The Design Comes as We Build

This essay discusses urbz' 'The Design Comes As We Build Project' which recognizes local builders in homegrown settlements by providing them a space to showcase their design imagination. The project started in Dharavi, Mumbai, a settlement populated by self-taught experts with a strong, practice-based, and experience-rich learning background. By recognising the agency of local actors in the production of their own habitats, this essay focuses on the processes at work in this context. We employ an ethnographic lens informed by the language of architecture to illustrate how artisans imagine and build thousands of tiny houses on a daily basis. These anonymous “contractors”, usually blamed for operating illegally and without formal education, are shown to be the heroes of an epic story in which neighbourhoods are created out of nothing through the transformation of meager local resources. Typically selected on the basis of previous work and common acquaintances, these artisans belong to the same community as their clients, often living in close proximity. Together, they design and build without formal plans or contracts, using trust and reputation as the cornerstones of their professional relationship. As a result of their collaboration in all stages of the project, unpredictable features become an inherent part of the structures that emerge organically from this process.

Debt, Trust, and Reputation

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.

Judgments in the Sharing Economy: The Effect of User-Generated Trust and Reputation Information on Decision-Making Accuracy and Bias

The growing ecosystem of peer-to-peer enterprise – the Sharing Economy (SE) – has brought with it a substantial change in how we access and provide goods and services. Within the SE, individuals make decisions based mainly on user-generated trust and reputation information (TRI). Recent research indicates that the use of such information tends to produce a positivity bias in the perceived trustworthiness of fellow users. Across two experimental studies performed on an artificial SE accommodation platform, we test whether users’ judgments can be accurate when presented with diagnostic information relating to the quality of the profiles they see or if these overly positive perceptions persist. In study 1, we find that users are quite accurate overall (70%) at determining the quality of a profile, both when presented with full profiles or with profiles where they selected three TRI elements they considered useful for their decision-making. However, users tended to exhibit an “upward quality bias” when making errors. In study 2, we leveraged patterns of frequently vs. infrequently selected TRI elements to understand whether users have insights into which are more diagnostic and find that presenting frequently selected TRI elements improved users’ accuracy. Overall, our studies demonstrate that – positivity bias notwithstanding – users can be remarkably accurate in their online SE judgments.

Road to recovery

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings Commitment to sustainability initiatives can help banks slowly rebuild societal trust and reputation tarnished by high-profile scandals and the global financial crash. Key principles function as important frameworks to identify appropriate behaviors that additionally help enhance reputational risk management. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.