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Save the date: Sunbelt 2013 in Hamburg May 21-26, 2013

Here are some interesting news for the ones among you who are interested in social network analysis (SNA) and live in Germany. Next year’s SUNBELT conference is going to be conveniently close as it is held in Hamburg from May 21-26. It will be organized by Betina Hollstein, Sonja Drobnic, and Michael Schnegg, all from the University of Hamburg. More information should follow shortly on the website, the INSNA blog, and on Facebook.

Talking about network analysis, @bkeegan pointed me to an extremely interesting article by Tom Valente published in the journal Science the other day. In the article, Tom describes different types of interventions that help to drive change in a network. Some of you probably find this interesting as well. Please see below for the full reference and the link to the article.

Reference:

Valente, T. W. (2012). Network Interventions. Science, 337(6090), 49–53. doi:10.1126/science.1217330

CfP: Special Issue on Social Media in Business and Education

The Journal of Enterprise Information Management (JEIM) invites submission of quality manuscripts for its Special Issue on Social Media in Business and Education.

The aim of the Special Edition is to explore Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 technologies, including Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Wikis and YouTube, etc, for business and education exploitation. The next generation of social media will involve social networking, document sharing, collaboration and interoperability. JEIM will consider evolving managerial, academic and pedagogical approaches and raise the profile of research in technology-enhanced applications; spread good practice in the use of Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 technologies for business and learning; and facilitate collaboration between practitioners, researchers, and policy makers. Manuscripts for the Special Issue on Social Media in Business and Education will include, but are not limited to:

  • Web 2.0 & Web 3.0 in business/education 
  • Enterprise 2.0 
  • Impact of Web 2.0 on organisational strategies 
  • e-Learning and Social Media 
  • Social Computing and social networks 
  • Facebook in business/education 
  • Micro-blogs and Twitter in business/education 
  • Wikis in business/education 
  • Blogs in business/education 
  • YouTube in business/education 
  • Collaboration and KM using Web 2.0 in business/education 
  • Mashups based inter-organisational collaborative services 
  • Semantic web applications and developments 
  • The future of Virtual Learning Environments 
  • The future of the university lecture

Meeting Jeff Martin @Viadrina

On Wednesday, April 18, we welcomed five new PhD students to our doctoral program. We were lucky to have Professor Jeff Martin at the European University Viadrina as the keynote speaker on that day. Jeff developed the notion of Dynamic Capabilities in his paper with Kathleen Eisenhardt (2000).

Many of us will have to build on their ideas while working on our own PhD projects. Being able to talk to the scholars whose research we deal with on a daily basis is a great experience (and I’ve commented on previous occasions, such as the visit to the Academy of Management Conference, in earlier blog posts).

In his keynote, Jeffrey talked about his current research program and, more particularly, about his recent article on Managerial Dynamic Capabilities published in the journal Organization Science. To me, the methodological part was most interesting as Jeff makes heavy use of case studies for theory-building. Over dinner we were able to ask him a few more personal questions, for example how he felt about being supervised by Professor Eisenhardt, what it took to write his seminal paper, or what he thought about Ann Majchrzak’s comment below.

18_04_2012eoe_dcg-600pix

Photo Credit: Heide Fest, Press Office, EUV

References:

Eisenhardt, K. M., & Martin, J. A. (2000). Dynamic Capabilities: What Are They. Strategic Management Journal, 21(10/11), 1105–1121.

Martin, J. A. (2011). Dynamic Managerial Capabilities and the Multibusiness Team: The Role of Episodic Teams in Executive Leadership Groups. Organization Science, 22(1), 118–140.

Ted Talks in Germany: @TEDxBerlin1 and @TEDxStuttgart

I’ve watched a number of Ted Talks over the past couple of years and really learnt to appreciate their entertaining approach to education. I’ve even used a couple of the talks on my blog. However, I found out only recently that Ted Talks are frequently hosted at different sites throughout Germany, e.g. in Berlin and Stuttgart. Here’s a complete list for your information.

Social Bookmarking @Delicious and Employee Innovativeness

Recently, I discovered a very interesting study by Gray and colleagues published in the journal MIS Quarterly. The researchers scrutinize the bookmarking service Delicious and its impact on employee innovativeness. I’ve included a key outcome below:

“Being able to demonstrate that social bookmarking system use can enhance personal innovativeness is a major milestone for Web 2.0 research, which to date has lacked empirical studies that point to the organizational value of such systems (Gray et al., 2011, p. 639)”.

Reference:

Gray, P., Parise, S., & Iyer, B. (2011). Innovation Impacts of Using Social Bookmarking Systems. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 35(3), 629–643. Retrieved from http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol35/iss3/9