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Uber drivers in the UK have used WhatsApp extensively in their organizing of drivers – like for Deliveroo, TGI Fridays, Wetherspoons and McDonald's workers, this built upon pre-existing networks and online groups. In the UK, this mobile organizing has developed further, as witnessed in their recent strikes on 9 October 2018. They called a 24-hour strike from 1 pm, demanding increased fares of L2 per mile, for Uber's commission to be reduced to 15 percent, an end to unfair deactivations (or sacking of drivers) and bullying, and worker rights protections. ‘After years of watching take-home pay plummet and with management bullying of workers on the rise, workers have been left with no choice but to take strike action’, the branch chair of United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD) (the branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) that organizes Uber drivers), James Farrar (quoted in IWGB, 2018), argued, continuing: ‘We ask the public to please support drivers by not crossing the digital picket line by not using the app during strike time.’
As Farrar notes, the drivers redrew the notion of the picket line for their dispersed and digitally mediated workplace. Rather than maintaining a picket outside meeting points, taxi ranks or offices, they argued that the app should be the picket line. This was supplemented with protests outside Uber offices to provide a physical point to focus on as well. On a global level, Uber drivers have coordinated through WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter to take joint action in the run up to Uber's IPO (initial public offering). These platforms have been key for providing the opportunities for workers to contact each other across borders, greatly lowering the administrative and logistical costs that would have been involved in doing so previously.
This growth of ‘digital picket lines’ reveals the importance of understanding (im)material power and politics. Here, discourses and ideologies not only operate but are framed within the public consciousness in these epidemic terms. This epidemic discursive framing can be traced back, at least, to the beginnings of the Cold War. The ability to see viruses in the decade after the Second World War fascinated scientists and the general public as, according to Wald (2017, p 158), ‘unlike their bacterial counterparts, viral microbes existed on – and seemed to define – the border between the living and non-living.
The memory of the Vietnam struggle for liberation continues to loom large even into the new millennium. For many, it was the war that gave birth to the US counterculture, the catalyst for a radical energy spurred on by their conviction that their own freedom should not be won by the blood of a repressed people halfway across the world. For others, it remains a testament to the possibility of a heavily outgunned and out-resourced force defeating a colonial oppressor. At the time though, driving this deadly military conflict was the fear, above all else, of contagious revolutions. It was the threat of one country after another falling like dominoes to Communism. In his now famous introduction of the ‘domino theory’, which helped give birth to this war a decade later, then US president Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed the danger of the ‘falling domino principle’, whereby, similar to dominoes in a row but with countries, ‘you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly’.
Indeed, in retrospect, scholars have critically described this perspective as ‘the notion of a contagious epidemic process in the incidence of political violence’ (O’Sullivan, 1996, p 106). Even after its genocidal consequences in the 20th century, it retains its relevance into the present – now rebooted to explain, for instance, the Arab Spring (see Fregonese, 2011). While the symbol of dominoes falling may be at this point bordering on the laughable, the spectre of viral social change is as potent as ever. The popularity of social media has made information, and hence politics, one of competing viral ideologies vying for dominance and power. It is fundamentally altering politics in ways previously almost unimaginable. One study drawing on data from the 2014 Hungarian general election campaign ‘showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing’ (Bene, 2017, p 513).
Guerrilla warfare is often thought of as something which emerged only in the modern era of revolutionary struggle. Yet, in truth, it has a long history stretching back to Sun Tzu's The Art of War (1963). Indeed it was prominently used in the US Revolutionary War in the late 18th century, where an outnumbered army was able to use a range of harassing attacks against invading British forces to successful effect (see Dederer, 1983). These same tactics would be adopted famously by Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists, where Mao succinctly described the strategy: ‘The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue’ (1965, p 124). Significantly, guerrilla tactics were viewed as more than simply a military technique. Rather, they were a way of being that emphasized values of adaptability, covert actions and resilience in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. According to US Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, what makes guerrilla warfare and its practitioners so dangerous is that ‘guerrillas are masters of the arts of simulation and dissimulation. … Their tactical concepts, dynamic and flexible, are not cut to any particular pattern.” (Mao Tse-tung & Griffith, 1964, p 26).
What lessons then, if any, would such a guerrilla ethos hold for present-day activism and social movements? At first glance, they may appear reserved for only armed insurrections or a rather duplicitous – indeed anti-democratic – mode of political operation due to their emphasis on simulation and dissimulation. Digging deeper, though, the contemporary relevance of guerilla tactics starts to emerge more fully. They speak to the possibilities of pursuing effective resistance and potential transformation in a social order whose domination is paradoxically marked by flexibility and innovation rather than stability and stagnation. While their rootedness in violence and duplicity may stand out, perhaps their true legacy will be in providing valuable insights into how to construct an insurgent revolutionary politics that is every bit as mobile – and often more so – as the power they are seeking to challenge and replace.
Che Guevera, opening his famous book Guerrilla Warfare, proclaimed that the Cuban revolution ‘showed plainly the capacity of the people to free themselves by means of guerrilla warfare from a government that oppresses them’. These words were written over half a century ago. Since then, the world and politics have changed dramatically. The Soviet Union has fallen, neoliberalism reigns supreme, and Cuba and China have almost completely abandoned ‘really existing socialism’ for the promises of capitalist progress. And yet the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. The 21st century has been marked by disastrous US imperialist adventures, a global financial crisis, a pandemic wherein the poor and precarious have suffered disproportionately to the wealthy, and the resurgence of socialist ideas the world over. New movements are arising, challenging the ideology of the free market and the rule of corporations. And just as importantly, new populist reactions have emerged embracing the rebirth of ethno-nationalism and political authoritarianism.
It is precisely in this contemporary context of revolution and reaction, radical change and an evolving status quo that guerrilla politics becomes once more so socially inspiring and strategically significant. Yet the terrain and composition of these insurrectionary movements have necessarily changed with the times. Now it is not professional armies that are the primary combatants but predictive algorithms which shape our behaviour and guide our exploitation. It is not only armed insurrections that will bring about revolutionary conditions but international mobile movements aided by digital platforms. And it is not the countryside that will be the main field of battle but a digital commons through which outdated capitalist structures and divisions between city, town and countryside can be subverted and new collaborative social relations can arise and thrive.
These rebooted guerrilla revolutionaries, admittedly, are more incipient than fully formed at this point in history. Yet their presence is being felt as insurgent groups are emerging, ushering in technologically sophisticated forms of ‘insurrectionary’ actions. Perhaps the best known of these is the hacktivist group tellingly named Anonymous, which has ‘incited online vigilantism from Tunisia to Ferguson’ (Kushner, 2014).
We analyze lending by traditional as well as fintech lenders during COVID-19. Comparing samples of fintech and bank loan records across the outbreak, we find that fintech companies are more likely to expand credit access to new and financially constrained borrowers after the start of the pandemic. However, this increased credit provision may not be sustainable; the delinquency rate of fintech loans triples after the outbreak, but there is no significant change in the delinquency of bank loans. Borrowers holding both loan types prioritize the payment of bank loans. These results shed light on the benefits provided by shadow banking in a crisis and hint at the potential fragility of such institutions when delinquency rates spike.
Globally, organizations are increasingly embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR) to strengthen competitive advantage. Although CSR is recognized to be context-sensitive, the literature is still lacking studies that examine CSR in different contexts, particularly non-western ones. Our study adds to a deeper understanding of CSR in Vietnam by identifying the predictors of CSR attitudes of business students. Vietnam has rich cultural, social, and economic characteristics that offer new theoretical perspectives and insights on the contextual nature of CSR. Our findings showed that CSR attitudes related positively to idealism and student seniority, and negatively to materialism and male students. A positive CSR–relativism relationship was uncovered. Spirituality related positively to the importance of CSR to business sustainability and negatively to CSR's importance to short-term competitiveness. The findings have theoretical and practical implications on the understanding and practice of CSR that would benefit CSR researchers, business organizations, and education institutions.
With a conceptual basis in conservation of resources theory, this paper investigates the relationship between employees' career plateau beliefs and their voice behavior, using parallel arguments that reflect resource-conservation versus resource-acquisition logics. The career plateau beliefs–voice behavior link, whether negative or positive, might be invigorated when employees encounter adversity in the workplace, such as due to work pressures (work overload and work–family conflict) or because of how their organization makes decisions (organizational politics and organizational underperformance). Survey data from employees in the Canadian information technology sector provide empirical support for the resource-acquisition logic: career plateau beliefs enhance employees' propensity to offer ideas for organizational improvement, particularly if they suffer from excessive workloads or conflicting work–family demands, perceive organizational decision making as political, and are unhappy about their organization's performance. These novel insights point to the critical role of a stagnated career in triggering, instead of dampening, proactive voice behaviors.
To better manage our work demands and family demands, we often erect mental or physical ‘boundaries’ to help manage our experiences. However, preferences for preserving these boundaries differ across individuals (e.g., some individuals may prefer to segment work/family roles, while others may prefer to integrate these roles) and employees may not always have similar preferences/values as their supervisors. Applying a resource framework from the job demands-resources model (JD-R; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007), we explicate the process through which supervisor–employee value congruence reduces work–family conflict, when supervisors provide valuable emotional and instrumental resources through family-supportive supervisor behaviors (FSSB). Furthermore, we find evidence that supervisors can demonstrate adequate FSSB even when having incongruent values with employees by fairly allocating and individually tailoring family-support. With a diverse sample of 815 staff members from four southern US universities, we conduct mediation and moderation analyses to test our hypotheses.
Since the late seventeenth century, trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve different purposes. Originally set up for administrative convenience, they helped to create liquidity, notably for foreign securities. From the 1930s, their primary purpose became to shield directors of large corporations from shareholder influence and hostile takeover threats. Subsequently, the trust offices evolved from general-purpose administrative units into dedicated foundations closely tied to individual companies and increasingly popular with foreign corporations as cheap anti-takeover devices. Their reincarnation as foundations also turned them into vehicles for the tax-efficient routing of international revenue flows via the Netherlands.
In the diversity arena, women and their heterogeneity as visible ethnic minority migrants at work are under researched. Our qualitative empirical research reveals, and compares, how visible ethnic women migrants (VEWM) experience their journey to professional success in Iceland and New Zealand. These island nations rank in the top six of the Global Gender Gap Index, have women Prime Ministers, and increasing demographic diversity. The findings reveal that for VEWM success is a continuous journey with many different challenges. VEWM reject the notion of success as accumulation of things or titles, emphasizing instead how success is experienced. For VEWM in Iceland, success means independent hard work and aligning with other women. VEWM in New Zealand experience success through religion and giving back to the community. These differences are explored and theorized, contributing to an expanding literature of migrant complexities, beyond monolithic representations of gender at work.
Relationships are widely recognized as key to business success in the form of both informal interpersonal networks and formal organizational relationships. While Chinese personal networks (guanxi) have attracted scholars’ interest, the concept has not been fully investigated or understood in other contexts, especially the Middle East, where personal networks fulfill some of the same roles. The underlying socio-cultural formulae of the distinctive cultural dimensions that influence relationship formation in the Middle East also remain under-explored. This research therefore investigates the dimensions of guanxi-type relationships in the Middle East and introduces a new model integrating these relationships into the existing relationship marketing framework, enabling firms to harness personal networks for organizational gain, in turn generating customer satisfaction and retention. Using empirical data from a survey of 637 hotel guests in 17 countries – drawn from a unique target population of guests introduced to Middle Eastern hotels via personal relationships – we show how guanxi-type relationships influence organizational relationships and improve satisfaction and retention. Our significant contributions to theory and practice include extending a holistic understanding of guanxi, enhancing knowledge of its dimensions in the Middle East, and providing managers with clear evidence for a hybrid system of guanxi-type and organizational relationships.
Many studies suggest that leaders should discourage or prevent the spread of negative workplace gossip (NWG), but yet little is understood about the relationship between leaders and their subordinates' NWG. This study interprets the linkage between authentic leadership and two types of NWG via individuals' perceptions of justice based on fairness heuristic and justice views. The data were collected in a three-stage process from a large information technology corporation in China. The findings revealed that interactional justice mediated authentic leadership and NWG's relationship with supervisors and the relationship between authentic leadership and NWG about coworkers. The procedural justice mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and NWG about supervisors, while it didn't mediate the relationship between authentic leadership and NWG about coworkers. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
We introduce and test a firm-level innovation-efficiency measure new to the finance literature. The measure, termed the research quotient (RQ), defined as the firm-specific output elasticity of research and development (R&D), was first developed in the management literature. RQ has a low correlation with existing innovation input, output, and efficiency measures. We test RQ in a number of innovation tests common to the finance literature and find that RQ is robust in all tests of firm value, even after controlling for previous innovation measures. The results suggest that RQ may serve as a relevant complementary measure of a company’s innovation.
This paper exploits an influx of Chinese students to U.S. universities from 2000 through 2018 to study synergies between banks’ deposit-taking and lending activities. Banks that are more recognizable by Chinese students experience higher deposit inflows and increase their local credit supply. This credit supply expansion only occurs in information-sensitive credit markets: small business loans and second lien mortgages. Such increase concentrates in nontradable sectors and is more pronounced at locations where managers have more autonomy. The results indicate that deposits from local consumers convey private information about the local credit market, which helps banks in information-sensitive lending.
By integrating role theory and social identity theory, this study examines the differential effects of organizational identification of the chief executive officer (CEO) and the chief financial officer (CFO) on corporate philanthropy. We argue that CEO organizational identification can positively affect corporate philanthropy, whereas the opposite holds for CFO organizational identification. This is because the CEO and the CFO have varying attitudes about corporate philanthropy owing to their different role expectations; thus, those who identify strongly with their organizations would act for the best interests of the firm. Moreover, because the beliefs of top executives are probably influenced by those of other executives, we further explore the interaction between the CEO and the CFO. We propose that the positive influence of CEO organizational identification on corporate philanthropy will be weakened by CFO organizational identification, and the moderating effect of CFO organizational identification will become stronger when the CEO and the CFO have opposite genders or when the CFO has ownership. From a sample of 880 publicly traded firms in China, we found support for our hypotheses. Our study can contribute to the corporate philanthropy literature and research on executive organizational identification by highlighting the importance of executive roles and their interactions.