Information and Organization最新文献

In this paper we ask the question “inequality of what” to examine the multiple inequalities revealed under the covid-19 pandemic. An intersectional perspective is adopted from feminist studies to highlight the intersection and entanglement between digital technology, structural stratifications and the ingrained tendency of ‘othering’ in societies. As part of a future research agenda, we propose that IS research should move beyond simplistic notions of digital divisions to examine digital technology as implicated in complex and intersectional systems of power, and improve our sensitivity to the positionality of individuals and groups within social orders. Implications for practice and policy are also discussed, including moving beyond single-axis analysis of digital exclusion.

Drawing on institutional theory and using examples from Israel, we offer a critique of technology's deployment in responses to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). We distinguish between technologies-in-use (“small ‘t' technologies”), the bundle of artifacts and practices that bring them into being, and “Big ‘T' Technology,” the latter being technology as an institution – shared meanings, structures, and practices that govern thought and action. Using the conceptual tool kit of institutional theory, we make three interrelated arguments. First, the deployment of technologies-in-use in response to the pandemic is embedded in diverse and contradictory institutions, the institution of technology among them. These technologies participate in the very construction of crisis, which fosters the revert to known and established ways of being and doing. Thus, technologies-in-use are not necessarily the most efficient and rational but rather the most legitimate and readily available. Second, putting certain technologies into action has not been happening by itself. Instead, we have witnessed contestations among relevant agents – like politicians and experts – who engage in institutional work to serve their interests. Third, despite its global reach, technology is locally adapted and implemented in specific contexts. All in all, institutional theory helps us to explore further and critique the naïve belief, common in public discourse, in technology as a remedy of all things. Instead, it offers a more critical understanding of the cultural dynamics involved in putting technology to work in the coronavirus crisis. This critical lens carries implications for policymaking and implementation in times of crisis.

Digital models that simulate the dynamics of a system are increasingly used to make predictions about the future. Although modeling has been central to decision-making under conditions of uncertainty across many industries for many years, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the role that models play in prediction and policymaking real for millions of people around the world. Despite the fact that modeling is a process through which experts use data and statistics to make sophisticated guesses, most consumers expect a model's predictions to be like crystal balls and provide perfect information about what the future will bring. Over the last decade, we have conducted a series of in-depth, longitudinal studies of digital modeling across several industries. From these studies, we share five lessons we have learned about modeling that demonstrate (1) why models are indeed not crystal balls and (2) why, despite their indeterminacy, people tend to treat them as crystal balls anyway. We discuss what each of these lessons can teach us about how to respond to the predictions made by COVID-19 models as well models of other stochastic processes and events about whose futures we wish to know today.

Organizations must continuously allocate and reallocate limited resources, including IT resources, to competing innovation and operational concerns. While the ambidexterity literature provides some guidance regarding resource allocation approaches, studies typically assume that such tensions can be balanced without taking contextual and trade-off issues into account. Further, many studies examine ambidexterity approaches individually without considering how different approaches may be combined. To address these shortcomings, we pragmatically examine how a U.S. health delivery organization responded to technological, regulatory, and demand changes over a 15-year period and the effects of its actions. To manage the consequential tensions between innovation and operation of its IT-enabled services, we retrospectively observe that the organization applied a portfolio of sequential, structural, and contextual ambidexterity approaches. As a contribution to the IT governance and health IT literatures, the study offers theoretical and practical knowledge on how organizations can pragmatically apply ambidexterity in highly dynamic contexts to mindfully orchestrate and coordinate between innovation and operation of their IT-enabled services.

In this paper we focus on the emerging phenomenon of Open Government Data Platforms (OGDPs), in particular those that provide open performance data to general public. Governments world-wide continue to implement these platforms, aiming to increase transparency and accountability. However, in spite of their positive intentions, ODGPs that provide performance data (e.g. about schools or hospitals) are reported to create serious harmful social effects. While the related literature has reported numerous cases of these unintended effects, the questions regarding why and how they emerge remain open. This is not surprising, given the complexity and dynamics of processes instigated through the use of ODGPs by a very large number of known and unknowable actors. Through a diffractive reading of complexity theories, in particular Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and sociomateriality, in this paper we propose a Complex Adaptive Sociomaterial Systems (CASS) theorization of OGDPs. Drawing from a case of OGDP in Australia called My School, which provides open performance data for more than 10.000 schools, we demonstrate how the proposed theoretical lens of CASS enables us to reveal and explain why and how these platforms perform unintended, yet serious social harm. Given that OGDPs are rapidly emerging around the world, our research opens a pathway for a research-informed public discourse about their harmful effects and responsibilities of different stakeholders.

Social media are increasingly credited with the emergence and rapid scaling of social movements. Consequently, many studies have explored the role of social media and other forms of Information and Communication Technology in enabling collective action beyond formal organizations. The focus in these studies has been on connective actions that emerge from the individualized but interdependent uses of social media in the pursuit of a movement's objectives. However, few studies have examined how social movements go beyond connective actions to build organizing capacity that can support effective and sustainable mobilization. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the shift from connective action to a more organized, concerted form of action is particularly important in the light of significant differences in lifespan and outcomes among social media-enabled movements. To advance our conceptualization of these mechanisms, we studied the case of Bersih movement, a transnational coalition and social media-enabled social movement that pushed for clean and fair elections in Malaysia. The case highlights two types of emergence, clustering and structuring emergence, that enabled the movement to evolve across three different phases: dispersed individuals, dispersed groups, and networked group. Our analysis of the case reveals that each of these two types of emergence exhibits different dynamics between the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that underlie the evolution of social movements. Our findings also present both the enabling and constraining roles of social media in clustering and structuring emergence.

The front-end of innovation (FEI) is critical for successful innovation in contemporary organizations. Employee creativity, or creative behavior, is at the heart of the FEI and it encompasses three activities: idea generation, idea elaboration, and idea championing. Information technology (IT) can play an important role in enabling these activities but extant research has focused primarily on IT-enabled idea generation. This paper complements the extant research by examining the entire set of activities that compose FEI. Specifically, we develop a model that examines IT-enabled idea generation, IT-enabled elaboration and IT-enabled championing, and that, grounded in the componential theory of creativity, analyzes their key drivers. An empirical study establishes the applicability of the model. The paper contributes to IS research and practice by shedding light on the tripartite role that organizational IT can play in employee creativity, and it serves as a springboard for future research.

In this paper, we build on the longstanding issue of whether and to what extent scholarly research affects stakeholders outside academia and focus on the management and IS fields. We take a practice-based view and build theoretically on the concepts of sites of knowing and knowing in practice. We interviewed experienced practice scholars and reviewed key practice theorizing concepts to demonstrate that: 1) impact outside academia does happens but in ways that are not evident from published academic papers; and, 2) the practice-based view allows us to understand how impact occurs and offers effective strategies to enhance it. Yet, practice scholars' impact outside academia still holds substantial areas of improvement, which we identify theoretically and showcase with concrete examples leading to recommendations. The insights we propose are not directed only to practice scholars, though. They can assist scholars of all epistemological, methodological, and theoretical perspectives to enhance research impact and engage meaningfully with multiple stakeholders beyond academic boundaries.

Over the past few decades, the widespread use of mobile work devices (MWDs: e.g., laptops and smartphones) has enabled constant connectivity to work. This study advances previous work on the effects of constant connectivity for employees by focusing on how and for whom constant connectivity might be related to employee well-being. Additionally, organizational-level antecedents of constant connectivity are investigated. This paper reports on two survey studies that a) operationalize constant connectivity and its organizational antecedents and b) investigate the relationship between constant connectivity and employee well-being. The findings demonstrate that constant connectivity is negatively related to employees' well-being due to the inability to disengage from work. Moreover, this negative association exists independently of employees' boundary preferences. The findings further suggest that perceived alignment between perceived functional, physical, and symbolic connectivity aspects of MWDs and occupational identity, susceptibility to social pressure, and the visibility of co-workers' communication practices all contribute to constant connectivity in the workplace.

A challenging part of many occupations is dealing with negative emotions from customers, coworkers and other communication partners on a daily basis. This paper describes a case-based, inductive study of information technology (IT) help-desk workers within a Fortune 500 energy company and the communication media and emotion regulation strategies (ERSs) they employ for dealing with negative emotions from communication partners. Using the technology affordance perspective as the theoretical lens to understand the role of communication media, the present study is the first of its kind to document empirically how employees and management can leverage communication media to ease the strain of emotion regulation upon members and the IT help-desk group—an original concept we label negativity decontaminating. Here, individuals' technologically enabled ERSs are metaphorically likened to the techniques used by medical workers to avoid contamination from viruses. This negativity decontaminating potential includes several media affordances existing at two levels: a group level affordance (negativity filtering) and individual level affordances (negativity isolating, negativity barriering, and negativity containing). Moreover, the tech-organizational contexts at the case organization gave rise to a set of conditions that affected the exercising and actualization of media's negativity decontaminating potential.