives and platform-based organizations. By showing how value propositions and business model features are linked in the sharing economy, the findings indicate the different legitimation strategies of grassroots initiatives and platform-based organizations, which we term “sustainability by model” and “sustainability by feature.” These findings broaden our understanding of the strategies that organizations apply to cope with societal expectations in the emerging sharing economy.

A novel approach to evaluating the impact of nonprofit organizations is proposed, combining social network and linguistic analysis. The authors examined data from nonprofit organizations’ websites and site hyperlinks to other organizations. They identified 369 sites of organizations that measure social impact and captured inbound and outbound weblinks to construct a relational structure. Keywords from the sites were categorized as reflecting scientific, civil society or managerial domains and located the entity in a triangular semantic space. While most organizations fell into one of the three communities, some were in an interstitial space spanning these domains. The interstitial organizations used a mix of terminology, were densely interconnected and connected extensively to organizations across domains, but there were few direct connections among the three domains. The resulting map integrates cultural and relational dimensions and reveals hidden patterns and clusters. The approach can be used with other social systems combining rich text with relational data.

The coming of ‘‘brand society’’ and the onset of mediatization spur universitiesto strategize their visual identity and pay particular attention to their icon. Resulting frombranding initiatives, university icons are visual self-representations and material-cum-symbolic forms of organizational identity. In this work we ask: What identity narratives areconveyed through the organizational iconography of universities? How do narrativescombine in this iconography? Drawing upon content analysis of Internet front-page iconsof 826 universities from 22 countries, we identify four identity narratives: guild-like classicnarrative, professional scientific narrative, localized narrative, and organizational narrative. Second, we show that such visual self-representations of university identity appear as products of broad historical themes. Last, we consider the relations between the four visualized identity narratives, showing evidence for iconographic sedimentation between the compatible guild-like classical, professional, and local-national narratives, along with iconographic abrasion of the logic of managed organization on the former. We discuss such findings in relation to the historical studies of the institution of the university

his study investigates how universities brand themselves and in what ways visual self-representation varies cross-nationally. We trace differ-ences in the icons (emblems and logos) used in the Internet self-representationof 821 universities and higher education institutions in 20 countries in 5continents. Emerging from content analyses of the icons were three main visual types (guilded, national, and organizational), arranged in five subtypes (classic, science, technology, local,abstract,and just-text). Generally, the visual expression of abstract or text-based organizational type is the least visually loaded, such lightness matching modern principles of corporate branding; the other types are rich in references to the national or guilded professional field of universities.We find that while the abstract organizational type of visual expression hasbecome dominant in Western countries, including France, Germany, and theUnited States, heterogeneity prevails in other nations such as Australia, Italy, orSouth Africa. We develop possible explanations of the observed distributionof types across countries and discuss the implication of our findings for world society institutionalism and the institutional logics approach

Summary We analyze the intranet communication behavior of members of a company that was deeply committed to the principles of non-hierarchical communication structures and of post-bureaucratic organization. We observe a split between the symbolic activities for creating a non-hierarchical network organization and the actual intranet communication behavior of the organization members. In their daily communication on the intranet, they persistently

Dieser Beitrag rekonstruiert den Einfluss der Hochschulentwicklung und der wissenschaftlichen Kapazitätsbildung auf die wissenschaftliche Wissensproduktion in Deutschland, einem der weltweit stärksten Produzenten wissenschaftlichen Wissen seit 1900. Folgende Forschungsfragen sollen beantwortet werden: Wie haben institutionalisierte Strukturen, und darin verschiedene Organisationsformen, die langfristige Entwicklung wissenschaftlicher Produktivität beeinflusst und verändert? In welchen organisationalen Netzwerken entwickelt sich aktuell die Wissenschaft weiter? Die Annäherung an den Forschungsgegenstand erfolgt auf der Makroebene anhand von Indikatoren zur Erfassung der globalen Expansion, Kooperation und Produktion der Wissenschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Untersuchungsrahmens wird dann auf der Mesoebene das Zusammenspiel von Organisationsformen in Deutschland mittels netzwerkanalytischer Verfahren betrachtet. Ziel des Beitrags ist, die Orte und institutionellen Settings wissenschaftlicher Produktion zu identifizieren und anhand ihrer Aufgaben und Ziele voneinander abzugrenzen sowie ihre Beziehungen zueinander herauszuarbeiten. Als theoretische Basis werden neo-institutionalistische Ansätze zur Untersuchung und Erklärung der Expansion des Hochschulwesens und der Wissenschaft und zur Analyse von organisationalen Netzwerken herangezogen. Grundlage der empirischen Analyse bilden Publikationen in peer-reviewed Zeitschriften als Kennzeichen wissenschaftlicher Produktion.