Melissa G. Ocepek

Differential innovation of smartphone and application use by sociodemographics and personality

We model sociodemographics and personality on smartphone use.We model sociodemographics and personality on smartphone application use.Sociodemographics play a major role in smartphone behavior.Personality plays a smaller, but significant, role in smartphone behavior. In the current study, we explore predictors of smartphone and smartphone application use in a large, diverse, population representative South Korean sample (N=9482). Sociodemographics (e.g., gender, age, education, and income) were major predictors of smartphone and smartphone application use. Generally, younger, educated, and wealthy individuals tended to use smartphones and smartphone applications to a greater extent. Females tended to use smartphones, e-commerce applications, and relational applications more compared to males. Openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness were associated with increased probability of smartphone ownership. Extraversion was associated with decreased literacy application use and increased relational application use. Conscientiousness was associated with decreased e-commerce application use. These results imply that sociodemographics and personality predict smartphone innovation.

Anatomy of a Dot-Com Failure: The Case of Online Grocer Webvan

In 2008, when CNET published its list of the top ten dot-com flops ever, online grocer Webvan topped the list. This chapter describes the rise and fall of Webvan, and analyzes the reasons for its failure. In particular, this case study demonstrates that Internet companies – contrary to what many entrepreneurs believed during the dot-com boom – are not immune to the basic laws of economics or sound business practice. Issues that are discussed include lack of knowledge of the grocery business, high efficiencies and low profit margins in the traditional grocery business, lack of consumer testing, inability to access a strong supplier market, cost of and problems with innovative and highly automated warehouses, the economics and logistics of home delivery, the “get big fast” philosophy of dot-com entrepreneurs, the failure of other early online grocers such as Kozmo and UrbanFetch, and the growth of successful online grocery businesses by such companies as Peapod and Tesco.

Food in the Internet Age

This book examines food in the United States in the age of the Internet. One major theme running through the book isbusiness opportunities and failures, as well as the harms to consumers and traditional brick-and-mortar companies that occurred as entrepreneurs tried to take advantage of the Internet to create online companies related to food. The other major theme is the concept of trust online and different models used by different companies to make their web presence seem trustworthy. The book describes a number of major food companies, including AllRecipes, Betty Crocker, Cooks Illustrated, Epicurious, Groupon, OpenTable, and Yelp. The book draws on business history, food studies, and information studies for its approach.

Formal and Informal Approaches to Food Policy

This chapter provides an overview of formal and informal approaches to food policy and gives examples of these approaches in the United States. Typically, a food policy issue will involve many interest groups, each with its own set of interests and organizational capabilities at getting across its message and influencing policy. Formal policy is by definition those formal actions taken by government bodies in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches—at the federal, state, and local levels. All other policy is informal, having the goal of influencing formal policy or influencing the behavior of private entities such as companies or members of the general public. Informal policy often involves various legal tactics to capture a voice in the food policy debates: boycotts, protests, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, strikes, work-to-rule, revelations, and teach-ins. Sometimes illegal means of civil disobedience are used as well: illegal boycotts, refusal to pay taxes, forbidden speech, threats to government officials, victimless crimes such as public nudity, riots, occupation of private property, denial of service attacks, information theft, and data leaks. The chapter provides many examples of both formal and informal efforts to influence food policy in the United States.

Bringing out the everyday in everyday information behavior

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to argue that scholars in the information behavior (IB) field should embrace the theoretical framework of the everyday to explore a more holistic view of IB. Design/methodology/approach The paper describes the theory of the everyday and delineates four opportunities offered by scholars of the everyday. The paper concludes with three examples that highlight what a more everyday-focused everyday information behavior might look like. Findings The theory of the everyday provides a useful theoretical framework to ground research addressing the everyday world as well as useful concepts for analysis and research methodology. Originality/value The theoretical framework of the everyday contributes to IB research by providing a theoretical justification for work addressing everyday life as well as useful concepts for analysis. The paper also outlines the benefits of integrating methods influenced by institutional ethnography, a methodology previously used to address the nuances of the everyday world.

Shopping for sources: an everyday information behavior exploration of grocery shoppers' information sources

The field of everyday information behavior addresses how individuals interact with information in their daily lives. Previous research in the field has largely ignored the banal and quotidian portions of everyday life, such as grocery shopping, which represents a gap the current project fills. Through two empirical studies using qualitative methods, the present work presents the prevalence and variety of information sources used by grocery shoppers. Findings indicate that grocery shoppers rely on close human sources, domain‐specific sources, and on surprisingly few online sources throughout the process of their grocery shopping. The findings demonstrate the information‐richness of grocery shopping and suggest that other everyday spaces may be fruitful areas for information behavior research.

Food Policy During the Depression and the Second World War: FDR’s New Deal Legislation and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Bully Pulpit

This chapter analyzes the efforts by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to use the bully pulpit to influence U.S. food policy and considers the interactions of her informal policy efforts with the formal policy efforts of the New Deal administration of her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first section gives biographical information about Eleanor Roosevelt, describing how she became the most influential woman in America of her time. The second section considers food policy issues during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Topics include surplus food; food and nutrition education; policies involving employment, diet, and exercise; Social Security; food stamps; school lunches; planned communities; and model meals. The third section examines food policy of the first half of the 1940s, during the Second World War. Topics include kitchen appliances as war materiel, nutritional standards and habits, physical education, rationing and price controls, Victory Gardens, and Eleanor Clubs. A brief conclusion provides an overview of Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in influencing legislation, encouraging federal agencies to expand their food and health programs, changing food and exercise habits of individual Americans, providing coping strategies during times of stress, and offering messages of reassurance to the American public in times of stress.

On Cars and Food: Reflections on Sources for the Historical Study of Everyday Information Behavior

Historical approaches are beginning to be used in the study of everyday information behavior. The ideal sources for carrying out this kind of scholarship would be large bodies of correspondence or large numbers of diary entries that discuss particular everyday activities, spread across long periods of time. Given the general lack of availability of these kinds of sources, historically minded everyday information behavior scholars need to find alternative source materials to employ in their research, even if these sources give only indirect rather than direct information about individuals’ everyday information behavior. This article discusses a number of these alternative sources (consumer magazines, popular magazines, corporate marketing literature, guidebooks, reviews, and various kinds of advertising) and shows how they were used in historical studies on car buying and eating out in America.

Passive information behaviors while grocery shopping: Passive Information Behaviors While Grocery Shopping

Information behavior addresses how individuals use information throughout the various contexts of their daily lives. Previous research in the field has explored passive information behaviors, but not addressed them in the quotidian aspects of life, such as grocery shopping. The current work fills this gap by addressing passive information behaviors throughout the grocery shopping process providing useful insights into how individuals interact with information in a new domain. Data was gathered through two empirical studies using qualitative methods emphasizing the lived experience of primary grocery shoppers. Findings show that information encountering, browsing and monitoring are prevalent in the grocery store and during the planning of a shopping trip demonstrating the information richness of grocery shopping.

Question, answer, compare: a cross-category comparison of answers on question and answer websites

Online information seekers make heavy use of websites that accept their natural language questions. This study compared the three types of such websites: social question and answer (Q&A), digital reference services, and ask-an-expert services. Questions reflecting daily life, research, and crisis situations were posed to high use websites of all three types. The resulting answers’ characteristics were analyzed in terms of speed, transparency, formality, and intimacy. The results indicate that social Q&A websites excel in speed, ask-an-expert websites in intimacy, and digital reference services in transparency and formality.