Rodney J. Clarke

Business services as communication patterns: a work practice approach for analyzing service encounters

In this paper, we describe an approach to business processes and services which views work practices as recurrent patterns of communication called genres. Although defining work practices in this way is unorthodox, it provides two major advantages. First, the communication resources employed by the parties engaging in a service transaction can be clearly described, understood, and communicated. Business processes and services can be differentiated on the basis of the structural and functional arrangement of their constituent genres. This provides a view of a business process or service that is technology-independent. Second, using this approach means that work practices are defined contextually—an important consideration when trying to understand how business processes and services will influence organizations. Because genres are represented using directed graphs, prototypes can be developed to assist during the analysis of existing services and the design of new ones. Structural and functional change of genres can be used to reveal how a specific service is evolving within an organization. This enables us to determine if business demands have changed, something that is difficult to achieve using conventional service engineering approaches.

Brand orientation and the voices from within

Abstract This work adds to the brand orientation literature by showing that while brand strategies may sometimes be aspirational, multiple identities exist which may either challenge or support a brand. In this place branding study, in-depth interviews of local residents reveal the existence of multiple place identities as well as how these identities relate to a place brand strategy. A framework is provided which illustrates how longitudinal identity studies can be a useful way to assess changes to place identities and the internal effectiveness of brand implementation. It is proposed that the functional communication-based research approach together with the novel framework developed in this study has relevance to the brand orientation of corporations, as it does for places.

Citizen-Driven Flood Mapping in Jakarta: A Self-Organising Socio-technical System

The PetaJakarta.org project aims at advancing our capacity to understand and promote the resilience of cities to both extreme weather events as a result of climate change and to long-term infrastructure transformation as a process of climate adaptation. PetaJakarta.org is a pioneering web-based platform that harnesses the power of social media by gathering, sorting, and displaying information about flooding for Jakarta residents and governmental agencies in real time. It allows situational information to be collected and disseminated by community members through their location enabled mobile devices, and shared with emergency response agencies. We argue that PetaJakarta.org is, in essence, a self-organizing socio-technical system that couples people, mobile technology and autonomous sensors in a complex network of information. As a consequence, we need to explore the various dimensions of computational justice that characterize this system in order to identify its opportunities and challenges.

Modelling real-time online information needs: A new research approach for complex consumer behaviour

Abstract A major challenge for online vendor website operations is serving information that meets visitor needs at a given point in their purchase process. The problem arises from the complexity of human behaviour, as well as changing needs with the evolution of consumer knowledge and skills through the purchase process. The most difficult element, however, is determining the effects of information provided on the site, as well as from other sources that the consumer may access, and anticipating resulting consumer needs. This paper discusses the contributions and limitations of current modelling techniques and utility studies of online consumer information to model consumer needs in real time. An alternative basis for real-time customer need appraisal is proposed using clickstream and customer input data combined with online information utility to enable more effective information serving. This requires further academic research and changes in practitioner online marketing operations.

The Work that Analysts Do: A Systemic Functional Approach to Elicitation

In this paper we advocate the view of systems analysis as an activity where communication and social interaction within the developer community and between developers, users and other stakeholders is central. Analysis involves a complex bridging process (Quintas 1993) between IS professionals and users implying different backgrounds, knowledge, agendas and social relations of power. We need to study communication in organisational contexts to better understand how we can conduct effective systems analysis and also in order to improve our pedagogic practices. However while there is a general recognition of the importance of communication it is none-the-less a complex social phenomena that is not well understood within the IS discipline and not explicitly addressed in traditional methods and methodologies despite growing interest and recognition in various qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic approaches (Easterbrook 1993).

Systemic semiotic development using SFX: prototyping genre-based representations of IS workpractices

Systemic semiotics, a combination of systemic functional linguistics and its elaboration into the general field of social semiotics, forms the basis for a new approach to the study of workpractices and information systems as patterns of human communication. Workpractices consist of one or more text-types referred to as genres, and zero or more actions-types. Action-types are purposeful, staged and goal-oriented sequences of social activity involving the movement of participants, goods, and/or texts, within/or between the organisation and its environment. Analysis of action-types generally involves direct observation, but may also be inferred from work documentation, reconstructed from software, or recovered from interviews. Genres integrate in predictable ways, purposeful, staged and goal-oriented social processes, with participant role structures and a symbolic organisation of written or spoken language. Through access to, and involvement with various institutions in society, members of communities become familiar with and utilise, commonly available genres called canonical genres. Genres in workplaces, while often based on canonical genres, have evolved to meet specific needs in organisational contexts. The paper provides an overview of the systemic functional systems (SFX) methodology. The case study used throughout this paper is of a small operational system (ALABS) used in the loan and return of items (software, hardware, and manuals) to students and staff at a tertiary educational computer centre.

Strategic Use of Social Media Affordances for Marketing: A Case Study of Chinese DMOs

Social media have become important platforms for tourism marketers but it is not clear if and how these organizations use social media to achieve particular strategic marketing goals. Given the enormous growth of both tourism and social media in China, this paper focuses on Weibo and its specific technological affordances. Using a case study methodology, it looks at five Chinese DMOs and analyses their Weibo activities in terms of correspondence to marketing communication elements and relation to specific technological affordances. The findings indicate that despite the opportunities for personal selling, DMOs do not fully capitalize on Weibo to achieve personal selling goals. Further, not all technological functions are used for strategic marketing purposes. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Decision making in organizations

[The study of decision making] is complicated by the difficulties of assessing to what extent... rational devices actually are used in making decisions, particularly by higher-ups... The CEO of Covenant Corporation [pseudonym for a company in the US which is a large conglomerate], for instance, sold the sporting goods business from one of his operating companies to the president of that company and some associates in a leveraged buyout. The sale surprised many people since at the time the business was the only profitable operation in that particular operating company and there were strong expectations for its long-term growth. Most likely, according to some managers, the corporation was just not big enough to hold two egos as large and bruising as those of the president and the CEO. However, the official reason was that sporting goods, being a consumer business, did not fit the ‘strategic profile’ of the corporation as a whole. Similarly, Covenant’s CEO sold large tracts of land with valuable minerals at dumbfoundingly low prices. The CEO and his aides said that Covenant simply did not have the experience to mine these minerals efficiently, a self-evident fact from the low profit rate of the business. In all likelihood, according to a manager close to the situation, the CEO, a man with a financial bent and a ready eye for the quick paper deal, felt so uncomfortable with the exigencies of mining these minerals that he ignored the fact that the prices the corporation was getting for the minerals had been negotiated 40 years earlier. Such impulsiveness and indeed, one might say from a certain perspective, irrationality, is of course always justified in rational and reasonable terms.

Participation Patterns and Reliability of Human Sensing in Crowd-Sourced Disaster Management

Over the last ten years, there has been a significant increase in crowd-sourcing applications for disaster management. Their success depends heavily on the behaviour of social media users, acting as human sensors during disaster monitoring and emergency response. Unlike their technological counterparts, human sensors are complex social entities, contributing in different ways to their collective task and creating varying participation patterns through social media. Failing to understand these participation patterns limits our capacity to evaluate the reliability of human sensing in different contexts. Based on an analysis of flood-related information contributed by Twitter users in Jakarta during the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 monsoonal seasons, this study establishes four categories of human sensors and their respective levels of reliability for disaster management. The results have significant implications for how we frame expectations and develop reliance on the use of social media for disaster management. Importantly, the results will serve as a useful guide for understanding levels of incentive that may be required to motivate members of the different categories of social media users during emergencies and disasters.

Systemic Functional Hypertexts (SFHT)

Despite the fact that texts exist in social contexts, models of hypertext authoring — and the tools derived from them — generally exclude this important aspect of the structure and function of texts. The inevitable result is an almost total exclusion of information con-cerning the situational and cultural aspects of textual units. Authors (writers) and users (readers) require situational and cultural contexts in order to understand the meanings ne-gotiated in and by (hyper)texts. These aspects of (hyper)texts are generally ignored be-cause most models of language do not provide formal relationships between texts and their contexts. In this paper we describe how Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), a semiotic model of language, can be used to create a dynamic hypertext model referred to as Systemic Functional Hypertexts (SFHT). This n-level hypertext model, the compo-nents of which are described using an ER Diagram, includes many aspects omitted from conventional hypertext models including: (i) text forming resources, (ii) intra- and inter-textual relations between texts and constituent text segments, occurring within their im-mediate (iii) situational and cultural contexts.