Improving citizens’ online engagement via community managers: an explanatory study

The role of community manager is gaining importance as the proper usage of social media becomes a key factor for achieving more active involvement of citizens in social and political issues. Focused on Spanish local governments and in line with the literature of Excellence Theory, this paper aims to analyze whether some characteristics of the community manager function are determinant in their fostering of citizens’ online engagement via social media. In particular ‘independence’, ‘having access to the dominant coalition’, ‘gender diversity’, ‘continuous training’ and ‘culture of the organization’ are the characteristics considered in this paper. As to the main findings, this study confirms that community managers have not as yet achieved their goal of embedding the use of social media by citizens as a means of establishing more direct contact with their local governments. Moreover, in line with Excellence Theory, community managers of local governments should be aware of the importance of having direct access to key managers of the organization in order to better achieve the objectives of the organization and, more specifically, to increase citizens’ engagement. Furthermore, continuous training in issues related to social media truly helps develop the skills and potential of community managers. Likewise, an excellent communication department should rely on good professionals no matter their gender, and, in this sense, the gender of community managers is not a significant factor in their performance. However, the results of this study also reveal that in the case of public sector community managers, an authoritarian culture seems to be a determining factor for obtaining better results in enhancing citizens’ engagement.     

Network domains in social networking sites: expectations,meanings, and social capital

This paper examines why the use of social networking sites (SNSs) leads to different results in cultivating bridging and bonding social capital for different groups of people. Based on in-depth interviews of 45 university students in Hong Kong, I find that Mainland Chinese students studying in Hong Kong actively use SNSs for seeking practical information about offline matters, and they obtain substantial enacted support from other Mainland students of the same university through SNS use. As a result, they accumulate both bridging and bonding social capital. Local Hong Kong students, however, use SNSs mainly for social information seeking and are only able to accrue limited bridging social capital through SNS use. Drawing on the theory of network domains, I argue that the different offline network structures in which students are located – namely, homogeneous and closed networks versus heterogeneous and open networks – explain this difference. Students with closed offline networks have defined expectations of online ties; they think of their online activities as practical and leading to real changes in their status among peers. Those with open networks have indefinite expectations of their online audience; thus, they interpret online activities differently, thinking of them as recreational, and they are playful in their online behaviour. These different outcomes of online activities consequently lead to diverse results in social capital accrual.     

Engaging stakeholders through Twitter: How nonprofit organizations are getting more out of 140 characters or less

While it may seem difficult to communicate in a meaningful manner with 140 characters or less, Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to engage stakeholders not only through their tweets, but also through other various communication methods. Specifically it looks into the organizations utilization of tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, public messages, retweets, and multimedia files. After analyzing 4655 tweets, the study found that the nation's largest nonprofits are not using Twitter to maximize stakeholder involvement. Instead, they continue to use social media as a one-way communication channel as less than 20% of their total tweets demonstrate conversations and roughly 16% demonstrate indirect connections to specific users.     

30年来近代河南经济史研究述评

作为区域史研究,30年来近代河南经济史研究日趋活跃,讨论关注之问题也十分广泛,相关内容主要集中在以下四个方面：一、帝国主义在河南经济势力的扩张和掠夺;二、河南传统经济在近代的延续与推移;三、近代河南新型经济的发展;四、综合性理论性研究。这些方面的研究取得了很多成绩,但也存在着一些不足之处。     

古代丝绸之路谣谚述论

古代丝绸之路谣谚在复杂多元的地理、政治、商业、文化等环境中生成,主要由胡商、士兵、宗教人士、士人等主体进行传播,从中能够反映古代丝绸之路上的自然名物、社会民情、政治趋势、战争冲突等多元化内容;因为古人没有“丝绸之路”的概念,所以,也就没有集中归类,而是分散记录在正史、笔记史料、诗歌总集、谣谚总集等文献之中。     

从制度缺陷看近代新疆的社会动荡

新疆既是一个偏远的边疆地区,又是一个多民族聚居、多宗教多文化并存的地区。鉴于新疆的特殊性,历代统治者都采取了有别于内地的、仅满足于形式上稳定的统治政策和政治制度,这些政策与制度在没有强大外部势力的干涉下,基本保持了新疆社会的相对和谐稳定。但是,随着社会的发展,特别是近代,这些政策与制度完全不能适应新疆社会发展的需要,进而引发了新疆社会的大动荡。     

Reconceptualizing the generation in a digital(izing) modernity: digital media,social networking sites,and the flattening of generations

As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social networking sites (SNS) shape social life through cultural transformations in the generation. This article rationalizes predominant patterns of SNS user behaviors in the context of social theoretical and philosophical frameworks informed by Mannheim, Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, social presence, action, and acceleration theories to offer a relational reconceptualization of the generation as a set of social relations and processes for visualizing changing conceptions of time and speed in a digital (izing) modernity. This article introduces the concept of general and local generationing processes to articulate the processual nature of the generation and to assert that trends in SNS use and content production are underwritten by grammatical logics that collectively “flatten” separate traditional generations to form a cross-demographic and cross-temporal digital generation.     

数据赋能驱动制造业企业实现敏捷制造案例研究

  世界经济的发展呼唤先进制造理念和制造技术,敏捷制造受到学者的广泛关注。制造业企业通过了解实现敏捷制造的过程机理,可以使其灵活地运用各种先进生产技术促成敏捷制造。然而,已有对制造业企业实现敏捷制造过程的研究缺少契合当前情景的视角以及完整、清晰的探究。         鉴于此,引入赋能概念,从数据驱动的视角对青岛酷特智能公司的研发、生产和营销3个阶段进行深入分析,结合扎根理论的3级编码技术,构建制造业企业通过数据赋能实现敏捷制造的过程模型。在已有研究基础上,构建敏捷制造的开放式概念框架,通过调研访谈、实地考察等方式获得分析数据,分析并构建制造业企业实现敏捷制造的过程模型,结合已有研究对该模型进行进一步讨论和完善。研究过程严格遵循理论构建的理论-实践-理论研究逻辑。         研究结果表明,企业的敏捷制造能力可以通过高效对接消费者需求与资源以及提高中间对接环节的效率来打造。从数据驱动视角看,数据化、标准化和联网化是制造业企业实现敏捷制造的核心所在。一方面,数据化和标准化可以提高数据的可接入性和流通性,减少制造加工环节的延缓;另一方面,联网化可以让需求数据直接对接企业的资源和制造过程的设备,进而实现资源的自动整合,打造企业高响应速度、高质量、低成本的供给。         从数据驱动视角构建的敏捷制造过程模型系统详细地解释了制造业企业通过数据赋能实现敏捷制造的过程,完善和拓展了关于敏捷制造的研究,为未来敏捷制造实证研究提供了一定的研究基础和启示。此外,为了给企业实践提供更加详细、明确的指导,给出基于数据赋能驱动制造业企业实现敏捷制造的实践指导步骤。     

Tactical production and distribution planning with dependency issues on the production process

Tactical production-distribution planning models have attracted a great deal of attention in the past decades. In these models, production and distribution decisions are considered simultaneously such that the combined plans are more advantageous than the plans resolved in a hierarchical planning process. We consider a two-stage production process, where in the first stage raw materials are transformed into continuous resources that feed the discrete production of end products in the second stage. Moreover, the setup times and costs of resources depend on the sequence in which they are processed in the first stage. The minimum scheduling unit is the product family which consists of products sharing common resources and manufacturing processes. Based on different mathematical modelling approaches to the production in the first stage, we develop a sequence-oriented formulation and a product-oriented formulation, and propose decomposition-based heuristics to solve this problem efficiently. By considering these dependencies arising in practical production processes, our model can be applied to various industrial cases, such as the beverage industry or the steel industry. Computation tests on instances from an industrial application are provided at the end of the paper.