THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND THE ORIGIN OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM: THE CASE OF THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY.

The Swellengrebels were the most important family at the Cape under Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule to become members of the Netherlands governing elite. Hendrik Swellengrebel was the colony's only locally-born governor, while his father and other members of the family at the Cape were born in Russia. Their migration between Europe, Africa and Asia reflected the development and functioning of the Dutch trade and patrimonial networks. Even on the periphery, at the Cape and among Dutch expatriates in Russia, those networks provided opportunities for overseas employment and upward social mobility. The case of the Swellengrebels shows that not only goods but also people could make their way from Russia to the Cape and the VOC Asia. Patronage enabled both spatial and upward social mobility. Keeping mutually beneficial relations with influential patrons such as Nicolaes Witsen, members of the Swellengrebel family navigated their way within the Dutch trade networks and achieved prosperity and a high status in such culturally diverse societies as Russia and the Cape. The social advancement, identity transformations and transcontinental migrations of the Swellengrebel family demonstrate the materiality of transcontinental patrimonial networks in the early modern period.

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The Authenticity Paradox: Why the Returns to Authenticity on Audience Appeal Decrease in Popularity and Iconicity

Journal of Management ◽

10.1177/0149206320950414 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 014920632095041

Author(s):

J. Cameron Verhaal ◽

Stanislav D. Dobrev

Keyword(s):

Social Construction ◽

Boundary Conditions ◽

Competitive Advantage ◽

Social Dynamics ◽

Economic Value ◽

Firm Level ◽

Craft Beer ◽

Audience Appeal ◽

The Social ◽

The U.S

A great deal of research has argued for authenticity as a key firm-level attribute and source of competitive advantage. But we know very little about the boundary conditions related to organizational authenticity. In order to address this, we develop a theory of the social construction of authenticity, how it affects the appeal of a producer’s offerings, and how the market success of these offerings affects the returns to authenticity. We propose that there are two mechanisms, in addition to authenticity, that can drive audience appeal: popularity and iconicity. But increases in both popularity and iconicity also challenge some of the underlying tenets of what the audience considers authentic, namely, intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of social, rather than economic, value. The authenticity paradox, then, is that even as the appeal of authentic offerings increases, their popularity and iconicity diminish the returns to authenticity. We find support for these ideas in the context of the U.S. market for craft beer and discuss the implications of our theory for authenticity research and for the broader market and social dynamics in craft industries.

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Wars and wonders: the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius

The British Journal for the History of Science ◽

10.1017/s0007087418000742 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 51 (4) ◽

pp. 559-584 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

GENIE YOO

Keyword(s):

Natural World ◽

East India Company ◽

Information Networks ◽

Dutch East India Company ◽

Intended Audience ◽

The Social ◽

Local Actors ◽

Economies Of Exchange

AbstractHow did one man living on an island come to acquire information about the rest of the vast archipelago? This article traces the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–1702), an employee of the Dutch East India Company, who was able to explore the natural world of the wider archipelago without ever leaving the Moluccan island of Ambon. This article demonstrates the complexities of Rumphius's inter-island networks, as he collected information about plants and objects from islands near and far. Using his administrative, commercial and household networks, Rumphius was able to interact with local actors from across the social spectrum, whose own active collection, mediation and circulation of objects and information overlapped with imperial activities in the archipelago. This article examines Rumphius as both a collector and a mediator, who negotiated between multiple economies of exchange and translated information from different islands for his distant European readership. Such practices of localized translation demonstrate how knowledge produced on one island was the product of criss-crossing inter-island networks, as the information concerned underwent its own complicated processes of transmission and transformation within the archipelago before reaching its intended audience in Europe.

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Organizing Global Knowledge Management in a Dispersed Organization

Knowledge Management and Business Model Innovation ◽

10.4018/978-1-878289-98-8.ch025 ◽

2001 ◽

pp. 426-441

Author(s):

Shan L. Pan

Keyword(s):

Knowledge Management ◽

Social Construction ◽

Competitive Advantage ◽

Knowledge Sharing ◽

Organizational Context ◽

Social Issues ◽

Global Knowledge ◽

The Social ◽

Technological Perspective ◽

Over Time

Knowledge has been identified as one of the most important resources that contribute to the competitive advantage of an organization. Such realization has led to a number of studies that have attempted to understand how organizations explore and exploit knowledge from a technological perspective. However, the chapter aims to go beyond the technological perspective by addressing the organizational and social issues of organizing global knowledge sharing. The research is based on an empirical investigation of knowledge sharing processes from an international organization. Through the social construction approach, the chapter traces the interactions between global knowledge management (KM) practices and the organizational context over time.

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Calamitous Voyages: the social space of shipwreck and mutiny narratives in the Dutch East India Company

Itinerario ◽

10.1017/s0165115315000157 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 39 (1) ◽

pp. 117-140 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Richard Guy

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Social Order ◽

Social Space ◽

East India Company ◽

Safe Space ◽

Dutch Republic ◽

Dutch East India Company ◽

Worst Case ◽

Social Hierarchies ◽

The Social

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.

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MIDWIVES AND MEDICAL MEN IN THE CAPE COLONY BEFORE 1860

The Journal of African History ◽

10.1017/s0021853798007191 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 39 (2) ◽

pp. 271-292 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

HARRIET DEACON

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Social History ◽

Historical Record ◽

East India Company ◽

Dutch East India Company ◽

British Rule ◽

The Social ◽

History Of ◽

Archival Record ◽

Social History Of Medicine

Relatively little research has been done on the history of midwifery at the Cape, although there has lately been increasing interest in the social history of medicine, as well as in the history of abortion, rape, infanticide and motherhood in South Africa. One of the reasons for the dearth of research is the relative absence of women, especially black women, from the historical record. The archival record of what was called the Cape Colony during the early nineteenth century is rich enough to reveal something about women's history, however. The Cape was first settled by Europeans in 1652 under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company (DEIC), and was captured by the British in 1795 and again in 1806. During the first half-century of British rule at the Cape, urban midwives came under greater professional and official scrutiny and left some traces in the historical archive. The remaining absences tell their own stories, too, and in this paper these silences will be made to speak, if only softly and tentatively, of the role of women in colonial African medical care.

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Gold Dreams, Gold Nightmares: The Social Construction of Inflation as Delegitimation Discourse

Sociological Research Online ◽

10.5153/sro.2228 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 21-31

Author(s):

Adam Rafalovich

Keyword(s):

Monetary Policy ◽

Social Construction ◽

Global Capitalism ◽

Economic Conditions ◽

Archival Data ◽

Time Period ◽

The Social ◽

Central Tenet ◽

Drastic Increase ◽

Ontological Claim

Using archival data from the four most popular gold investment websites, this study is a content analysis of gold investment enthusiast (‘gold bug’) commentaries over a six-month time period, from November 2007 to April 2008. We examine gold bug discourse as a conspiracy narrative whose central tenet is the criticism of inflationary monetary policy. Gold bugs argue that the continual presence of inflation demonstrates the fundamental flaws of global capitalism and the illegitimacy of the administrative system that operates it. The invocation of inflation is the primary way in which gold bugs forecast economic conditions and the inevitable failure of those who control global monetary policy. Based upon the ontological claim that gold is the only ‘true’ store of value, gold bugs posit a sharp rebuke of monetary policy, predicting a drastic increase in the price of gold and a consequent collapse of the world's fiat currencies.

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Sailors,Zielverkopers, and the Dutch East India Company: The maritime labour market in eighteenth-century Surat

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x13000449 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 336-364

Author(s):

GHULAM A. NADRI

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Labour Market ◽

East India Company ◽

Western India ◽

Dutch East India Company ◽

Institutional Dynamics ◽

Labour Relations ◽

The Social ◽

The Indian Ocean ◽

Political Economic

AbstractIn the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. TheMoorse zeevarenden(Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance ofzielverkopers(labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

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