Does culture affect sentiments expressed in cruise tours’ eWOM?

The study aims to examine the sentiment differences in the content of cruise tour online reviews across North Americans and Europeans, as representing the two largest cruise markets. Dictionary-based sentiment analysis has been carried out on 1127 reviews on guided tours retrieved from TripAdvisor. The results indicate significant differences in the sentiment score of the reviews, with North Americans’ texts being more emotionally charged than the European ones. In addition, North Americans’ reviews conveyed a more positive affect and had a more subjective and intimate tone, while those written by Europeans contained a smaller amount of sentiment-bearing words and their tone was more objective. The study’s contribution lies in (i) providing evidence for the influence of culture on electronic word-of-mouth communication in terms of varying sentiment expression, (ii) demonstrating the effectiveness of sentiment analysis for recognizing cultural differences and (iii) enhancing the current understanding of cruisers’ tour experience.     

Learning In A Constellation of Interconnected Practices: Canon or Dissonance?

In this paper we argue that the learning of safety in a constellation of communities of practice is mediated by comparison among the perspectives of the world embraced by the co‐participants in the production of this practice. Our discussion is based on two empirical research projects in which we investigated the accounts of the causes of accidents provided by the members of three different communities of practice (engineers, site foremen and main contractors), in a medium sized building firm. In the paper we suggest that comparison among perspectives is made possible by a discursive practice targeted on the alignment of elements both mental and material, within mutually accountable discursive positions. These alignments are provisional and unstable, they produce tensions, discontinuities and incoherence (cacophony) just as much as they produce order and negotiated meanings (consonance).     

The firm,the platform and the customer: A “double mangle” interpretation of social media for innovation

The aim of this article was to explore the relationship between human actors and technology in the context of a social media platform, developed by a leading Italian firm in the food industry, and created to keep in contact with its customers, while gathering innovative ideas from them.In order to address these issues, we adopt a theoretical approach that is deeply rooted in Pickering's “mangle” theory, and Jones' subsequent metaphor of “double dance of agency” i.e. human and material agencies. A longitudinal case study has been developed with two rounds of interviews with marketing and R&D managers. A total of 8 recorded interviews, for 22 h overall.We examined conditions in the ongoing functioning of the platform, and considered how the website's dynamic materiality configures and reconfigures the practices and possibilities of different modes of engagement by multiple users (i.e. firm employees and customers) and vice versa. Specifically, dealing with the case of a social media platform developed by a firm to gain clearly defined organizational ends, the entanglement is considered to be double. One entanglement is between the human agency of customers and the material agency of the social media platform. The other is between the human agency of the firm and the material agency of the social media platform, including all actions that human agents (i.e. firm employees) undertake in seeking to channel material agency and shape actions of other human agents, i.e. customers.