PHD Publications

This dissertation is an inquiry into the phenomenon of social media use in organizational context with a focus at self-presentation transparency. It drives attention to the processes of enactment of this new technology and investigates how these developments are embedded in the context of occupational norms, social roles, organizational control and autonomy. The research setting is based on the 19-month social media implementation campaign by a central European media organization as a means of enhancing communication and coordination within the organization. The implementation encompassed two departments, journalists and advertising agents, who were asked to create and open their online social media profiles and befriend their colleagues. The dissertation comprises four research papers each taking a separate perspective on the phenomenon. Methodologically, the dissertation builds on qualitative case-study approach and abductive and inductive reasonings. The thesis provides theoretical and practical contributions to the understanding of the normative prerequisites, process and consequences of social media use in organizational context for occupational norms, online knowledge collaboration and organizational control while presenting co-evolution of the technology meaning and use.

This dissertation explores the construct, prior scientific inquiry, and market implications of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), and it is based upon one conceptual and two empirical papers. In the first essay, I provide conceptual clarity by dimensionalizing the construct according to five aspects (the Who, What, Where, When, and How of eWOM). In the second essay, the resulting organizing framework is followed up with a historical analysis of eWOM dimensions, aliases, theories, and methodologies used in prior research. Additionally, I employ citation network analysis in order to identify gaps in scholarly communication and facilitate progressive knowledge building in this area. Finally, in the third essay, I use meta-analysis to empirically test the moderating impact of four of the five eWOM dimensions on sales effectiveness. I find that eWOM is positively correlated with sales (.091), but its effectiveness differs across platform, product, and metric factors. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for further research are discussed.

Climate change and global temperature rise has made environmentallegislations a focal point of discussion. This dissertation is devoted to the study ofenvironmental legislations and their effect on supply chain practices. More precisely, ourcenter of interest is the product recovery based legislation along with compliance basedregulations. We explore the reuse potential and the environmental and economical aspects of different product recovery based legislation schemes by modeling a stackelberg game between a social welfare maximizing policy maker and a profit maximizing monopolistic firm and find that a combination of existing recoverypolicies i.e., a recovery target in combination with incentive structure such as taxation/subsidy may lead to better outcomes not only from environmental perspective but also from economical aspects. In Chapter 2, we extend the discussion comparative performance of the recovery legislation based schemes in presence of innovation and product design issues and show how unintended environmental outcomes may appear if the policy framework is not adequately designed. In Chapter 3, we capture the effect of recovery legislations and compliance based legislations on productselection when a firm serves a number of markets. We incorporate the effects ofuncertainty associated with market demands and recovery cost parameters and present a robust optimization based method for product selection and allocation decisions.