This book presents ten essays that examine the potential of digital responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The essays explore new digital concepts for learning and teaching, provide an overview of organizational responses to the crisis through digital technologies, and examine digital solutions developed to manage the crisis. Scientists from many disciplines work together in the fight against the virus and its numerous consequences. This book explores how information systems researchers can contribute to these global efforts. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the field of digital business and education.
What do vehicle manufacturers like Rosenbauer, logistics companies like DB Schenker, a compressor manufacturer such as Bauer, an elevator manufacturer such as ThyssenKrupp, and a hygiene goods manufacturer like Hagleitner all have in common? They all use the potential of digitization to offer smarter and faster services to customers and to actively shape the digital transformation of their business models. This book provides valuable insights with concise and established guidelines for the successful digital transformation of business models. Professionals in management, strategic planning, business development, as well as researchers and students from the fields of innovation/technology management, strategic management, and entrepreneurship would particularly benefit from this book.
This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index
One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI – and, if so, what this will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail to understand how it affects us. At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to reappropriate control and transform it into care. As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the future.
"This book provides new approaches of digitalization of decentralized supply chains and industries to help researchers, educators, consultants and practitioners to deal with global crises and to improve the global performance of supply chains"--
Education privatization is a global phenomenon that has crystallized in countries with very different cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. In this book, the authors examine how privatization policies are being adopted and why so many countries are engaging in this type of education reform. The authors explore the contexts, key personnel, and policy initiatives that explain the worldwide advance of the private sector in education, and identify six different paths toward education privatization—as a drastic state sector reform (e.g., Chile, the U.K.), as an incremental reform (e.g., the U.S.A.), in social-democratic welfare states, as historical public-private partnerships (e.g., Netherlands, Spain), as de facto privatization in low-income countries, and privatization via disaster. Book Features: The first comprehensive, in-depth investigation of the political economy of education privatization at a global scale.An analysis of the different strategies, discourses, and agents that have contributed to advancing (and resisting) education privatization trends. An examination of the role of private corporations, policy entrepreneurs, philanthropic organizations, think-tanks, and teacher unions. “Rich in examples, careful in its analysis, important in its conclusions and recommendations for further work, this book is a vital, rigorous, up-to-date resource for education policy researchers.” —Stephen J. Ball, University College London “Few issues are as significant as is education privatization across the globe; few treatments of this issue offer both the breadth and nuanced understanding that this book does.” —Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University
Creating, adapting to, and exploiting change is inherently entrepreneurial. To survive and prosper under conditions of change, firms must develop the “dynamic capabilities” to create, extend, and modify the ways in which they operate. The capacity of an organization to create, extend, or modify its resource base is vital. Since the concept of dynamic capabilities was first introduced, much research has elaborated the initial idea. This important book by Constance Helfat and her team of leading scholars provides a timely focus on in-depth examples of corporate dynamic capabilities. Examining these in the different contexts of alliances, acquisitions, and management, the book gives students and researchers a succinct, up-to-date definition of dynamic capabilities and the strategic management theories around them.
An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks. From the ocean floor to outer space, China’s Digital Silk Road aims to wire the world and rewrite the global order. Taking readers on a journey inside China’s surveillance state, rural America, and Africa’s megacities, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China’s expanding digital footprint looks like on the ground and explores the economic and strategic consequences of a future in which all routers lead to Beijing. If China becomes the world’s chief network operator, it could reap a commercial and strategic windfall, including many advantages currently enjoyed by the United States. It could reshape global flows of data, finance, and communications to reflect its interests. It could possess an unrivaled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its networks. However, China’s digital dominance is not yet assured. Beijing remains vulnerable in several key dimensions, the United States and its allies have an opportunity to offer better alternatives, and the rest of the world has a voice. But winning the battle for tomorrow’s networks will require the United States to innovate and take greater risks in emerging markets. Networks create large winners, and this is a contest America cannot afford to lose.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses are especially vulnerable. This is one of the first books that explicitly examines the linkage between crisis and entrepreneurship with a specific focus on small businesses. The book adopts a holistic approach and outlines strategies that small business owners can utilize as well as business opportunities that are available in these new market conditions. It also provides a comparative analysis of the current and future market conditions to enable a better understanding of how institutional structures can facilitate or hinder growth. The book also goes on to explain why and how creativity and innovation can help to mitigate the impact of such a crisis on business and highlights why business continuity is especially crucial to family-owned businesses. This timely publication will help to guide small business owners and entrepreneurs to maintain business continuity and build up their resilience in a challenging business climate.
As organizations continue to move towards digital enterprise, the need for digital transformation continues to grow especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These impacts will last far into the future, as newer digital technologies continue to be accepted, used, and developed. These digital tools will forever change the face of business and management. However, on the road to digital enterprise transformation there are many successes, difficulties, challenges, and failures. Finding solutions for these issues through strategic thinking and identification of the core issues facing the enterprise is of primary concern. This means modernizing management and strategies around the digital workforce and understanding digital business at various levels. These key areas of digitalization and global challenges, such as those during or derived from the pandemic, are new and unique; They require new knowledge gained from a deep understanding of complex issues that have been examined and the solutions being discovered. Emerging Challenges, Solutions, and Best Practices for Digital Enterprise Transformation explores the key challenges being faced as businesses undergo digital transformation. It provides both solutions and best practices for not only handling and solving these key issues, but for becoming successful in digital enterprise. This includes topics such as security and privacy in technologies, data management, information and communication technologies, and digital marketing, branding, and commerce. This book is ideal for managers, business professionals, government, researchers, students, practitioners, stakeholders, academicians, and anyone else looking to learn about new developments in digital enterprise transformation of business systems from a global perspective.
