Authors: Annika Tidstrom; Rumy Narayan
Research in areas related to network management and business relationships indicates that strategic actions and decision-making in business networks are driven by how actors perceive and understand their environments. Often the complexities inherent in such environments compel managers to engage with diverse networks in order to make sense of the prevalent conditions. Firms dealing with sustainable development (SD) issues need to make sense of what it means in order to design and implement effective strategies. Digital technologies have powerful network effects and offer network-building tools like digitized platforms, which play critical roles as network intermediaries for knowledge development and diffusion. In doing so these platforms introduce new ways of understanding the core ideas behind sustainability and what they mean for sustainable business. We borrow the idea of ontology building for the creation of a Semantic Web from Information Systems (IS) Studies to identify sustainability related ontologies through a study of emerging online communities of a sustainability-oriented network. It aims to identify how ontology and Semantic Web rules can be used in a knowledge-based system to integrate information about sustainability that can help create network pictures for addressing sustainability challenges. This paper fills a gap in business network research that traditionally has not focused on the role of digital networks in creating network pictures.
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Publish Year: 2018
Conference: Marseille, France (2018)