The middling mobile: finding place in the liquid city

The middling mobile, differentiated by their modest and unsure mobility, are a vast of bulk of people who intend or expect to move on. As they travel, they tread differing intensities of rhythm and social embeddedness felt to be chaotic, constraining, liberating, or comforting. Owing to their aspirations to ‘get out’ of a rhythmic life, or to move somewhere familiar, the middling mobile use movement and rootedness to navigate and manage everyday life in the liquid city. My analysis offers a holistic exposition of a life that flows between mobility/immobility and rhythmic/arrhythmic forms, and the transitions between them.     

平台竞争、排他性协议与竞争瓶颈

在很多双边市场中，经常出现平台一边的用户与平台之间产生利益纠纷的现象，例如顺丰速运与菜鸟网络之间的纠纷等，本文从理论模型的角度研究了这种经济现象。文章通过将双边市场的用户分为视平台有差异和无差异两种类型，研究了平台如何掠夺视平台无差异的用户所有剩余的问题。研究发现，平台厂商有与视平台无差异的用户签订排他性协议的激励；无论签订排他性协议与否，这类用户都将被掠夺所有剩余，产生了所谓的"竞争瓶颈"；排他性协议带来的福利效应并不明确，当平台的边际成本和交叉外部性参数较大时，排他性协议的签订能够提升社会总福利。     

Twitter,incivility, and presidential communication: A theoretical incursion into spectacle and power

ABSTRACT

By approaching civility as an operational logic for democracy, we ask how incivility is a strategy related to power and domination, particularly from the president of the United States. We propose that Twitter is part of an infrastructure of incivility, through which structures and discursive mechanisms contribute to a devaluation of normative democratic discourses. Spectacle provides a theoretical framework to contextualize the forces at play in mediating our relations. Using President Trump’s Twitter use as a case study, we offer four propositions that together formulate a framework for theorizing the strategic use and deployment of incivility as an increasingly legitimate, yet problematic tool for democratic governance.     

Calibrating the go-along for the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This article contends that the ‘go-along’ contains more technical and ontological agility as a methodology for social research than is often assumed. After distinguishing the central spectrums of technical and ontological agility rooted in different research designs and philosophical orientations, I examine how researchers can nourish it while refining the go-along’s moral purpose in the context of environmental and related mobility crises that define the Anthropocene. I argue researchers can cultivate the go-along’s agility and moral purpose by deploying it with a quantitative context, comparing go-along case studies, moving past human supremacism and illuminating ecologically just forms of mobility that respect other species of life and their habitats. To show one way that the go-along can accomplish these things, I present two vignettes of cycling in urban Canada, drawing on a mobile video ethnography of cycling, a funded study in sociology, conducted between 2014 and 2018.     

Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator

Digital transformation and the reorganization of the firm have given rise to new forms of work that diverge significantly from the standard employment relationship. Advocates of digital disruption suggest that the existing legal framework cannot accommodate “innovative” working templates and business models. This article, however, argues that labour regulation can continue to facilitate innovation, presenting the employment relationship as a flexible instrument, and standard forms of employment as the means of achieving efficiencies and cost advantages. First, they allow for the full exercise of managerial prerogative and attendant internal flexibility in workforce deployment, and, second, they constitute an effective device to deliver training and develop skills.     

The red and the black: China’s social credit experiment as a total test environment

China's social credit system is an unusually explicit case where technology is used by multiple actors to turn human behavior into a test object on behalf of the state's goal of modifying the larger social environment, making it an intriguing setting for thinking about the new sociology of testing. This article considers how China's search for a usable “credit” score to both allocate financial resources and explicitly measure a citizen's trustworthiness creates an emergent experimental system of governance similar to, yet not quite captured by, the kinds of experimental processes observed in literature on the platform as a form of market-based governance. As a site where “seeing like a state” and “seeing like a market” converge, the social credit system is a vantage point for observing the changing relationship between moral and economic domains in an era of digital platforms. The article highlights the experimental quality of the system and its emerging system of governance structured around reward and punishment and argues that strategic ambiguity, institutionalized through the affordances of digital platforms, is an important part of the design of this large-scale social experiment.     

Improving patients’ satisfaction in a mobile hospital using Lean Six Sigma – a design-thinking intervention

Abstract

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) that offers a unique integration of Lean and Six Sigma has been accepted globally across services sectors. Previous studies that examined the application of LSS in healthcare were steered in traditional hospital settings. Apparently, there are no studies that highlight the application of LSS in mobile hospitals, an emerging trend in the healthcare sector. The aim of this article is to explore the applicability of LSS in a mobile hospital. The authors present a case study of improving patients’ satisfaction in a mobile hospital, through reducing turnaround time. Design-thinking intervention to LSS helped resolve a real-time problem using Define-Measure-Analyze-Design-Verify roadmap. This article contributes to the ‘healthcare quality” body of knowledge and is novel as it is the first of its kind of LSS application in a mobile hospital underpinning Design thinking. This study is unique as it demonstrates academia–industry collaboration in solving an organizational problem.     

ECM-IS视角下移动政务APP用户持续使用意愿影响因素研究

随着“互联网+”时代的到来，移动政务APP快速发展，但也存在功能单一、满意度不高、用户持续使用意愿较低的问题，要促使其健康发展，必须重视用户的使用体验和使用意愿。本研究以ECM-IS模型理论为基础，构建了移动政务APP用户持续使用意愿影响因素模型，据此设计调查问卷并进行实证研究。研究结果显示，移动政务APP的系统质量是满足用户期望的重要因素，而用户感知对于提升用户的满意度以及促使持续使用具有重要的意义，其中，感知便利性和感知有用性的积极作用尤为明显。最后，从促使用户持续使用的角度，提出了完善移动政务APP系统功能、突出实用优势，兼顾趣味功能，以及重视用户感知、强调人文关怀等对策和建议。     

构建民办高校学生党建微博平台的思考

微博作为新媒体领域的一个重要平台，已经渗透到高校学生学习、生活的各个方面，其教育载体的属性已然显现。然而，目前民办高校学生党建微博平台的建设尚处于起步阶段。民办高校应充分认识构建学生党建微博平台的必要性，探索其可行性路径，思考其深层次问题，不断提高学生党建平台建设的现代化水平。     

“通知—删除”规则在电子商务专利侵权中的适用——兼论《民法典》第1195条

随着电子商务的蓬勃发展，“通知—删除”规则在有效制止电子商务专利侵权中具有重要作用。我国在21世纪初引进“通知—删除”规则，逐步构建了适用于电子商务领域专利侵权的“通知—删除”规则。《民法典》正式施行以来，“通知—删除”规则在适用于电子商务专利侵权中暴露出诸多问题：存在规则滥用隐患，权利人与商家利益失衡，通知与反通知的审核标准难以一致，因错误通知造成商家损失难以恢复，等等。解决好这些问题，需从专利侵权的特殊性出发，贴合《民法典》第1195条的规定，遵循“通知—删除”规则的立法目的进行解释适用；应重视和探索电子商务平台的自治能力，推动“通知—删除”规则在电子商务专利侵权中的解释适用。