Business as political actor –evolving practice, emerging norms and shifting expectations for a pivotal determinant of public trust in both business and democracy (BIZPOL) BIZPOL deploys a mix of innovative, multi-disciplinary approaches to substantially advance scholarly thinking, as well as the practical policy debate on corporate political activity (CPA). CPA comprises all non-market activities by companies when they engage with governments and policy-making more broadly to advance their interests. As such, CPA is forcefully becoming central to some of the most vexing societal challenges of our times and evolving into an important area of research in a variety of fields. Business is increasingly recognised as a crucial political actor to address issue such as climate change or corruption. Yet, at the same time, there is a growing public perception in many countries that corporate interests have disproportionate influence over policy-making. This suspicion, real or not, has dramatic consequences for public trust in both democracy and markets. With BIZPOL I aim to make significant contributions to the growing body of scholarship in this area through four interrelated work streams: • what should CPA look like? An exploration of plausible normative expectations for responsible CPA drawing on normative theories of democracy; • what does CPA look like? A comparative diagnostic exercise to assess the transparency and patterns of current CPA practices in major European companies with new metrics and new data; • how is CPA “produced”? A qualitative, in-depth exploration of where and how expectations and decisions about responsible exercise of CPA are constructed and negotiated, inside companies, as well as in the broader stakeholder community; and, • where is CPA heading? A survey and desk-research supported interrogation of the future evolution of CPA and the potential of research and education to critically and constructively accompany this trajectory.

This proposal proposal intends to systematically pioneer the cross-cultural mobile user experience issues and provide valuable guidelines for designing cultural adaptability into the context-awareness of smart phones. The objectives of this proposal are to: 1) Identify the user experience problems that exists in mobile context-awareness system in Europe and China, and uncover the key factors producing the problems; 2) Examine the influence of context-awareness factors and culture difference on mobile context-aware cross-cultural applications (MOCCA); 3) Apply the findings to improving the design of mobile context-awareness systems and demonstrate specific user experiences for European and Chinese users of smart phones with cultural adaptability. In WP 1, 2 and 3, we will use a combination of qualitative methods (contextual inquiry) and quantitative methods (experiment and psychophysiological measures) to support our objective of identifying and measuring cross-cultural user experiences of the smart phone and the applications. In WP 4 we will apply a user-centered design method to ensure that our cross-cultural UX measures and design guidelines for context-awareness features in smart phones are in fact usable. The experienced researcher will improve and explore alternative approaches to measuring user experience, under supervision provided by the host university, and in close collaboration with the university providing the secondment, Chinese universities, and a European (Danish) high tech company. The research will be published in leading journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and disseminated in Europe and China. The host university provides intellectual and physical infrastructure specifically aimed to bring the experienced researcher to the next level of a professor position in the field of business-oriented Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on extending and bridging user experience research between Europe and China.