Breaking the Paradigm of Sensing, Seizing, and Transforming - Evidence from Axel Springer

Dynamic capabilities have typically been conceptualized as sensing, seizing, and transforming. This article explores the interplay of these procedural dimensions employing a longitudinal case study of Axel Springer, a leading media corporation that has exercised dynamic capabilities to convert from a print publisher to an internet company. Insightful evidence is produced from interviews with current and former top managers. The case study shows iterations, overlaps, and interconnections between sensing, seizing, and transforming. Sensing-by-seizing is introduced as a dynamic capability to seize concrete opportunities while concurrently sensing them. A conceptual model furnishes implications and recommendations for managerial decision-making.

The Strategic Planning and Branding Tactics of Meituan

Meituan, an Internet company that focuses on businesses such as food delivery and hotel-ordering, was first launched in 2009. Within a decade, Meituan has evolved into a shopping platform that Chinese rely on, due to Meituan’s smart strategic planning, marketing positioning, high working efficiency, and its variety of business branches. Meituan has emerged as one of the Top 20 Risers global brands and ranked 54th among the Top 100 brands in 2020. As a service company that occupies the biggest portion of food delivery within the Chinese market, it’s of significance to explore what factors make Meituan the most successful and popular platform that changes people’s way of living. By investigating on Meituan’s financial reports, industry analysis, case studies and peer brand comparison, this paper will analyze Meituan’s strategic planning and development of its business and its linkage with consumer psychology, examine the factors that contribute to Meituan’s success, and provide inspiration of the brand’s future development.

Effect of long working hours and insomnia on depressive symptoms among employees of Chinese internet companies

Background In China, long working hours and insomnia are relatively common among internet company employees. Considering that both can affect mental health, we examined their independent and interaction effects on these employees’ depressive symptoms (DS). Methods We analyzed data from the 2016 occupational health questionnaire survey conducted in 35 large-, medium-, and small-scale internet companies. Overall, 3589 full-time employees were recruited to evaluate the association among working hours, insomnia, and DS. The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) was used to assess DS. The association of DS (PHQ-9 ≥ 10) with working hours (≤40, 41–50, 51–60, and > 60 h/week), insomnia (with or without), and interaction of both was estimated using multivariable logistic regression analysis. Results Compared with the group working for ≤40 h/week, the adjusted odds ratios (ORs) for DS among participants who worked for 41–50 h/week, 51–60 h/week, and > 60 h/week were 1.32 (1.11–1.56), 1.74 (1.35–2.24), and 2.54 (1.90–3.39), respectively. The ORs for DS among those with insomnia were 2.36 (2.04–2.74) after adjusting for general characteristics. The ORs for DS related to insomnia were similar [1.91 (1.46–2.50), 2.00 (1.61–2.50), respectively] in the participants who worked for < 50 h/week. However, among participants working for 51–60 h or > 60 h/week, the adjusted ORs for DS substantially increased to 4.62 (2.90–7.37) and 5.60 (3.36–9.33), respectively. Moreover, among the participants with insomnia, working overtime showed a greater association with DS. Conclusions We showed that long working hours and insomnia are independent factors associated with the prevalence of DS; furthermore, an interaction effect of long working hours and insomnia on DS was observed. For relieving DS in internet company employees, it is important to reduce insomnia.

Enterprising and lost: Professional lives of programmer interns

Programmer interns are a distinctive group of precarious laborers. They undertake the same jobs as junior programmers with formal employment, while suffering from high pressure and earning low pay. Still, they are convinced that only a long-term internship can keep them on the right track of professional career development. We explore their consent-making through six months of fieldwork in an internet company, and propose the “enterprising-self” game to explain their subjective orientations. In the enterprising-self game, programmer interns become accustomed to identifying themselves with a particular type of quantifiable labor product, for instance, the positioning of “their” sticky notes on company whiteboards and the expected “T-levels” that represent their employability in the industry, by which their enterprising self is a by-product. Programmer interns seems to believe that, rather than higher education, state-owned enterprises, or multinational enterprises, only domestic internet companies can help them attain their enterprising selves. Even though the supervisor–intern relationship and the “gender game” of masculinity performance constitute part of the programmer interns’ enterprising-self game, the essence of the game has never been challenged and in some ways is only being reinforced. Though only a few lucky employees can win the game by attaining promotion to the senior engineer or management level, most of them still get lost in the “periodic” and “imperceptible” time of life as a programmer, which is characterized by full devotion to the company, until the “35-year-old crisis”.

Tax control over the computation and discharge of VAT in services rendered by foreign companies in electronic form on the territory of the Russian Federation: legal aspect

This article is dedicated to the analysis of relevant problems of tax control in the e-commerce sector caused by digitalization and globalization of business. The author gives general characteristics to tax control as the key element of tax administration; examines the peculiarities of legal regulation of the value-added tax for services rendered by foreign companies in electronic form on the territory of the Russian Federation. Description is given to the amendments in the Russian legislation on taxes and fees related to the establishment of new rules of VAT taxation for electronic services provided by foreign suppliers, which have been enacted in the past five years. Attention is turned to such instrument of interaction of the Federal Tax Service of Russia with foreign companies as the &ldquo;VAT office of a foreign Internet company&rdquo;. Analysis is conducted on the major problems of tax control over the computation and discharge of VAT in rendering transboundary electronic services on the territory of the Russian Federation, which emerge also due to the gaps in legal regulation. The author outlines the vectors of improving tax control in this sphere. The conclusion is made on the need for amending the legislation of the Russian Federation on taxes and fees, further expansion of the use of digital technologies in tax administration, and creation of infrastructure necessary for automated interaction with various institutions and tax authorities of other countries, development of international cooperation, and formation of tax culture.

G-CNN and double-referenced thresholding for detecting time series anomalies

Anomaly detection based on time series data is of great importance in many fields. Time series data produced by man-made systems usually include two parts: monitored and exogenous data, which respectively are the detected object and the control/feedback information. In this paper, a so-called G-CNN architecture that combined the gated recurrent units (GRU) with a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, which respectively focus on the monitored and exogenous data. The most important is the introduction of a complementary double-referenced thresholding approach that processes prediction errors and calculates threshold, achieving balance between the minimization of false positives and the false negatives. The outstanding performance and extensive applicability of our model is demonstrated by experiments on two public datasets from aerospace and a new server machine dataset from an Internet company. It is also found that the monitored data is close associated with the exogenous data if any, and the interpretability of the G-CNN is discussed by visualizing the intermediate output of neural networks.

Analyzing the IPv6 Deployment Process in Palestine

This paper is to examine the IPv6 in Palestine and to examine where are Palestinian companies in the deployment process. Also, to examine if the infrastructure can withstand the transition to IPv6 or not. This study used quantitative research methods and collect the data through a survey from the Internet companies in Palestine as reported anonymously. Due to the lack of research related to the internet in Palestine, we saw that it is necessary to discover the internet companies and how much they achieved of the deployment process. The collected data have been analyzed and described using SPSS. The data analysis showed that one internet company representing 11% of the companies in Palestine did apply the transition process to IPv6, and the percentages have set a positive indicator for the transition process. It turns out that the other companies on their way to start deploying the IPv6.

The co-evolution of two Chinese mobile short video apps: Parallel platformization of Douyin and TikTok

TikTok is the international twin of China’s mobile short video app, Douyin, and one of the fastest growing short video platforms in the world. Owned by Chinese tech giant, ByteDance, TikTok and Douyin share many similarities in terms of appearance, functionality, and platform affordances; however, they exist in radically different markets and are governed by radically different forces. Unlike other popular mobile media platforms in China and internationally, TikTok and Douyin are neither part of the big three tech giants in China nor the big five in the US. This provides an interesting case study to investigate how an emerging internet company adapts its products to better fit divergent expectations, cultures, and policy frameworks in China and abroad. Using the app walkthrough method informed by platformization of culture production theory, this study highlights the similarities and distinctions between these two platforms. We argue the co-evolution of Douyin and TikTok is a new paradigm of global platform expansion that differs from strategies of regionalization adopted by previous major social media platforms. We contribute to platformization theory by developing the concept of parallel platformization to explain ByteDance’s strategies for surviving in two opposing platform ecosystems in China and abroad.

Green Supplier Selection Based on Green Practices Evaluated Using Fuzzy Approaches of TOPSIS and ELECTRE with a Case Study in a Chinese Internet Company

The selection of appropriate green chain suppliers is a very critical decision for effective and efficient green supply chain management in today’s increased awareness and significant environmental pressures from various stakeholders. The aim of this paper is to screen appropriate green chain suppliers based on a framework using fuzzy TOPSIS and ELECTRE for a Chinese internet company. The framework is proposed, grounded on a literature review on green supply chain management practices, after which an empirical analysis is made to be applied an integrated suppliers selection, based on green practices incorporating specifically data collected of the 12 criteria from a set of 12 available suppliers. We use a fuzzy TOPSIS and ELECTRE approach to rank the green chain suppliers, and the results of the proposed framework are compared with the ranks obtained by both the outranking degrees and the incomparability among the actions of fuzzy ELECTRE methodology. Finally, sensitivity analysis was conducted to test the feasibility of the best alternative. The results indicated that the best supplier was alternative 9, and there were four dominant criteria: management support for GSCM, used environmentally friendly materials, followed legal environmental requirements and policies, and reduced the use of harmful substances.

Demoxie: Reflections on digital democracy in Dave Eggers' novel The Circle

The Circle is a novel written by the American author Dave Eggers (2013), and it tells the story about a powerful Internet company that works with highly developed surveillance technologies to monitor workers as well as the local and global community. In discussions and research this novel often has been seen in the tradition of a dystopic and totalitarian view of society as we know from Orwell’s 1984 or Huxleys Brave New World. However, this article critically investigates a vision of democracy that is suggested in The Circle. Circlers call this political model “demoxie”, which embraces the idea that everybody who has a Circle account is also a registered voter. That means, the voter directly votes on issues via his or her Internet platform (such as decisions on healthcare, company policies, as well as international politics issues). Based on this work of fiction as well as recent discussions about cyber democracy, this article opens up a discussion about the benefits and risks of Internet technologies and democracy.