This article examines online gift giving in the form of opinion, information, and advice that individuals post on websites. Research has highlighted altruism and reciprocity as the key motives behind such gift giving. We argue that informational gift giving is also strongly driven by status and status seeking, and that status sentiments are more likely to sustain virtual communities. Using theories of status seeking and self-presentation, we investigate the ways in which consumers construct status in online consumer communities. The data reveal insights into the strategies behind constructing a digital status and the rise of online systems to promote celebrity status within online communities.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link ABSTRACTCurrent economic crisis has highlighted the importance of an organization's ability to withstand economic shocks. This has rekindled the interest in organization resilience on the one hand, and the relationship between alternative governance forms such as employee owned businesses (EOBs) on the other. We explore this relationship using performance data on 204 publicly traded non-employee owned businesses and 49 EOBs prior to the economic downturn (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008), and during the economic downturn (2008)(2009)). This data is complemented with a survey of resilience related governance and organizational practices in 41 EOBs and 22 non-EOBs. Our results show that: a) employee ownership form is associated with greater stability in business performance over a business cycle; b) EOBs have longer payback horizon when compared to non-EOBs across a number of activities; c) EOBs top management seek employee input beyond operational aspects by involving them in strategic decision making; d) EOBs achieve tighter coupling between the feedback from operations and the feed forward on strategic direction. These results suggest that employee stock ownership programs alone are not sufficient to develop higher levels of organizational resilience. Managers must combine employee stock ownership with employee involvement in governance if they wish to build up resilience in advance of adverse economic conditions. 2 INTRODUCTIONThe recent economic crisis and the prolonged economic recession that has ensued is focusing increasing attention on 'organizational resilience': the organization's capacity to cope with "unanticipated dangers after they become manifest (Wildavsky, 1988: 147) Our analysis of the performance data show that EOBs are more resilient than non-EOBs.We follow this with analysis of managerial practices that points to differences in employee voice and involvement that may account for higher resilience.The paper is structured as follows. We begin with an overview of the concept of organizational resilience. We then examine current research on the relationship between organizational resilience and stakeholders' governance. We then turn our attention to governance in employee owned businesses, contrasting publicly traded corporations where owners are generally external to the organization, with firms where employees substantially own and exercise control over the organization.We begin by looking at elaborating the role governance plays in ensuring long-term stability of the firm. Next, we highlight employee-ownership governance structure and whyEOBs are a case for more resilient organisations. We then present our research methodology and discuss the findings of our research. Finally, we close with a discussion and implications for the managers and future research directions.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Offshoring allows firms to pursue greater flexibility at lower costs, but it also presents major structural and managerial challenges. Adopting the activity configuration perspective, we argue that offshoring creates tensions between benefits to the competitive position of the firm, and potential disruption to the cohesion and consistency of the organization's internal activity configuration. We further argue that both benefits and risks increase as organizations move from offshoring low to offshoring high value-creating activities, and as they seek tight as opposed to loose couplings among offshored and onshored value-creating activities. Our research site is the UK operations of Tiscali, a European telecommunications firm. We examine how Tiscali uses offshoring as it grows and expands its service offerings from single, to double, and then triple play, and also analyze how Tiscali addresses the ensuing disruption to its activity configuration. We conclude with implications of our study to future research on offshoring. Permanent repository link

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