CIM News
CIM's Matt Spencer starts Senior Fellowship with the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS)
Matt joins the RISCS community with a senior academic fellowship focused on interdisciplinarity in cyber security.
More details here: https://riscs.org.uk/research/riscs-fellows/
New article on cross-platform bot studies published in special issue about visual methods
An article on “Quali-quanti visual methods and political bots: A cross-platform study of pro- & anti- bolsobots” has just been published in the special issue "Methods in Visual Politics and Protest" of the Journal of Digital Social Research, co-authored by Janna Joceli Omena, Thais Lobo, Giulia Tucci, Elias Bitencourt, Emillie de Keulenaar, Francisco W. Kerche, Jason Chao, Marius Liedtke, Mengying Li, Maria Luiza Paschoal, and Ilya Lavrov.
New paper by Neda Genova was just published in Time & Society
A new paper, titled “‘View from the window’: On time, politics and domestics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic” has been published in Time & Society as part of a special issue on the political and transformative uses of time.
New paper published in Environmental Science and Policy
A new paper from CIM members Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Greg McInerny, along with João Porto de Albuquerque, Joanna Suchomska and Grant Tregonning has just been published in Environmental Science and Policy
Research Talk: "How Do Decision Makers Use Visualisation? A Population Health Perspective" by Dr Mai Elshehaly, City, University of London. Wed, March 6th, 14:30 - 16:00 , A0.23 Social Sciences
We will be having Dr. Mai Elshehaly Link opens in a new windowfrom the giCentre at City, University of London for a talk titled "How Do Decision Makers Use Visualisation? A Population Health Perspective". The talk will take place on Wednesday, March 6th, 14:30 - 16:00 at A0.23 at the Social Sciences buildings.
Upcoming event: Public Lecture: Richard Rogers, Post-Truth Spaces, March 11th
Post-truth spaces: Studying authenticity and influence on the internet
Richard Rogers
Room: OC1.09; Date: Monday, 11/03/2024; Time: 17:00-19:00.
Hungry for power: financialization and the concentration of corporate control in the global food system
The global food system is in crisis. Climate change, ecological degradation, and economic and military conflict have exposed significant vulnerabilities in how the world produces, distributes, and consumes food. While governments aim to address these intersecting crises, they typically overlook another critical factor - the unprecedented concentration of corporate control in the global food system driven by contemporary processes of financialization. The incursion of new financial actors and imperatives have encouraged food firms to implement mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to improve financial performance, generate shareholder value, and capture market share. This has resulted in record levels of concentration, with more power controlled by fewer firms. Surprisingly, there is little empirical detail concerning the uneven pace, scale, and geographies of this concentration. Our article develops a novel M&A-based approach to investigate the concentration of power and corporate control throughout the global food system. Drawing from a sample of 4449 M&A deals throughout 2001–20, we reveal the uneven geographical and sectoral characteristics of food systems concentration, showing that the majority of M&A deals are horizontal (within the same sub-sector) and domestic (within the same country). These findings allow us to reflect on when, where, and why corporate control and decision-making power are shifting between different actors and geographies throughout the global food system, ultimately underscoring the importance of bringing finance and financialization into closer dialogue with food systems research.
New paper: Super-appification: Conglomeration in the global digital economy
‘Super apps’ are on the rise. This study explores the characteristics, origins, and manifestations of these apps worldwide, presenting the concept of ‘super-appification’ to describe processes of conglomeration in the global digital economy. Super apps aim to become deeply integrated into people’s everyday lives, capturing and monetising essential activities. By analysing 41 super apps, we identify four distinct types of ‘super-app constellations’, showcasing different patterns and dynamics of conglomeration: ‘Swiss-Army Knife’ apps that consolidate services in one app, ‘Family’ apps that expand through subsidiaries, and ‘Host’ and ‘Hub’-style apps that leverage external developers. This typology offers a comprehensive understanding of the conglomeration patterns underpinning the rise of super apps, involving corporate, development and international expansion strategies. Ultimately, super-appification represents an intensified form of ‘appification’, as these apps increasingly pervade and commodify various aspects of everyday life, such as payment, insurance, grocery delivery, mobility and travel, with significant sociopolitical implications.
New paper: The De-Perimeterisation of Information Security: the Jericho Forum, Zero Trust, and narrativity
New paper: The De-Perimeterisation of Information Security: the Jericho Forum, Zero Trust, and narrativity
CIM academics Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio have published their latest paper on their work from the ‘Scaling Trust’ UKRI project. They examine processes of conceptual change in the recent history of the field, focusing in particular on the efforts of the Jericho Forum pressure group to ‘de-perimeterise’ security thinking. The article is open access in Social Studies of Science:
doi.org/10.1177/03063127231221107
Alternative futures for digital health - magazine article
Here is a commentary from Meg Davis and co-authors for the somewhat glossy publication, Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration: https://bit.ly/hapc23
The magazine will be published at the World Health Summit, in Berlin, 15–17 October.
Meg's article is "Alternative Futures for Digital Health"