Social Media Engagement of Stakeholders: A Decision Tree Approach in Container Shipping

How should climate actions be planned? Model lessons from published action plans

To effectively protect against the increasingly pervasive effects of climate change, countries and cities around the world are tasked with formulating and implementing climate actions that effectively respond to the challenges ahead. However, choosing the optimal climate actions is complex, since it is necessary to consider many external impacts as early on as the planning phase. Our novel methodology uncovers and integrates into first-of-its-kind decision support framework the identified climate actions of 443 European cities (from 32 countries) and the city structure-related features that influence the basic success of strategy creation into a first-of-its-kind decision support framework. Depending on their budget, population density, development and energy consumption portfolio, the results highlight that the analyzed European cities need to adopt a different way of thinking. The research results lay the foundation for the decision support of evidence-based climate action planning and contribute towards strengthening the role of cities worldwide in the fight against climate change in the future.

Social media engagement in the maritime industry during the pandemic

The maritime sectors are suffering severe disruptions as a result of COVID-19. Maritime companies have turned to social media to interact with partners and clear up confusion. However, not every social media post receives the same engagement levels especially during a pandemic. For a more holistic analysis of social media engagement during a pandemic, the Protection Motivation Theory and classical theories such as user gratification and media richness theories were included. The research uses hierarchical regression analysis on information gathered from Facebook posts about COVID-19 made by eighteen different companies from four distinct maritime sectors. It was found that the rate of stakeholder engagement is highly influenced by informational, relational, and entertaining content as well as content that fosters self-efficacy, severity, and vulnerability. Additionally, the stakeholder engagement rate is greatly influenced by posts with greater vividness and fluency, which are characterized by providing external links. This is the first study to look into why stakeholders interact with posts linked to COVID-19 on social media. The findings will help maritime organisations use social media as a management and communication instrument.

Strategic Crisis Response of Shipping Industry in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Case of the Top 10 Shipping Lines

Shipping has played a pivotal role during the epidemic, ensuring that the global logistics functions without disruption. COVID-19 hit various industries around the world, and shipping was no exception. How the shipping industry responds to the crisis and simultaneously shoulders its respective responsibility in the world’s battling the crisis is thus worth exploring in depth. This study takes the top 10 global container shipping capacity liners, which account for 84.7% of the worldwide capacity, as research objects. A corpus for text analysis was constructed collecting press releases and advisories issued on official websites of these 10 container shipping companies from January 2020 to July 2021. Comparison studies were made horizontally among ten shipping companies and longitudinally for crisis evolution patterns into three sub-corpora of Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. Quantitative findings were explored and elaborated further under a comprehensive theoretical framework integrating crisis management and communication, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and maritime management (MM). The extracted positive and negative keywords revealed textual characteristics and emergency response strategies on the part of shipping lines in the Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. The inclusion of the themes of pursuing sustainability in the shipping lines’ responses to such worldwide crisis as COVID-19 is out of the common knowledge of crisis management but reveals the commitment and strategies on the part of the industry. The findings provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of the efforts made by large container shipping companies to respond to COVID-19 and the measures taken to soothe stakeholders. This paper extends and relearns crisis management, CSR, and MM theories through integrating the fulfilling of cooperate social responsibilities in maritime management as the cooperate crisis responses, thus proposing the integrity of the three topics. Moreover, management recommendations are provided for shipping company management, IMO, and port authorities.

A New Mobility Era: Stakeholders’ Insights regarding Urban Air Mobility

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) constitutes a future aerial mobility alternative, which concerns the use of electric and autonomous aerial vehicles for transporting people throughout a planned network of vertiports. To materialize UAM, several actors of the air and urban transport ecosystem play a vital role. This paper describes the insights gathered from 32 key stakeholders around the world to present and frame the key aspects for the future implementation of UAM. The participants include representatives from the UAM industry such as airports, airlines, aviation consulting companies, academia, and authorities. The data collection encompasses various key research areas, covering topics such as UAM strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks, requirements for implementation, concept integration in the existing transport system, specific use cases, business models, and end-user segments. The research aims at setting up the stakeholder scene and expanding the current literature for UAM by engaging key decision makers and experts towards shaping the new mobility era. The results demonstrate that ensuring certification standards for UAM fleets and updating the current legal and regulatory framework are the main prerequisites for UAM’s realization. In addition, the usage of UAM for transporting cargo or for air ambulance services are the most mature business models for the coming decade.

Stakeholder theory and management: Understanding longitudinal collaboration networks

This paper explores the evolution of research collaboration networks in the ‘stakeholder theory and management’ (STM) discipline and identifies the longitudinal effect of co-authorship networks on research performance, i.e., research productivity and citation counts. Research articles totaling 6,127 records from 1989 to 2020 were harvested from the Web of Science Database and transformed into bibliometric data using Bibexcel, followed by applying social network analysis to compare and analyze scientific collaboration networks at the author, institution and country levels. This work maps the structure of these networks across three consecutive sub-periods (t₁: 1989–1999; t₂: 2000–2010; t₃: 2011–2020) and explores the association between authors’ social network properties and their research performance. The results show that authors collaboration network was fragmented all through the periods, however, with an increase in the number and size of cliques. Similar results were observed in the institutional collaboration network but with less fragmentation between institutions reflected by the increase in network density as time passed. The international collaboration had evolved from an uncondensed, fragmented and highly centralized network, to a highly dense and less fragmented network in t₃. Moreover, a positive association was reported between authors’ research performance and centrality and structural hole measures in t₃ as opposed to ego-density, constraint and tie strength in t₁. The findings can be used by policy makers to improve collaboration and develop research programs that can enhance several scientific fields. Central authors identified in the networks are better positioned to receive government funding, maximize research outputs and improve research community reputation. Viewed from a network’s perspective, scientists can understand how collaborative relationships influence research performance and consider where to invest their decision and choices.