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AoM Symposium: Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilities

At this year’s Academy of Management Conference, which will take place in Orlando, Florida, my colleague Markus Vodosek and I are going to organize a symposium entitled Microfoundations of Dynamic Capabilities. The symposium will feature presentations by Jeff Martin, whom I met for the first time in 2012, and several of my colleagues from the PhD program on Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships. Margaret Peteraf has agreed to serve as a discussant for the session.

The symposium is sponsored by the Business Policy and Strategy Division, the Organization and Management Theory Division, and the Technology and Innovation Management Division. Our session is scheduled for Monday, August 12, 2013, from 4:45pm to 6:15pm at WDW Swan Resort in Pelican 1. If you are a scholar interested in dynamic capabilities and their microfoundations, we hope to meet you there.

How to Review: Some Guidelines

I recently finished the review of a paper for the International Conference on Information Systems. Earlier this year, I also reviewed for the Academy of Management Conference. The act of reviewing is a recurring task for any academic and I wonder what ‘set of instructions’ fellow scholars are using in this process. The Academy of Management provides some guidelines and also posted a few book chapters on its website. I find the following papers particularly helpful:

What are your favorites in this area? Which set of guidelines have supported you in the review process? Please drop me a line if you have an interesting addition to this list.

Call for Papers: Journal of Strategic Information Systems

Here is an interesting call for papers for those of you studying social media from a strategic perspective. The special issue of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems is entitled “Strategic and policy perspectives on social media technologies” and will be edited by Sirkka Jarvenpaa, Sandy Staples, and Robin Teigland. The submission deadline is November 30, 2013. The description reads as follows:

The widespread diffusion and proliferation of social media technologies and tools present organizations of all sizes and shapes with numerous strategic and policy-oriented opportunities and challenges.  Moreover, such technologies and tools have fundamentally transformed how various external and internal stakeholder relationships are influenced and managed, how brand loyalty is built, how talent is attracted and employment commitment is built, how innovations (products, services, business models, processes) are created and appropriated, how knowledge is created and shared both within and across organizational boundaries, how funding is raised, how control is exercised, how policies are developed and diffused, and how laws are interpreted. This special issue invites papers that build our understanding of these phenomena.

SNA Courses and Summer Schools in 2013

I’ve been closely following the offerings for courses with a focus on social network analysis over the past couple of years. Roughly two years ago, I compiled a list of events taking place in Europe. Back then, I decided for an introductory course taking place in Trier, Germany, which I really enjoyed. Recently, I’ve repeated my search and here is a selection of a few, slightly more international, courses that are of particular interest to me:

Although the Sunbelt conference is conveniently close this year, the courses offered are fairly short. Therefore, I’m likely to attend the Greenwich course which is spread out over a week. Interestingly, Christopher Tunnard has also converted the spreadsheet I linked to earlier into a website listing all SNA courses with a business focus around the world.

A Reading List for Social Media and Community Managers

Last weekend, the CommunityCamp 2012 took place in Berlin. The CommunityCamp is a barcamp for social media and community managers. You can have a glance at the conversations surrounding the event by looking at the Twitter stream with the hashtag #ccb12. Here is one of the few blog posts in English about the event, written by Monica Zaldivar.

Doing research on the use of social media and online communities in organizations, I was thrilled to be there. Listening closely to some of the discussions, I was able to identify a number of issues that I have previously come across in the literature. As a delayed contribution to the barcamp, I thought I could provide a small reading list for practitioners. I consider the references below to be of high practical relevance. They provide answers to questions such as:

  • What is an online community?
  • How to manage an online community?
  • What are relevant psychological and social aspects when dealing with online communities?
  • Where to position community management within the organization?
  • Which tools may be used for connecting different kinds of stakeholders?

If you know of additional material that should be listed here, please feel free to drop me a line. Providing an overview of recent literature on the topic is probably a nice idea for next year’s CommunityCamp.

Here are my suggestions:

Faraj, S., Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Majchrzak, A. (2011). Knowledge Collaboration in Online Communities. Organization Science, 22(5), 1224–1239. doi:10.1287/orsc.1100.0614

Kane, G. C., Fichman, R. G., Gallaugher, J., & Glaser, J. (2009). Community Relations 2.0. Harvard Business Review, 87(11), 45–50. Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/11/community-relations-20/ar/1

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2011). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press.

McAfee, A. (2009). Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. Harvard Business School Press.

Wallace, P. M. (2001). The Psychology of the Internet. Cambridge University Press.