Purpose: The paper investigates the relationship between accounting and promises in the context of digital change.

Design/methodology/approach: Relying on emergent literature on accounting and promises, a qualitative field study has been conducted covering 57 interviews with municipal directors, digitalization strategists, administration managers and CFOs in a Swedish region consisting of 13 municipalities.

Findings: The paper provides insights into how municipalities draw on accounting in attempts to reconstruct promissory narratives of the digital. By highlighting two contrasting cases, we show how this can involve practices of either restoration or transformation. Likewise, we find that attempts to restore promises can sometimes have unanticipated effects, in our case a transformation of the promise instead.

Originality/value: We introduce a “promise” lens to the literature on accounting and digital change and empirically describe how accounting is implicated in shaping promises in the context of public sector digital change.

Purpose: Digitally intermediated peer-to-peer exchanges have accelerated in occurrence, and as a consequence, they have introduced an increased pluralism of connotations. Accordingly, this paper aims to assess user perceptions of the interplay between the sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies.

Design/methodology/approach: The sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies have been systematically tracked in the social media landscape using Social Media Analytics (SMA). In doing so, a total material of 62,855 publicly posted user-generated content concerning the four respective economies were collected and analyzed.

Findings: Even though the sharing economy has been conceptually argued to be interlinked with the access, platform, and community-based economies, the empirical results of the study do not validate this interlinkage. Instead, the results regarding user perceptions in social media show that the sharing, access, platform, and community-based economies manifest as clearly separated.

Originality/value: This paper contributes to existing literature by offering an empirical validation, as well as an in-depth understanding, of the sharing economy's interlinkage to other economies, along with the extent to which the overlaps between these economies manifest in social media. 

How are historical, practice-oriented, and critical research perspectives in management affected by digitalization? In this article, we describe and discuss how two digital research approaches can be applied and how they may influence the future directions of management scholarship and education: Social Media Analytics and digital archives. Our empirical illustrations suggest that digitalization generates productivity improvements for scholars, making it possible to undertake research that was previously too laborious. It also enables researchers to pay closer attention to detail while still being able to abstract and generalize. We therefore argue that digitalization contributes to a historical turn in management, that practice-oriented research can be conducted with less effort and improved quality and that micro-level data in the form of digital archives and online contents make it easier to adopt critical perspectives. 

To what degree do participating and nonparticipating brands enjoy engagement of social media users in the setting of multibrand events? Based on empirical material comprising 4,424 user-generated content published before, during, and after Fashion Week Stockholm in February 2016, this article illustrates how the studied multibrand event both concentrated engagement for participating brands and created spillover engagement to other, nonparticipating brands. Therefore, these findings question whether individual brands benefit from being official participants in multibrand events. This article contributes to the field of event management by illustrating the dynamic interplay between engagement created in social media and multibrand events, while also highlighting associated conceptual and managerial implications.

What is the role of innovation policy for accomplishing renewal of mature industries in Western economies? Drawing upon an unusually rich dataset spanning 9752 digitized archival documents, we categorize and code decisions taken by policymakers on several levels while also mapping and quantifying the strategic activities of both entrant firms and incumbent monopolists over a decade. Our data concerns two empirical cases from Sweden during the time period 1980–1990: the financial sector and the telecommunications sector. In both industries, a combination of technological and institutional upheaval came into motion during this time period which in turn fueled the revitalization of the Swedish economy in the subsequent decades. Our findings show that Swedish policymakers in both cases consistently acted in order to promote the emergence of more competition and de novo entrant firms at the expense of established monopolies. The paper quantifies and documents this process while also highlighting several enabling conditions. In conclusion, the results indicate that successful innovation policy in mature economies is largely a matter of strategically dealing with resourceful vested interest groups, alignment of expectations, and removing resistance to industrial renewal. 

This paper aims to assess the degree to which sustainability-oriented dimensions are integrated within the public discourse on crowdfunding in social media. Utilizing Social Media Analytics (SMA), we track discussions on crowdfunding in user-generated content published in social media. Based on an empirical material of 141,754 user-generated content, we identify 308 entries (0.21 percent) explicitly or implicitly relating to sustainability and 80 percent of these 308 entries came from professional actors. In this material, 37 sustainability-oriented campaigns are identified and 26 of them (70 percent) received one entry. Taken together, this paper adds to previous literature by assessing and describing the seemingly minor role played by social media with regards to the interplay between crowdfunding and sustainability.

Digital entrepreneurship may result in institutional turbulence and new initiatives are frequently blocked by vested interest groups who posit superior financial and relational resources. In this paper, we explore the role of cities in facilitating digital entrepreneurship and overcoming institutional resistance to innovation. Drawing upon two historical case studies of digital entrepreneurship in the city of Stockholm along with an extensive material on the sharing economy in Sweden, our results suggest that cities offer an environment that is critical for digital entrepreneurship. The economic and technological diversity of a city may provide the field conditions required for institutional change to take place and to avoid regulatory capture.

This paper aims to assess how diffusion of Virtual Reality (VR) technology is taking place and identify potential barriers to increased adoption. This is done by utilising Social Media Analytics to collect a data set covering an empirical material of 6044 user-generated content concerning the market‑leading VR headsets Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and machine learning to identify critical barriers to adoption. Our findings suggest that there is a lack of sufficient technological performance of these headsets and that more applications are required for this technology to take off. We contribute to literature on VR by providing a systematic assessment of current barriers to adoption while also pointing out implications for marketing. 

The sharing economy has evolved and spread to various sectors of the economy. Its early idea linked to the creation of more sustainable uses of resources. Since then, the development of the sharing economy has included a professionalization with self-employed suppliers rather than peers, and the question is whether the platforms following this development maintain the focus on sustainability. This paper describes and classifies the sustainability connotation of sharing economy platforms. It analyses 121 platforms derived through social media analytics to figure out whether they describe themselves as sustainable. The findings suggest that the sustainability connotation closely connects to specific sectors such as fashion, on-demand services and logistics. Meanwhile, the dominant role model platforms do not communicate about being sustainable. These findings contribute to previous research through (1) giving a systematic empirical account on the way various sharing economy platforms describe themselves in terms of sustainability, (2) pointing out the differences among the platforms, and (3) indicating the diversity in sustainability connotation among various sectors of the economy.