Eliane Bucher

THE STRESS POTENTIAL OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE WORKPLACE

Social media have enriched the communication profession with new and immediate ways of stakeholder interaction. Along with new possibilities also come challenges – as professionals are engaging in real-time conversations with their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like, they have to learn to mentally cope with an oversupply of possibly relevant information, with an invasion of work matters into the private domain and with changing work contents and structures. This paper proposes a measurement routed in the technostress and overload research to assess these challenges brought to communication workforces by social media. These data were collected in a quantitative survey among 2,579 marketing and communication professionals. Based on an exploratory factor analysis, we demonstrate that being literate in an age of social media encompasses not only knowing how to retrieve and process information appropriately in various social settings, but also – and maybe more importantly – to mentally cope with overload, invasion and uncertainty.

What's mine is yours (for a nominal fee) - Exploring the spectrum of utilitarian to altruistic motives for Internet-mediated sharing

In this contribution, we scrutinize the diverse motives for internet-mediated sharing as well as their role in shaping attitudes towards sharing ones possessions in commercialized as well as non-commercialized settings. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative research, we first develop a scale of sharing motives, showing that the reasons for participating in online sharing platforms are more nuanced than previously thought. Second, employing a motivational model of sharing, rooted in the theory of planned behavior, we show that sharing attitudes are driven by moral, social-hedonic and monetary motivations. Furthermore, we identify materialism, sociability and volunteering as predictors of sharing motives in different sharing contexts. Against this background, we explore the possible role of monetary incentives as a necessary but not sufficient condition for sharing ones possessions with others. Individuals share out of social-hedonic, moral, and monetary motives.Materialism, sociability and volunteerism predict individual sharing motives.Social-hedonic motives are the strongest predictor of Internet-mediated sharing.Monetary incentives may be necessary but not sufficient for online sharing.Commercial and non-commercial sharers differ substantially in their motives.

The flow of digital labor

Digital microwork is a type of labor that many—typically poorly paid—workers engage in. In our research, we focus on an experience-based model of digital labor and the nonmonetary benefits derived from such activities. Based on a survey of 701 workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk, we demonstrate that experiences during digital labor sequences generate flow-like states of immersion. We show that reaching flow-like states while performing microwork depends on certain work characteristics, such as the particular worker’s degree of autonomy, the extent to which a worker’s skills are utilized, and the apparent significance of and feedback derived from the task. The results both highlight the importance of flow-like immersion in explaining why individuals engage in digital labor projects and point to avenues that can lead to the design of better digital work experiences.

The role of privacy concerns in the sharing economy

ABSTRACT Internet-mediated sharing is growing quickly. Millions of users around the world share personal services and possessions with others ‒ often complete strangers. Shared goods can amount to substantial financial and immaterial value. Despite this, little research has investigated privacy in the sharing economy. To fill this gap, we examine the sharing–privacy nexus by exploring the privacy threats associated with Internet-mediated sharing. Given the popularity of sharing services, users seem quite willing to share goods and services despite the compounded informational and physical privacy threats associated with such sharing. We develop and test a framework for analyzing the effect of privacy concerns on sharing that considers institutional and social privacy threats, trust and social-hedonic as well as monetary motives.