Platformed professionalization: Labor, assets, and earning a livelihood through Airbnb

This paper analyses processes of professionalization on Airbnb in Berlin, exploring who is able to take part most successfully in urban value creation processes facilitated by short-term rental platforms. In doing so, it intervenes in debates on platform urbanism that focus on the role of digital platforms in reconfiguring urban governance and livelihoods. Combining a political economic approach and affordance theory, I conceptualize professionalization as a particular platform logic that benefits Airbnb and hosts who are able to take part, while reinforcing existing inequalities. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in Berlin, I show how these professionalization practices differentially affect the strategies and practices of hosts, offering benefits to some while worsening the position of others who are unable or unwilling to professionalize. As such, professionalization processes produce inequalities and power asymmetries both on and off the platform, between hosts as well as between the platform owner and platform users. In a context where a growing number of city-dwellers rely on platforms to generate their livelihoods, such power shifts resulting from platform dynamics have a significant impact on who is able to benefit from platformization and thrive in a platform society.

Disruptive Unicorn of Digital Innovations

This chapter analyzes the disruptive unicorn of the 21st century, characterized by six of the most important digital disruptive innovations that will dominate the business ecosystem. A survey was applied to undergraduate students at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico in 2019 to identify the students' perception of the unicorn. The hypothesis to be evaluated is that the undergraduate student has an unclear perception of the existence of the unicorn that could generate risks related to ethics and business power shifts in the world. An educational challenge is the need to develop the transversal competence of critical thinking related to digital disruptive innovations in the students. The educational strategies must evolve as fast as these digital disruptive innovations in order for the world to have citizens of a technological world in favor of humanity with the power of critical thinking and discernment. This is the challenge for the university educator.

Educating for complexities: Using future focus education to approach the wicked problem of climate change

<p>Climate change is a wicked problem. It is one that, among other things, is caused by those trying to solve it, is a symptom of deeper problems, and is complicated and full of uncertainties. Future focus education approaches are designed to enable learners to work within those complexities. This thesis looked at the 2012 NZ/Pacific Power Shift conference as an example of a future focus education approach to climate change education. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and Power Shift participant questionnaires allowed for the development of five theoretical constructs; Complexity, Connections, Collaboration, Confidence, and Commitment. Wicked problem literature showed that framing climate change as ‘wicked’ enables learners to deal with the underlying issues associated with the complexities of climate change. Power Shift as an example of a future focus education approach to climate change education created engaged thinkers and participants. It embraced complexities and did not let them get in the way of creating positive and ambitious solutions to climate change issues. Learners benefited from Power Shifts future focus approach to climate change education in four interconnected ways. Firstly, it provided educational processes that could lead to the development of more capable learners. Learners were able to approach the wicked problem of climate change at localised levels. Secondly, it provided solutions-based approaches to working towards climate change actions. Thirdly, it increased self-confidence within some participants. And lastly, it created connections between participants that developed into a climate change action community.</p>

Educating for complexities: Using future focus education to approach the wicked problem of climate change

<p>Climate change is a wicked problem. It is one that, among other things, is caused by those trying to solve it, is a symptom of deeper problems, and is complicated and full of uncertainties. Future focus education approaches are designed to enable learners to work within those complexities. This thesis looked at the 2012 NZ/Pacific Power Shift conference as an example of a future focus education approach to climate change education. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and Power Shift participant questionnaires allowed for the development of five theoretical constructs; Complexity, Connections, Collaboration, Confidence, and Commitment. Wicked problem literature showed that framing climate change as ‘wicked’ enables learners to deal with the underlying issues associated with the complexities of climate change. Power Shift as an example of a future focus education approach to climate change education created engaged thinkers and participants. It embraced complexities and did not let them get in the way of creating positive and ambitious solutions to climate change issues. Learners benefited from Power Shifts future focus approach to climate change education in four interconnected ways. Firstly, it provided educational processes that could lead to the development of more capable learners. Learners were able to approach the wicked problem of climate change at localised levels. Secondly, it provided solutions-based approaches to working towards climate change actions. Thirdly, it increased self-confidence within some participants. And lastly, it created connections between participants that developed into a climate change action community.</p>

Cutting the Supply of Climate Injustice

This article considers the role of activism and politics to restrict the supply of fossil fuels as a key means to prevent further climate injustices. We firstly explore the historical production of climate injustice through extractive economies of colonial control, the accumulation of climate debts, and ongoing patterns of uneven exchange. We develop an account which highlights the relationship between the production, exchange, and consumption of fossil fuels and historical and contemporary inequalities around race, class, and gender which need to be addressed if a meaningful account of climate justice is to take root. We then explore the role of resistance to the expansion of fossil-fuel frontiers and campaigns to leave fossil fuels in the ground with which we are involved. We reflect on their potential role in enabling the power shifts necessary to rebalance energy economies and disrupt incumbent actors as a prerequisite to the achievement of climate justice

The liberal international trading order (LITO) in an era of shifting capabilities

There is much debate about the impending collapse of the liberal international order. It is provoked by the shifts in material and military capabilities from emerging peer and near-peer competitors, some of whom were not part of the original grand bargain and others that are in a stronger position to renegotiate the bargain. As one critical element of the liberal international order, we ask, during power shifts: is the liberal international trading order (LITO) durable and resilient? When and why will the LITO collapse? Does the relative decline of the hegemon alone explain these outcomes? In advancing a second-image reversed plus argument, we highlight how a shift in the nature of the foreign commercial orientation of peer and near-peer contenders can alter the domestic balance of power of two broad and logrolled coalitions competing to capture the state and thus affect whether the erstwhile leader defends, renegotiates, or abandons the trading order it created. To better understand these forces, we examine two paradigmatic cases: Britain in the 1930s and the United States in the 2000s.

Alliance Dynamics in the Shadow of Shifting Power

Alliances are costly to form and to terminate, and yet alliances change frequently. Scholars typically attribute these decisions to static factors, such as the power balance, and retrospective ones, such as past power shifts. We highlight another factor: prospective changes, particularly anticipated military strength shifts. We analyze a three-country bargaining model of alliances and war that incorporates forward-looking power dynamics. The model, unlike those restricting players to set roles, flexibly allows players to ally in any arrangement. We find that alliance arrangements that are optimal when power is static are often suboptimal when power fluctuates. Maintaining prior alliances despite expected power shifts may even lead to preventive war. States thus strategically look to the future to identify optimal alliances in the present. Quantitative analyses corroborate the expectation. As the anticipated size of power shifts increases, alliance changes become more common. Accordingly, states navigate expected changes in the international landscape by rearranging current alliance commitments that can help minimize the risk of conflict. When power balances are in flux, malleable institutional arrangements may prove preferable to rigid ones.