Facebook Content Strategies and Citizens’ Online Engagement: The Case of Greek Local Governments

This paper analyzes the communication strategies used by Greek local governments through the utilization of Web 2.0 technologies, specifically Facebook, and the effectiveness of these strategies in relation to citizens’ online engagement. More specifically, it examines Facebook communication strategies and levels of citizens’ engagement. For this purpose, we conducted a content analysis on the active and official Facebook pages of local municipalities in Greece from January 2017 until the end of September 2017. Our results suggest a rise in the percentage of active Facebook pages maintained by local governments in comparison to our 2014 study. Our results also show that local governments in Greece are using Facebook in a predominantly top-down manner to promote events organized by the municipality and to push one-way information to citizens about their services and actions. Local authorities have, however, made significant progress in relation to posts that support transparency and accountability and that enhance or mobilize citizens’ participation. Our evaluation of local government Facebook strategies indicates that marketing the municipality to external public, such as tourists, and providing information about services are effective strategies that drive citizens’ online attitude expression (liking), engagement (commenting), and advocacy behavior (sharing). According to our analysis, local governments in Greece prefer the strategies that we found to be the least engaging. In addition, our study provides interesting details of how specific characteristics and modes of Facebook messages (photos, videos, URLs, hashtags, and mentions) impact on citizens’ engagement. Finally, our results provide valuable insights for social media managers in local government who aim to increase the impact of their municipal Facebook pages.     

Sabotage in the financial system: Lessons from Veblen

The global financial crisis that started in the summer of 2007 has generated a wide-ranging discussion about the causes of the meltdown and the role of banking and bankers in today's economy. However, the ongoing debate rarely addresses questions of business tactics in the financial industry. Indeed, while ‘incentives,’ ‘vested interests,’ power, and—increasingly—social utility are often factored into analyses of financial regulation, the strategies and tactics of financial institutions are rarely discussed in a systematic way in academic and policy debate. Nonetheless, we believe that these two elements are key to understanding the financial system, not as a mere sector of the wider economy but as a business enterprise driven by its own logic and shaped by a variety of business tactics of its key agents. In our vision of finance as business, we draw on the concept of industrial sabotage as a business tactic (originally developed by Thorstein Veblen) to explore the roots of the financial sector's contemporary architecture. Our key premise is that the central motive driving the process often described as ‘financialization’ or financial innovation is the sabotage instinct of finance operating as business. Whereas Veblen originally understood sabotage as “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency,” today, we argue, the workings of the banking and financial sector augment the very notion of efficiency by relying on concepts, techniques, and institutions of financial innovation that are shrouded in complexity. In this article, we explore conceptual, institutional, and selected policy dimensions of this phenomenon.     

Efficiency and productivity growth in the banking industry of Central and Eastern Europe

We employ the directional technology distance function and provide estimates of bank efficiency and productivity change across Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries and across banks with different ownership status for the period 1998–2003. Our results demonstrate the strong links of competition and concentration with bank efficiency. They also show that productivity for the whole region initially declined but has improved more recently with further progress on institutional and structural reforms. Input-biased technical change has been consistently positive throughout the entire period suggesting that the reforms have induced favorable changes in relative input prices and input mix. However we find evidence of diverging trends in productivity growth patterns across banking industries and that foreign banks outperform domestic private and state-owned banks both in terms of efficiency and productivity gains. Overall, we find that productivity change in CEE is driven by technological change rather than efficiency change.     

The <Emphasis Type=\"Italic\">featuring</Emphasis> phenomenon in music: how combining artists of different genres increases a song’s popularity

The appearance of songs including featured artists on Billboard’s Hot 100 music charts has increased exponentially in the past two decades. This particular type of creative collaboration involves one artist integrating another artist’s contribution, either instrumentally or vocally, into their work and publicizing it with a “featuring” credit. According to broad literature in sociology on categorical boundaries, artists who deviate from existing genres are expected to be penalized for violating collective expectations and norms. We find songs featuring other artists actually have a greater likelihood of making it into the top 10 than songs not featuring other artists. Additionally, consistent with theorizing about congruency in the co-branding literature, we observe that the greater the difference (cultural distance) between the genres of the artists involved, the more likely the song is to reach the top of the charts. We argue that by combining the expertise of specialists in each genre, as well as comingling audiences while still maintaining each collaborator’s original positioning, artists who feature artists from other genres are able to produce more successful songs.