Oriol Miralbell's_research

After more than two years working on the theoretical framework for my PhD research on “Evaluating Online Social Networks in generating knowledge among tourism professionals”, together with my two directors Dr. Francesc González Reverté and Dr. Jaume Guia, i’ve reached the point to launch the survey which is the first visible part of the epirical study.

I’m happy to be at the point where the first outcomes are visible, after this long period of readings and discussions, of questioning and asking to experts and friends about online social networks as learning environments.
I’m really excited on the possible results of the analysis I will do once I receive the information from you, the experts. At the same time, I fear I won’t ger enough responses from all of you.
This is a fantastic opportunity to learn about the web 2.0 tools and to have a better picture from this new and still unknown Network Society. I have found in this study one of the most exciting intellectual activities I’ve ever had. It has stressed from me all the rational and intellectual abilities I had, if I ever had one. It has kept me connected to the issue all time I was awakened and sometime in my dreams too.
Thus I want this project to finish with a set of conclusions that can help us all, users, academics, experts and, in general, followers of the web 2.0 and the social media and of e-learning to get more from it.
I’d like to invite you to participate in this survey that is directed to all those professionals, business people, academics, consultants, experts and lovers of tourism, that use online social networks to communicate and learn.

Here’s the link for the survey in SPANISH and here’s it ENGLISH.

I want to thank you in advance for your help by answering to this survey, that will take you only 15 minutes of your time.
I WISH YOU A PEACEFUL XMAS TIME AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Never before freedom was so threatened in Internet like now. The European Parliament has refused to legislate letting this decision to the country members  individually, in punish or not (with no need to follow judiciary procedures) file downloaders in their country. Besides that this is a strange decission (borders are easily broken in Internet). it is the recognition that Europe has not a clear policy on how to deal with freedom in the web. Though we could also identify a consequence. If the European Parliament refuses to act in this isssue it may be because they don’t consider it as a subject that fits in their competencies. Commerce and consumer protection are fundamentals comnpetencies of the European authorities. Thus, we could understand that Europe does not see this as an issue that affects commercial or consumer regulation. So we are back to a no man’s land’s legislation. Who is competent in this issue?
Meawhile, some countries, like Spain are punishing in advance all the people who buy any CD, DVD (even if users don’t copy any other file than their ownes) and the electronic equipments to work with them, with a “canon” that goes to the agencies in charge for defending authorship.
This irrational behaviour of governments like tha Spanish one, is the consequence of the lobbying of the record companies and media producers and distruibutors, that are refusing to accept that market rules have changed. After decades of controling the market, these big conmpanies like SONY, Universal, etc., are affraid that people now can decide how they want the market to function. Not from upside down, but with bottom-up decisions.
But let’s see what this new scenario has cuased. In most places, there have never been so many concerts like now, and this is thanks to the power of Internet in spreading music more effectively than ever before. There are more movie makers in the world now and more films viewed (from short cheap-produced videos to megaproduction from Hollywood) produced than ever before and this happens thanks to the new technological paradigm and the power of Internet spreading all these videos.
We can imagine on who is losing and who wins. The majority of the people win, because knowledge is shared and distributed, fostering, at th same time indicidual and public initiatives that make innovation possible and help creativity to become more visible than ever. Only these few business man, loose their privilege of beeing the ones who could control the market, fixing prices, and censoring all those musicians and other artists that were not submissive enough.
From the business side, the growth of art industry is also an indicator that this market is healthy and is creating wealth and giving opportunities to many people to work and earn money. Though this is a better distributed business. With less concentration of benefits and more facilities for new players to enter the market. So, what governments are trying to legislate is not protecting authors’s rights but protecting a model that doesn’t work anymore.

There’s a perverse strategy that music and film companies are using in this regard. They pretend to compare file sharing with stealing cds or dvds. This strategy goes parallel to a campaign to convince, first the authors that they got stolen, and second to governments, drawing a false picture that says that this is a crime and it has to be prosecuted.
I call this a perverse strategy because it places a completely new way of communicating under the law of old ways of commeerce. But even so, their strategy is fake and corrupt, because they’ve never prooved that there’s a direct consequence on the decision of people to stop buying cds and dvds with file sharing. In fact there is not s direct relation between these two facts. The growth of the music business in Internet has not stopped file sharing, thus we can see rather a direct cuase of these changes in the first rule of commerce: “value for money”. Cds and DVDs don’t provide to the customers enough value foe the money they have to pay.
Could we imagine a campaign like this sixty years ago, where record companies could have started a cmpaign against broadasters because they were pushing people out from buying vinil records? Obviously not, and for two main reasons: first, because music producers had not such control over the market, and second because they saw an oportunity rather than a threat in broadcasting music over the radios.
Why do these companies do not see in Internet an opportunity as they saw it decades ago. Just because the Internet is giving much more power to the consumer than ever before, and they are reluctant to become more flexible and invest money in new strategies.
Though we all know that companies like iTunes or Spotify, two major succesful services of music on the Internet, have reached agreements with the biggest music producers. Music cpmanies have more than one strategy: supporting the emergence of new markets in Internet and lobbying to force governments to prosecute file sharing.

In my opinion they want to get rid of their stocks gaining time for it, while they know that the present situation has no turn back. Music or video file sharing cannot be a crime or cause dammage to any author, because it is a social action. I’m convinced that this idea will prevail because it has been the grounding philosophy of Internet and the engine that has made of this networking tool the global miracle of the last decade. What cosnumers will be reasy to pay is “value for money”. IN music, as in other industries, Internet has cuased de-intermediation and re-intermediation, and this is the oaradigm that companies have to gace to find their opportunity.

It ’s true that Internet has pushed many people to change their jobs, and many companies to change their strategies. The same as in earlier times did the steam engine . The only difference is that this changes have occurred globally and in a much shorter lap of time.

Unfortunately, we cannot say that we don’t know what corruption is or that in our country or city, we don’t know any recent crime commited by corrupted people. We can imagine that it is because today crimes are more easily publicized and reported than in the past, but, we also can believe that this kind of economy where we livie in, is a better framework where unscrupulous people can make much money using illegal means that can be easily hidden to the public eyes, and that what we get to know is only a minimum part of the real corruption that is hitting our society.

Criminals do seldom work alone. There are always groups. that in form of social networks, are giving support and taking advantage from their crimes. Social networks do not only function for good means, but also for bad ones.

In mids of this globalized world, there exist many people that can easily get tempted to delinquish. The amount of legal rules that are functioning in our countries is high and we do not always know them, though, many “smart” experts know how to break them, and they know,who to convince or tempt to act in name of others.

I could go further and talk about how criminal organizations have extremely complex networks of complices and how these networks often reach very important people, often politicians, who should refuse to take part in such illegal actions. This is how people think that corruption works. My interest on this issue was stronger after some scandal that this week has been on the title page of the newspaper of Barcelona and affects one of the most prestigious cultural institution of the city: the Palau de la Musica.

There is an interesting study published last july (Jamie D. Collins, Klaus Uhlenbruck, Peter Rodriguez. (2009) Why Firms Engage in Corruption: A Top Management Perspective. Journal of Business Ethics 87:1, 89-108) where the authors conclude that there is a strong relation between corrupted firms and their relations to the administration.

Social relationships exert their influence on firms
through the actions of managers and others within
the firm (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Scott, 1995).
Through a history of interaction, individuals develop
personal relationships with others, which Nahapiet
and Ghoshal (1998, p. 244) describe as an individual’s
‘‘personal embeddedness.’’ One’s personal
embeddedness within a family, organization, or
other relationships creates identification with the
group that leads to shared norms, develops trust, and
creates the expectation or obligation to support
others in the group (Coleman, 1990; Uzzi, 1997).

The relation between individuals (nodes) and the “personal embeddednes” within the firm and the group of these firms determines strongly the compromise of individuals with the firm’s principles, or culture. In the case of small societies, firms can, thus, gain a relatively tacit tolerance with corruption and this can easily spread a culture of corruption. Collins et al. state in their paper:

The social context in which crime
takes place shapes attitudes as well as propensities
toward criminal behavior (Canter and Alison, 2000;
Maguire et al., 1997). Social relationships shape our
views of what constitutes appropriate behavior,
including our view of the duties and obligations
inherent to social relationships (Greenwald and
Banaji, 1995). Indeed, our frameworks of comprehension
are formed by our social environments,
including one’s family, membership in organizations,
etc (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Blau, 1964;
Levine and White, 1961).

Networked corruption is an interesting field for research where criminal departments should work on, and that should also be taken in account when designing rules to scanction- and policies to prevent corruption.