scholarly journals PLATFORM AS NEW “DADDY”: CHINA’S GENDERED WANGHONG ECONOMY AND PATRIARCHAL PLATFORMS BEHIND

Author(s):  
Xiaofei Han

This paper provides an explorative analysis of gender as a critical dimension of the prospering wanghong economy in China with special attention devoted to the e-commerce wanghong value chains that are yet to be examined by scholars so far. Wanghong refers to a particular stream of vocational Chinese internet celebrities that have acquired their celebrity online and have acute incentives through various models to liquidate such online influence by transforming followers into consumers. While wanghong economy is often projected as a new platform economy that is by the women and for the women on diverse media outlets, my analysis highlights the structurally embedded gender hierarchy of this platform business ecosystem and the platform power increasingly associated with patriarchal order as exemplified by the updated meanings constructed around the Chinese term “baba” (daddy), which now is used to refer to platforms by wanghong and netizens. By combining the analysis of female participation at different levels of wanghong economy with the “platform-as-daddy” discourse prevalent on Douyin, one of the most popular social media platforms, this paper seeks to connect the industrial analysis of wanghong economy as one of the most prominent “platform economies” in contemporary China with its cultural dimensions. It accentuates the key roles of major Chinese platform companies as not only new critical intermediaries in perpetuating the ongoing patriarchal system between the state and users but also active participants that actively construct, and aggressively profit from, the gendered wanghong economy value chains.

Author(s):  
Prem Poddar

The essentially contested notion of the modern, and its cognate form “modernity,” have a long intellectual history. The emergence and dissemination of the idea of Western modernity was sometimes forcibly imposed, sometimes partially accepted, and sometimes resisted at different levels around the globe. Recent thinking has produced qualifiers and prefixes such as “unfinished,” “post-,” “late,” “inevitable,” “contra-,” “alternative,” or “differential” in relation to modernity, to signal the striations in approaches, interpretations, and positionings towards what is seen as an umbrella term to describe the various possibilities that can be brought to bear while considering contentions in contemporary theory and praxis. The social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of this field of forces are integral to any thinking about the symbolic contestation of power in multifarious re-imaginings. This article charts this field mainly by looking at the colonial and postcolonial interventions that have impacted and continue to the present day to effect and inflect cultures and societies, including pressing questions of climate change and cyberspace. Sections are sorted under the following sub-headings: “The vortex of the modern;” “Subaltern bodies, subversive minds;” “Communication and colonization: Re-inventing space and time;” “Borderlands, migrations, identities;” and “Contesting and controlling cyberspace.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 9282-9289
Author(s):  
Qingyang Wu ◽  
Lei Li ◽  
Hao Zhou ◽  
Ying Zeng ◽  
Zhou Yu

Many social media news writers are not professionally trained. Therefore, social media platforms have to hire professional editors to adjust amateur headlines to attract more readers. We propose to automate this headline editing process through neural network models to provide more immediate writing support for these social media news writers. To train such a neural headline editing model, we collected a dataset which contains articles with original headlines and professionally edited headlines. However, it is expensive to collect a large number of professionally edited headlines. To solve this low-resource problem, we design an encoder-decoder model which leverages large scale pre-trained language models. We further improve the pre-trained model's quality by introducing a headline generation task as an intermediate task before the headline editing task. Also, we propose Self Importance-Aware (SIA) loss to address the different levels of editing in the dataset by down-weighting the importance of easily classified tokens and sentences. With the help of Pre-training, Adaptation, and SIA, the model learns to generate headlines in the professional editor's style. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the quality of headline editing comparing against previous methods.


The chapter starts presenting the main elements of the coding scheme, previously introduced, that the author used to analyse the cultural impact on corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication on company websites. It presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of the websites of 352 organisations belonging to different geographical areas and included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSWI) and in the Hang Seng (Mainland and HK) Corporate Sustainability Index (HSMHUS). The findings show that Hofstede's cultural dimensions and online CSR communication belong to two different levels of analysis: one is innate, intuitive, and diffusive, while the other one is planned, intentional, and rational. Thus, the findings suggest that cultural dimensions are factors that need to be analysed as social aspects, while CSR communication on corporate websites has to be explored as a strategic feature. Finally, the chapter recommends areas for further discussion and research about the relation between traditional culture, culture of the Internet, and CSR, reflecting on the achieved results that largely differ from previous studies related to Hofstede's cultural dimensions and CSR communication.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Li Shen

This paper develops a conceptual connection between the Revised Technology Acceptance Model and Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions in explicating the adoption by customers of a social media platform in the fashion industry in the context of the US and China. This study shows that the trustworthiness of Facebook is positively related to US customers’ intention to purchase fashion items and the trustworthiness of WeChat is positively related to Chinese customers’ intention to purchase fashion items. Also, US customers’ perceived usefulness is not positively related to the intention of using Facebook to buy fashion items. However, their Chinese counterparts had the opposite result. The findings enhance our understanding of the factors that influence customers’ adoption of social media platforms for purchasing fashion items and provides suggestions for marketing managers as to how they can utilize social media platforms to market fashion items. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible future research in this field.


Author(s):  
Andrėja Juršė ◽  
Aistė Makackaitė ◽  
Gabija Jakutytė ◽  
Laura Kievišienė

The role of social media in today’s life is almost imperative. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram or Youtube are widely used all over the world. Above all, social media has become a global phenomenon, which has dramatically changed the concept of cross-cultural communication not only between individuals, but also brands and consumers. Varieties of social media platforms provide a new channel to acquire information through peer communication, thus influencing consumer purchase intention. Although diverse cultures have different cultural backgrounds, they affect the acceptance of social media usage. In order to broaden the understanding of this rapidly changing field, this paper provides a framework, based on Hofstede’s dimensions and Technology Acceptance model, for examining the intersection of cultural differences, social media usage and consumer behaviour to set the agenda for future research.


First Monday ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Stanger ◽  
Noorah Alnaghaimshi ◽  
Erika Pearson

With the global growth of social media platforms, there are questions as to how regional cultural factors shape online engagement. Focusing on young Saudi Arabian users of some of the more popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, this article uses Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to assess how cultural and religious factors are shaping and constraining online social media engagements. Using interviews, questionnaires, and analysis of individual profiles, this paper discusses some of the intertwined cultural and religious factors that influence how Saudi youth negotiate their use of social media platforms that are developed in completely different cultural contexts. In particular, this article highlights gendered concerns and the strong influence of the social collective on how these sites are used and how users manage the information they share. Through the development of “personas” as representative young Saudi users, this article concludes with some recommendations for platform developers as to how to meet the needs of this growing market.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512093663 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Caplan ◽  
Tarleton Gillespie

Social media platforms have profoundly transformed cultural production, in part by restructuring the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for. In this article, we examine the YouTube Partner Program and the controversies around the “demonetization” of videos, to understand these arrangements and what happens when they shift beneath creators’ feet. We use the testimony of YouTubers, provided in their own videos, to understand how creators square the contradiction between YouTube’s increasingly cautious rules regarding “advertiser-friendly” content, its shifting financial and algorithmic incentive structure, and its stated values as an open platform of expression. We examine YouTube’s tiered governance strategy, in which different users are offered different sets of rules, different material resources, and different procedural protections when content is demonetized. And we examine how, especially when the details of that tiered governance are ambiguous or poorly conveyed, creators develop their own theories for why their content has been demonetized—which can provide some creators a tactical opportunity to advance politically motivated accusations of bias against the platform.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193896552092465
Author(s):  
Fuad Mehraliyev ◽  
Youngjoon Choi ◽  
Brian King

There has been exponential growth in the power exercised by social media in hospitality and tourism. The power of social media platforms as stakeholders has been widely accepted by both academics and industry practitioners. However, to the best of the current authors’ knowledge, there has been no conceptualization of the power attributable to social media. On this basis, it is both timely and necessary to establish theoretical grounds that explain the concept of social media power and its application in hospitality and tourism. A hierarchical model that characterizes social media power is constructed in the present article by bringing together fundamental power discourses, media effect theories, and technology determinism. The authors identify definitions and sources of social media power at different levels of the power pyramid and present various technological mechanisms that trigger such sources. This conceptual study proposes theoretical foundations for future research and theory-building.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-43
Author(s):  
Jaakko Salminen

AbstractContracts are used to extend governance on supply chain and platform actors in ways that could not be envisaged when the foundations of current conceptualizations of contractual privity were laid down in the 19th century. This results in a stark contradiction. Firms use contracts to extend governance on actors beyond privity when it suits their interests, for example for reasons of supply-chain-wide cost-management. At the same time, law offers few means of holding a firm liable for the inadequate governance of social, environmental, cultural, and economic sustainability in its supply chain or platform eco-system. I propose two tools for uncovering the multiple societal tensions that this disjuncture between law and contractual practice entails. The first is a genealogy of how contractual paradigms have contributed to the rise of new forms of production, such as centralized mass production in the 19th century, global value chains in the 20th century, and the platform economy in the 21st century. The second is a multidisciplinary typology of the contractual mechanisms used to extend governance beyond privity. My hope is that these two tools will help us better understand, research, teach, and balance the implications of contractual paradigms on the social, environmental, cultural, and economic sustainability of production.


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