Rikke Duus’s research while affiliated with University College London and other places

Organizations continue to create digital interfaces and infrastructure that are designed to heighten consumers’ online visibility and encourage them to part with their data. The way these digital systems operate and the rules they are governed by are often opaque, leaving consumers to deploy their own strategies for managing their online information sharing with organizations. In this study, we draw upon Erving Goffman’s metaphor of expression games and three forms of concealment or cover moves to explore how consumers, who have been well socialized as digital natives, engage in dynamic and game-like interactions with organizations in an attempt to manage their level of online visibility and information sharing in relation, inter alia, to the ‘convenience’ and ‘benefits’ that are afforded to them. Our research is based on in-depth interviews in combination with photo-elicitation with 20 participants. Based on the insight generated, we offer a new framework, ‘Propensity to Game’ (P2G), which present the processual dynamics that characterize these consumers’ evolving and game-like engagements with organizations. These are Game Awareness, Rule Familiarization, Player Commitment and Game Play. Our work contributes with new insight into how these consumers actively engage in the orchestration of their online visibility by surfacing the nuanced and multifaceted decision-making and thought processes that they engage in when they, situation-by-situation, decide on the tactics and methods to use in their efforts to manage the data and information they share with organizations.

Business schools must continue to develop their digital ecosystems, to help prepare learners for a fast-changing and digitally-charged business environment, say Mike Cooray and Rikke Duus.

What kind of urban environment would you like to live in? In this article, we critically reflect on how digital technologies are accelerating and changing the nature of urban spaces. Using examples from around the world, we identify some of the boundaries of our technology-textured living and illuminate how the creation of our urban spaces takes place at the delicate intersection of personal privacy on one hand and the dream of the utopian ‘smart’ city on the other.

In this article, we present the Digital Value Creation (DVC) framework. The DVC framework can be used as an evaluative method for organisations to create, enhance and consolidate digital value. We propose that organisations focus their digital value creation efforts in three interconnected areas: creating and managing ‘Experiences’, building meaningful and personalised ‘Relationships’ and accelerating ‘Evolution’ to support business longevity. Organisations must structure their digital value creation efforts within a strengthened outer layer comprising of ‘Digital Competences’, ‘Digital Infrastructure’ and ‘Digital Outputs’. In order to accelerate digital value creation, organisations must be digitally ready and have the internal capabilities and digital set-up that enable it to respond to new and emergent opportunities. At the heart of the DVC framework is ‘Relevance’. The process of digital value creation should be undertaken with Relevance as the interconnecting force between the three DVC elements of Experiences, Relationships and Evolution. Based on our on-going empirical research with organisations that are spearheading digital value creation, we explore the DVC framework through three case organisations: DSB, Coop Denmark and Moleskine.

Across industries, organisations are in search of new ways to enhance their competitiveness in the midst of digital disruption and a changing competitor landscape. To guide organisations through the turbulent waters of the digital era, we need new frameworks to help shape organisational strategy and decision-making. In this article, we introduce a new strategising framework that is designed, developed and tested to support organisations to navigate and maneuver in digital spheres.

In an increasingly technology-textured environment, smart, intelligent and responsive technology has moved onto the body of many individuals. Mobile phones, smart watches, and wearable activity trackers (WATs) are just some of the technologies that are guiding, nudging, monitoring, and reminding individuals in their day-to-day lives. These devices are designed to enhance and support their human users, however, there is a lack of attention to the unintended consequences, the technology non-neutrality and the darker sides of becoming human-tech hybrids. Using the extended mind theory (EMT) and agential intra-action, we aimed at exploring how human-tech hybrids gain collective skills and how these are put to use; how agency is expressed and how this affects the interactions; and what the darker sides are of being a human-tech hybrid. Using a qualitative method, we analyzed the experiences of using a WAT, with a specific focus on how the tracker and the individual solve tasks, share competences, develop new skills, and negotiate for agency and autonomy. We contributed with new insight on human-tech hybridity and presented a concept referred to as the agency pendulum, reflecting the dynamism of agency. Finally, we demonstrated how the EMT and agential intra-action as a combined theoretical lens can be used to explore human-tech hybridity.

Technology influences consumers’ consumption habits (Verma et al. 2015) and construction of identities (Cluley and Brown 2015). This research focuses specifically on the wearable activity tracker, Fitbit, and explores how it not only drives change but also becomes an active participant in consumers’ everyday lives. Four themes are presented: health-related behavioral change, impact on self-satisfaction, technology-governed goal-driven behaviors, and technology dependency and embodiment. We conclude that when consumers actively track and monitor their quantified selves, the technology takes on an agentic role and demands consumers’ trust and reliance in exchange for gratification, access to performance data, and a happier, more satisfied, state of mind.

In a global business environment, marketing education must support students to develop cross-cultural agility and adeptness with an aim to enhance their employability. This article contributes with an experiential cross-cultural exercise that enables students to develop new enterprises in collaboration with other students in a different country through virtual teamwork. The exercise exposes students to practical cross-cultural learning, enterprise development, and virtual team management. Results from students’ reflection journals indicate that the exercise is enjoyable, builds confidence in a range of skills, and prepares students for future employment. We offer guidance and direction on how to design and execute this experiential cross-cultural exercise and also highlight the challenges faced and strategies for success.