D11.3: Economic aspects of mobility and identity

Title: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

The market for mobile computing solutions has been investigated intensively by scientists and market research institutions in the last years. In most cases the research takes the perspective of vendors of products and solutions or organisations introducing mobile computing., From these perspectives, business processes and workflows that benefit from the use of mobile solutions (internal business or business to business perspective) are especially investigated as they seem to be the most promising market.

Based on the work of Bergmann, Rost and Pettersson, in this chapter a different perspective is taken: that of a user of a mobile device taking various roles within society in different communicational contexts. Notably, the communicational contexts and the corresponding roles taken by the participants define their partial identities. So this perspective is also an (partial) identity centric view on markets for mobile applications and services.

Following the theory of social systems which is a contribution of sociologists to systemics, roles can be assigned to two social systems: 

1. Interactional systems (types of communities in which members are not subject to particular rules, but nevertheless schemes apply - examples are spontaneous meetings as neighbours, spontaneous encounters)

2. Organisational systems (characteristics are membership and effective production of decisions - examples are public bodies, institutes and companies)

While roles in interactional systems show a big variety, organisations mainly distinguish between members (such as employees) and clients (such as customers or citizen). These aspects have been elaborated in detail.

Bergmann, Rost and Pettersson developed the model of the virtual city as paradigm for user interfaces for mobile devices. They clustered communicational contexts and mapped them to three areas of a virtual city: public area, business related area (i.e. the user’s work zone), and private area. As the virtual city model was not developed to analyse markets for mobile solutions, clusters of applications we can find there or the corresponding privacy and security needs, it is limited when addressing the following aspects: 

1. The public sector in the virtual city model integrates, due to the similarity to a traditional market place, a number of different types of communication and as a result different applications and services. This limits the applicability of this model for classification purposes of applications and products with respect to economic factors. 

2. The specific nature of governmental communication in difference to communication originating from or targeted at private enterprises cannot be distinguished by different sectors in this model. They all are mapped to the public area in the city model which does not allow for a detailed analysis of the different kinds of communication and underlying applications in this area. 

Taking over the user centric view and the focus on communicational contexts from the virtual city model we define in development of the original model four sectors as targets for communication originating from a user of a mobile device: 

1. The business related sector, where any one-to-one (1:1) communication to a private enterprise takes place. In this context we also summarise the individualised part of the communication when using a shop (personal suggestions of what to buy, the shop trolley, the payment etc.). The communication partner is a member (employee) of an organisation.

2. The governmental sector, where any 1:1 communication with governmental institution and offices takes place. The communication partner is a member (employee) of an organisation.

3. The private sector, where we have personal social contacts. Communication from the perspective of the user is typically 1:1 or takes place in small groups of trusted persons. The communication partners either take roles in interactional systems or are clients of an organisation.

4. The public sector, this sector has a different nature as compared to the other sectors. At least one participant of the communication aims at many partners (1:n communication) in a public way. Examples for this kind of communication are public parts of online-shops, postings in open web fora, portals, newsletters, scientific online articles, etc. In addition the information published typically is not confidential. The publisher at the moment of publishing does not know exactly which role and in which social system the recipient of the communication will take.

The following figure illustrates the described four sectors: 

Figure : Four sectors of general communicational contexts

The starting point for communication, represented by the role the user of the mobile device is taking, is typically one of the following sectors: 

1. Business related sector (role of the user of a mobile device: member (employee) of a private enterprise)

2. Governmental sector (role of the user of a mobile device: member (employee) of a public institution)

3. Private sector (role of the users of the mobile device: various roles in interactional systems or client of an organisation such as citizen or customer). In this case the private character of the communication is not always that precise as many kinds of private communication take place in a public environment for example a restaurant, on the street, etc. and communication is done in the open

The public sector in this model cannot be used as a initial point of communication in a meaningful way because it is very unlikely that many people will start communicating to one organisation at the same time (many 1:1 communications adding up to a n:1 communication). In addition, from a social scientist’s point of view one-to-one communication that starts with the initiating communication partner having no role in a social system in mind do not exist. 

In general the sectors in the upper half are dominated by organisations. Persons communicating in these two sectors typically take the role of a member of an organisation. In the public sector we find all kinds of roles in the communication. This sector is used by organisations as well as by individual persons. In the private sector individual persons in various roles (clients of an organisation and roles in interactive systems) take part in communication. 

This model has limitations especially in the precision these sectors are described with – to the authors the borderline between the sectors seems to be weak. The reason is that many different aspects of communication have to be covered. Examples are:  

1. Different roles in various social systems (including functional systems),  

2. Different type of communication (1:1, 1:n), and in addition  

3. Shifts in roles and type within the communication, which are also possible