Negus, Keith (2002): Identities and industries: The cultural formation of aesthetic economies In: Du Gay, Paul / Pryke, Michael (2002): Cultural economy: Cultural analysis and commercial life, Sage, London/Thousand oaks/New Dehli, p. 115-131

My question: What seems to be the right way for changing a corporate culture, and what problems are appearing in this case?

Answer: Negus offers an example within the record industry of the US, where a record label (EMI) and its executive was requested to “change the culture”.  The President and CEO Davitt Sigerson decided to fire 70 percent of the employees and to limit the roster of artist under the contract of this label  (p.125). This seems the way for changing culture, beneath marketing and organisational strategies are the people the key factor within a corporate culture process. So it seems less important to create a “new” brand or the image of it, but rather changing the inner-personal structure of the company. That is the same idea as the basic model of Scheins organisational structure, which deepest level is grounded on basic assumptions, made by the leaders of an organisation. Küng-Shankleman describes these basic assumptions: “These are the unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions and feelings about the organisation and its environment which act as the ultimate sources of values and drivers of action”. These description seems very familiar if you look, how Negus describes the music situations in the UK: “The ‘genre culture’ of British rock music had provided a particular series of orientations, assumptions, dispositions and values, and these were carried into the organizations of music production […]” (p.120) These underlying basic assumptions are the factor which drives and steers the culture of a company or a record label. But these assumptions are made by humans and their personal feelings and are not build upon pure economic facts and trends (as Negus stresses it in the case of Sigerson, p.126). These people, who, influenced by values, assumptions and taken-for-granted beliefs, are the most important but simultaneously the weakest link in the chain of corporate culture within an organisation.  So the problems which appeared in the case of EMI seemed unavoidable. Sigerson fired a lot of important people who dominated the corporate culture, but instead of a neutral factor Sigerson, himself then with his not-alone-economic assumptions and their consequences became the weakest link and was fired.

Shirky, Clay (2000): What is the P2P … And What isn’t

http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/472

My question: What are in the sense of Shirky the important qualities which define applications as peer-to.peer?

Answer: The definition, or has he says, the litmus test for finding out if something is P2P is divided into two conditions. The first, that the application mustn’t treat variable connectivity and temporary network addresses as the norm. That means that the application isn’t build up on stabile IP addresses and stable always connected servers and computers and accept this sort of “unreliability” within its system. The second condition includes the possibility of  giving the nodes (users) at the edges significant autonomy within this system, for example in the case of Napster where everybody is allowed to search other peoples directories and use their storage. The definition, Shirky gives is one which is not involved in the question of server-based applications. If a great server (as in the case of Napster) is used is not the point, but important in the sense of Shirky how this system is used, if there exist central power resources (Yahoo) and under which conditions it functions. This makes the difference in being a P2P system or not.

Rutherford, Emilie (2000) The P2P Report

http://www.cio.com/research/knowledge/edit/p2p_content.html

I found it hard to find critical questions for a small text (four pages) which offers pure facts and is written without offering any theories and seems to be written for possible customers within this realm. The only possibly questionable distinction Rutherford made is in the case of flavors between collaborative computing, instant messaging and affinity communities, but this seems totally clear in my opinion. So I can’t offer any questions or answers.

Wellman, Barry / Boase, Jeffrey (2001): A Plague of Viruses: Biological, Computer and Marketing (Current Sociology, draft)

 My question: Why have the “brokers” in the model of Wellmann & Boase such a great importance?

Answer: What all kinds of viruses need in the network models of Wellmann & Boase are possibilities to spread. In a densely knit group everybody helps to spread the virus because of the dense contact-behaviour. In a ramified network there is not a such closeness and there are a lot of gaps and structural holes were a spreading process can be stopped. People who fill this gap are so called “brokers”: “These key gatekeepers and brokers are the means by which avirus  spreads out through ramified networks” (p.8). With the help of the broker, a virus can travel between groups ans spread out through ramified networks. This person, the broker is important for biological and  computer viruses and also viral marketing, because every form of a virus needs hosts whio have access to different groups to accelerate the transgression.