Christian Fieseler

BI Norwegian Business School | BINBS · Department of Communication, Culture, and Languages

Amidst the rapid rise of gig economy platforms, gig workers increasingly report feelings of mistrust, anxiety, and profound fear under opaque and abusive algorithmic management. This article introduces the concept of ‘algorithmic paranoia’ to capture the negative affective experiences stemming from workers' perceptions of algorithmic management as...

This chapter retraces the evolution of socially engaged arts as part of a social practice in the arts that emerged in, and has evolved since, the middle of the twentieth century, as well as how this practice affects the initiation, establishment, and sustainability of social entrepreneurship. Artists are assuming new roles, not only as agents that...

Digital microwork consists of remote and highly decontextualized labor that is increasingly governed by algorithms. The anonymity and granularity of such work is likely to cause alienation among workers. To date, we know little about how workers reconcile such potential feelings of alienation with their simultaneous commitment to the platform. Base...

A guidebook supporting artists’ critical engagement with enterprises for a more inclusive digital transformation.

Digital technologies induce organised immaturity by generating toxic sociotechnical conditions that lead us to delegate autonomous, individual, and responsible thoughts and actions to external technological systems. Aiming to move beyond a diagnostic critical reading of the toxicity of digitalisation, we bring Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological ana...

Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour pla...

We propose a symposium on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to encourage research about a burgeoning phenomenon that poses significant implications for the business and society domain. AI refers to computer applications that have the ability to acquire their own knowledge (LeCun et al., 2015). In the last decade, AI has spread dramatically, showing grea...

Shareholder Activism bezeichnet den Versuch von Aktionären, Entscheidungen der Unternehmensführung direkt zu beeinflussen. Dies kann sowohl im Rahmen der etablierten Corporate-Governance-Mechanismen geschehen als auch jenseits dieser Mechanismen, bspw. durch öffentliche Kritik an der Unternehmensleitung. Aktivistische Investoren sind neben passiven...

Digital self-tracking technologies, such as mobile applications and wearables have become commonplace, mediating users’ fitness and health management efforts by providing performance recommendations. While digital self-tracking technologies have been welcomed by some as useful tools in users’ pursuit of healthier and happier lives, they have also d...

Responsible innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) calls for public deliberation: well-informed “deep democratic” debate that involves actors from the public, private, and civil society sectors in joint efforts to critically address the goals and means of AI. Adopting such an approach constitutes a challenge, however, due to the opacity of AI a...

We argue that (1) enterprise collaborative platforms are conducive to the creation of hyper-connective work environments that foster connectivity with respect to (a) access to an exhaustive amount of content, conversation and metadata (everything), (b) access to an exhaustive circle of team-members (everyone) as well as (c) access to information in...

This symposium consists of four presentations. Presentation 1-3 provide insights into recent research findings on the topic of gig work relevant in the context of careers, organizational behavior, and human resources management. Presentation 4 – a systematic literature review – provides an overview on existing studies on gig work, and an agenda for...

With crowdsourcing increasingly contributing to organizations' innovative performance, it becomes more and more important for them to cultivate the creativity of their crowdsourcing communities. While digital feedback is the main, if not the only, two-way channel of communication between the platforms and the crowdworkers, little is yet known about...

The present study investigates how individual and collaborative job crafting may help digital labourers to build resilience and career commitment in the gig economy. Results based on a time‐lagged survey from 334 digital labourers indicate that those who engaged in higher individual job crafting reported subsequently higher resilience at the outset...

The rapid innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) is raising concerns regarding human autonomy, agency, fairness, and justice. While responsible stewardship of innovation calls for public engagement, inclusiveness, and informed discourse, AI seemingly challenges such informed discourse by way of its opacity (poor transparency, explainability, an...

Many organizations struggle to meaningfully engage with their stakeholders on political, societal and environmental topics via social media. Often such discourses unravel into splintered and negative conversations, raising the question whether organizations can and should exercise some level of control and ‘steering’ in these conversations and, if...

Organizations increasingly delegate agency to artificial intelligence. However, such systems can yield unintended negative effects as they may produce biases against users or reinforce social injustices. What pronounces them as a unique grand challenge, however, are not their potentially problematic outcomes but their fluid design. Machine learning...

Organizations increasingly delegate agency to artificial intelligence. However, such systems can yield unintended negative effects as they may produce biases against users or reinforce social injustices. What pronounces them as a unique grand challenge, however, are not their potentially problematic outcomes but their fluid design. Machine learning...

Organizations increasingly delegate agency to artificial intelligence. However, such systems can yield unintended negative effects as they may produce biases against users or reinforce social injustices. What pronounces them as a unique grand challenge, however, are not their potentially problematic outcomes but their fluid design. Machine learning...

Organizations increasingly delegate agency to artificial intelligence. However, such systems can yield unintended negative effects as they may produce biases against users or reinforce social injustices. What pronounces them as a unique grand challenge, however, are not their potentially problematic outcomes but their fluid design. Machine learning...

This article examines career transitions in creative industries that involve geographical relocation from large metropolitan creative cities to small, remote and marginal urbanities. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews with freelancers who have relocated to peripheral Southern European locales, the article explores the ways in which creative workers...

Digital Labor, taking up flexible but small‐scale employment arrangements on online intermediary platforms, with few constraints on how much, when, and where work is performed, are becoming the new work reality for many individuals. Scholars have argued that this type of work is inherently demeaning. We seek to explore the worker’s perspective and...

While organizations today make extensive use of complex algorithms, the notion of algorithmic accountability remains an elusive ideal due to the opacity and fluidity of algorithms. In this article, we develop a framework for managing algorithmic accountability that highlights three interrelated dimensions: reputational concerns, engagement strategi...

Independent actors operating through peer-to-peer sharing economy platforms co-create service experiences, such as shared car-rides or home-stays. Emotional labor among both parties, manifested in the mutual enactment of socially desirable behavior, is essential in ensuring that these experiences are successful. However, little is known about emoti...

In our introduction to this special issue on the gig economy, we provide some context to how and why this phenomenon should be studied, with a particular emphasis on Human Resource Management. We then describe the four articles that comprise the special issue, and we note some common themes. Our introduction concludes with some suggestions for futu...

Advocates of the boundaryless career perspective have relied to a great extent on the assumption that actors take responsibility for their own career development and that they consequently take charge of developing their career competencies. In this provocation piece, we debate the obstructions to and potential ways to promote boundaryless careers...

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is no...

Purpose Online gig labor platforms bring together a global and fast-growing workforce to complete highly granular, remote and decontextualized tasks. While these environments might be empowering to some workers, many others feel disenfranchised and removed from the final product of their labor. To better understand the antecedents of continued part...

Based on a qualitative survey among 203 US workers active on the microwork platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, we analyze potential biases embedded in the institutional setting provided by on-demand crowdworking platforms and their effect on perceived workplace fairness. We explore the triadic relationship between employers, workers, and platform prov...

In this article, we explore the practices of extensive data collection among sharing economy platforms, highlighting how the unknown future value of big data creates an ethical problem for a fair exchange relationship between companies and users. Specifically, we present a typology with four scenarios related to the future value of data. In the rem...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore how rating mechanisms encourage emotional labor norms among sharing economy consumers. Design/methodology/approach This study follows a mixed methods research design. Survey data from 207 consumers were used to quantify the impact of three distinct rating dimensions on a consumer behavioral outcome...

Purpose A growing number of research report positive effects of gamification, that is the introduction of game elements to non-game contexts, on stakeholder intentions and behaviors. Hence, gamification is proposed as an effective tool for organizations to educate their stakeholders about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability-re...

Based on a qualitative interview-study as well as on a quantitative survey among users of the room sharing platform Airbnb, we show that situational closeness between sharing economy consumers and providers may prompt instances of interpersonal contamination which in turn negatively impact reviewer behaviour and intention to engage in room sharing...

Conditions in the sharing economy are often favourably designed for consumers and platforms but entail new challenges for the labour side, such as substandard social-security and rigid forms of algorithmic management. Since comparatively little is known about how providers in the sharing economy make their voices heard collectively, we investigate...

We debate the strategic application of game elements to corporate messaging regarding societal and ecological concerns. We propose that gamified corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is potentially well suited to create attention and involvement for corporate CSR initiatives. However, we argue that many gamification applications under...

Internet-mediated sharing is growing quickly. Millions of users around the world share personal services and possessions with others—often complete strangers. Shared goods can amount to substantial financial and immaterial value. Despite this, little research has investigated privacy in the sharing economy. To fill this gap, we examine the sharing-...

The sharing economy offers individuals various opportunities to generate additional income through sharing their personal possessions with strangers. The flexibility promised by sharing platforms , to share when and how often individuals prefer, has been highlighted as the key advantage of the sharing economy model. However, for sharing platforms w...

New forms of employment centered on the completion of simple and atomized tasks, such as online microwork, raise the question of the possible gratifications that could be derived from such work when compared to more traditional labor arrangements. Our research presented here focuses on how microworkers construct meaningfulness, based on the account...

This report, ‘Recommendations for the Sharing Economy: (Re-)Balancing Power’, forms one element of a European Union Horizon 2020 Research Project on the sharing economy: Ps2Share ‘Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy’. It presents a set of 25 recommendations for five key stakeholders in the sharing economy: providers, consumers,...

The peer-to-peer nature of the sharing economy en-courages participants to alter their behavior in ways that resemble traditional notions of emotional labor. A key element in this shift lies in the coercive nature of feedback mechanisms which condition both providers and consumers to perform emotional labor during ser-vice encounters. Using survey...

Christian Fieseler, Kateryna Maltseva, and Christian Pieter Hoffmann advance the notion that corporate efforts to engage stakeholders in social, ecological, and governmental issues are unbalanced and unrepresentative, such that they are dominated by elite users, with their chapter "Hedonic stakeholder engagement: bridging the online participation g...

Introducing wearable devices can potentially be a game changer in creating happy, healthy and engaged employees. However, good intentions can go bad. In this brieft article in "Communication for Leaders" magazine, we discuss benefits and concerns of using self-tracking devices in corporate wellness programs.

This report, ‘European Perspectives on Power in the Sharing Economy’, forms one element of a European Union Horizon 2020 Research Project on the sharing economy: Ps2Share ‘Participation, Privacy, and Power in the Sharing Economy’. Within the survey and in the following report, we addressed various items towards four distinct sub-categories of Europ...

This chapter outlines a new role for investor relations in an environment where a passive, acquiescent shareholder base is no longer the norm. Today, investors are increasingly ready to engage and challenge management and boards on strategic, financial, and ethical grounds. As shareholders settle into a more active stance toward their investments,...

Despite the rising practice of engaging stakeholders through online media in organizational social responsibility efforts, little is known about the effects and the most impactful modes of engagement. In this study, we utilize dialogic theory to develop four common conversational logics employed in contemporary CSR efforts: open script, directed, m...

This article examines the argument regarding whether perceived social exclusion during unemployment leads to procrastination through online media, which in turn lessens the job search efforts of the unemployed. Based on data from 386 unemployed Internet users, we argue that online procrastination plays an important role in the lives of the unemploy...

In this contribution, we scrutinize the diverse motives for internet-mediated sharing as well as their role in shaping attitudes towards sharing one's possessions in commercialized as well as non-commercialized settings. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative research, we first develop a scale of sharing motives, showing that the reasons for...

Digital microwork is a type of labor that many—typically poorly paid—workers engage in. In our research, we focus on an experience-based model of digital labor and the nonmonetary benefits derived from such activities. Based on a survey of 701 workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk, we demonstrate that experiences during digital labor sequences generate...

When shareholders become dissatisfied with a public company's policies or actions, they may resort to activist interventions. Shareholder activism has been described as an attempt to resolve agency conflicts by directly influencing management or board decisions. Shareholder activism may be incited by a lack of focus on shareholder value, a misalign...

Innovationen sind wichtig für das Bestehen und den Erfolg von Unternehmen. Organisationen bemühen sich fortlaufend und auf vielfältige Weise, Innovation zu generieren –, sei es in Form von Produkt-, Dienstleistungs-, Prozess- und Geschäftsmodellinnovationen. Doch was macht eine Organisation tatsächlich innovativ? Das St. Galler Business-Innovation-...

Purpose – The rise of social media has caused a shift in organizational practices, giving rise, in some cases, to genuinely “mediatized” organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how communications managers employ social media to influence their professional impressions. Design/methodology/approach – Analyzing a sample of 679 European...

Purpose Recent years have seen resurgent interest in professionalism in public relations, with several initiatives to enquire about the state of the communication profession and its part in organizational strategy. This article discusses the findings of a quantitative investigation into the work roles of European communication professionals. In par...

Sharing one’s possessions over a growing number of Internet platforms has gained popularity in recent years. To better understand why people share their possessions online, we combined qualitative and quantitative research to propose four sharing motives (hedonic, moral, monetary and learning). Based on these motives, we identified four clusters of...

Digital microwork is a type of labor that many—typically poorly paid—workers engage in. In our research, we focus on an experience-based model of digital labor and the nonmonetary benefits derived from such activities. Based on a survey of 701 workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk, we demonstrate that experiences during digital labor sequences generate...

Unemployment is an unfortunate reality, whose overcoming often depends on social support, among other factors. Online social media, such as social network sites and communities, may offer an additional source of such support for unemployed people. This paper posits that online social support plays an important role in unemployed people's ability to...

As organizations become increasingly mediatized, the roles of professionals are reshaped and negoti-ated, and the boundaries between professional and private relationships are blurred. In this context, the extent to which one identifies with his or her organization might play an important role. This paper investigates how professionals construct th...

This article reports the results of a stratified sample survey of 2414 unemployed individuals in Germany regarding Internet usage, accompanied by a small sample of qualitative interviews and time-use diaries. The Internet serves as a structuring device for individuals during unemployment and helps such individuals maintain social contacts; it fills...

Many people who are unemployed tend to experience forms of psychological and social losses, including a weakened time structure, diminished social contacts, an absence of collective purpose, falling status, and inactivity. This article focuses on the experience of diminished social contacts and addresses whether social media help the unemployed mai...

Unemployment is an unsettling reality, affiliated to financial restriction, a loss of social structure, and the risk of mental strain such as depressions and anxiety states. How well people overcome the incriminatory situation of unemployment is among others a matter of social support. Online social media such as social network sites and communitie...

One pathway to alleviate the consequences of technology- induced stress may lie in the role that supervisors may or may not play in mitigating the negative consequences of ICT usage. Based on survey research with 491 salespersons using ICT in their work environment, and tested with structural equation modelling, we discuss the impact of two forms o...

Purpose — In this chapter we discuss the implications social media have for the self-representation and identity formulation of professionals within organizations. Under the assumption that new, technology-mediated networking possibilities call for a reformulation of the boundaries between the professional and the private, we propose several avenue...

With the emergence of participative social media, the ways in which stakeholders may interact with companies are changing. Social media and Web 2.0 technologies change gatekeeping mechanisms and the distribution of information. In consequence, organizations must realize that they are structurally embedded in online networks of interconnected and eq...

Social media are transforming the nature of work. With the rise of social media, the discussion about the stress potential of new media once again becomes pertinent. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media reshape workplaces and accelerate traditional stress factors, such as information overload, the invasion of work into the private domain, and...

The far-reaching consequences for individuals and organizations make technostress a crucial issue of management. What impact does leadership have on the negative consequences which may result out of the use of ICT? Management constitutes an influential factor in employee’s work environment and a powerful leverage for organizations to effect employe...