Bordercrossing Talk: ‘Science (Communication) and Wikipedia: Potentials and Pitfalls’

April 11, 2024 in Bordercrossing News | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

This week, my University of Innsbruck hosted the conference on “Enhancing the voice of science on Wikipedia: How universities can collaborate with the online encyclopedia in science communication”. I had the honor to deliver the opening keynote on “Science (Communication) and Wikipedia: Potentials and Pitfalls”. In this talk, I offer some thoughts on the following questions:

  • How ‘scientific’ is Wikipedia?
  • How important is science for Wikipedia?
  • How important is Wikipedia for science?
  • How important is Wikipedia for our common knowledge?
  • What are potentials when science communication meets Wikipedia?
  • What are the pitfalls?
  • Is it worth it?

The slides are available over at Slideshare.

Call for Papers for the EGOS 2024 Subtheme: “Regulating Organizations: Re-Examining the Intersections between States and Businesses”

October 29, 2023 in Bordercrossing News, Environmental Standards, Financial Market Regulation, Governance of markets, Labour Standards, Miscellaneous Governance Issues, Transnational Studies | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

Florian Überbacher (Montpellier Business School), Elke Schüßler (Leuphana University) and Arno Kourula (University of Amsterdam Business School) are calling for submissions to their 2024 EGOS Subtheme on “Regulating Organizations: Re-Examining the Intersections between States and Businesses”.

In view of the grand environmental, political, and social problems we are facing, we would – perhaps more urgently than ever – need a functioning regulatory and legal environment that motivates companies contribute towards making our world more sustainable. But how should such a ‘better’ and ‘smarter’ regulatory system look like and how should regulatory processes be organized?

To address such questions, and connect organizational scholarship with ongoing debates on (trans)national governance and regulation, the aim of this subtheme is to invite scholarship that seeks to integrate, extend, or contradict regulatory and organizational research in novel ways.

The deadline for the submission of short papers is January 9th, 2024.

Bordercrossing Call to Action: »Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!«

July 6, 2023 in Miscellaneous Governance Issues | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment

While there is a lot of discussion about new Twitter alternatives and the relevance of journalists and other critical groups of users, the potential of university-based Fediverse instances has hardly been addressed. It is high time for universities to get involved in the Fediverse.

In fact, researchers from around the world are already there, as evidenced by the various disciplinary opt-in lists of Academics on Mastodon. They recognize the Fediverse’s potential to contribute to publicly owned scholarly knowledge, as Björn Brembs and colleagues have advocated for in Nature.

However, the full potential of decentralized social networks will only become clear when universities also bring students into the Fediverse. In order to support this, please check out and share the call to action “Universities of the World, Join the Fediverse!”

Discussion Proposal: Increasing Vaccine Access in a Shorter Time

June 27, 2023 in Global Health Governance, Governance of markets, Open Source Pharma, Patent law | Tags: , , | by | 1 comment

As we have all experienced recently, to prevent pandemic outbreaks or mitigate an evolving pandemic crisis, it is of utmost importance to guarantee timely and global access to safe and effective vaccines. Through their pre-print, Milena Leybold (University of Innsbruck) and Konstantin Hondros (University of Duisburg-Essen) make a step towards opening a debate on “Increasing Vaccine Access in a Shorter Time. Alternative Regulatory Frameworks in Response to Pandemics.” 

População do DF conta com 47 tipos de vacinas e soros
Source: Agência Brasília, https://www.flickr.com/photos/64586261@N02/51330020291/
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Bordercrossing Essay: “How Openness Becomes Exclusionary”

November 30, 2022 in Miscellaneous Governance Issues | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

In March 2021, Alek Tarkowski and Paul Keller published an essay on the “Paradox of Open” on the occasion of launching their Brussels-based Think Tank Open Future. While sketching an agenda for their adovacy work, the essay offered a more sober perspective on the promises previously associated with openness:

While Open works as a strategic (and narrative) approach in specific fields of application, it no longer provides a more general vision of a more just and egalitarian digital society.

More recently, open future published a collection of essays responding to this text. I had the honor to also contribute a response essay entitled “How Openness Becomes Exclusionary” on imported, created and path-dependent diversity deficits in online communities that explicitly describe themselves as “open”:

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Are there Open-Source Vaccines?

October 20, 2022 in Open Source Pharma, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

Konstantin Hondros & Milena Leybold

Is an open source vaccine inside?

Just over a year ago, Milena Leybold and Leonhard Dobusch asked, Why is there no open-source vaccine against Covid-19? and discussed arguments why open-source vaccines are difficult to achieve. In March 2022, The Financial Times published an article by Donato Paolo Mancini, Jamie Smyth, and Joseph Cotterill asking Will ‘open-source’ vaccines narrow the inequality gap exposed by Covid? (behind a subscription barrier) and indicating that the landscape of open-source vaccines may have changed substantially.This blog post is thought of as a reply and extension to this very informative report that introduces mainly two organizations producing or aiming to produce open-source vaccines: Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines (Afrigen) and the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development (CVD with their vaccine Corbevax). For sure, Afrigen and CVD approach vaccine development, production, and distribution much more openly than most of the vaccines dominating the market. Still, it is unclear to what extent they should be considered as “open-source.” To clarify this topic, we scrutinize what an open-source vaccine ideally could be, to what degree Afrigen or CVD fit the ideals of open-source, and what other attempts for open-source vaccine alternatives are currently under development.

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A Digital Remix Culture Guide to Public Service Media Reform: Copy – Transform – Combine

September 19, 2022 in Miscellaneous Governance Issues | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

(Source: everythingisaremix.info)

I delivered this statement as a panelist at the RIPE@2022 conference “Between the Fourth Estate and the Fifth Power: Conservation and Innovation in Public Service Media Journalism”, September 19, 2022.

Facing competition from large platform giants, from Facebook to TikTok, how should, how could nationally embedded legacy Public Service Media providers ever even hope to compete with those global competitors?

One way to do so would require embracing digital remix culture with its three foundational pillars: copy, transform, combine.

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Bordercrossing Article: “We Can’t Compete on Human Rights”

July 11, 2022 in Bordercrossing News, Governance of markets, Labour Standards, Transnational Studies | Tags: , , , , , | by | Leave a comment

“Dhaka Savar Building Collapse” by rijans, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

In the article “’We Can’t Compete on Human Rights’: Creating Market-Protected Spaces to Institutionalize the Emerging Logic of Responsible Management“, which has just come out at the Academy of Management Journal, Nora Lohmeyer, Sarah Ashwin and myself argue that the protection of labor and environmental standards in the global economy relies on the construction of “market-protected spaces”, institutionally bound spaces that suspend the dominance of the market logic on selected issues based on a binding regulatory infrastructure that allows prioritizing responsible management practices. This conclusion is based on years-long research on the consequences of the deadly Rana Plaza accident in Bangladesh in which thousands of garment workers were killed or injured. Our research shows that voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are not enough to address systemic, complex social or environmental problems in the global economy. We agree with De Bakker, Matten, Spence, and Wickert (2020), who

see an urgent need to address an “elephant in the room” of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research: the systemic constraints exerted by the current economic paradigm that might not be reconcilable with responsible business conduct.

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Laudatio for Sigrid Quack receiving the EGOS Honorary Membership

July 7, 2022 in Meta | Tags: , , , , | by | Leave a comment

Laudatio delivered by Leonhard Dobusch at the 38th EGOS Colloquium, July 7, 2022, at WU Vienna, Austria.

How can we assess what a pioneering and lasting contribution to “the social sciences dealing with organization, organized and organizing” is, as is required for anyone receiving an EGOS Honorary Membership. To do so, as a proxy, let me briefly sketch what is particular for organization studies as a discipline – and not just particular, but particularly great:

  • Organization studies is truly transdisciplinary. At EGOS, Business scholars meet sociologists and political scientists and anthropologists and communications scholars and also the occasional economist.
  • Probably because of its transdisciplinarity, organization studies is also characterized by great methodological openness and diversity. Organization studies was about mixed methods long before it was considered cool.
  • And, related to both these features, organization studies is a field that sports theoretical pluralism.

And this triad of transdisciplinarity, methodological openness and theoretical pluralism is also, what Sigrid not just contributed to, but rather what she lived, what she exemplified, what she spearheaded.

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Bordercrossing Blogpost: “Three Faces of Openness in Organising Copyright”

June 17, 2022 in Copyright Regulation | Tags: , , , , , , | by | Leave a comment

Konstantin Hondros and myself had been invited to contribute to the great series of evidence summaries for the 21 for 2021 project, a CREATe project within the AHRC Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC). Specifically, we put together a synthesis on “Three Faces of Openness in Organising Copyright”:

In this blog, focusing on copyright-related aspects of open approaches across domains, we will first develop a typology of openness in organising copyright, ranging from permissive over viral to restrictive openness. Based upon this typology, we will review the empirical evidence available for each of these three types of organising copyright-related openness. We conclude with some reflections on potential avenues for future research within and across the various domains of openness.

Check out the blog post in full over at CREATe.

(leonhard)

The Book

Governance across borders: transnational fields and transversal themes. Leonhard Dobusch, Philip Mader and Sigrid Quack (eds.), 2013, epubli publishers.
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