Information and Organization最新文献

Despite being a source of significant change, there has been little focus on how and why industry analysts constantly launch, adjust and abandon market-defining categories. To address this issue, we investigate the Big Three industry analyst firms and find that they promote categories clients find valuable and adjust or abandon those no longer attracting attention. Bringing together insights from information systems research and category scholarship, we show that industry analysts ensure their expertise is seen as relevant to clients through material and visual processes theorised as category-work, figuring-work, and client-mapping, which together create client-induced categories’. This novel theorisation throws light on the processes market intermediaries use to align categories with client concerns and how incorporating categories in graphical figurations can intensify the cycle of category creation and abandonment. It also enhances understanding of the dynamics surrounding transitory terminologies and opens up new research opportunities for studying IT markets.

Crowdwork is becoming increasingly popular as evidenced by its rapid growth. It is a new way of working that is conducted through global digital platforms where money is exchanged for services provided online. As it is digitally grounded, it has been assumed to be context-free, uniform and consisting of a simple exchange of tasks/labour from a global workforce for direct monetary pay. In this study, we examine these dominant, largely Western assumptions from crowdworkers' perspective and turn to a non-Western context to destabilise them. We adopt an inductive research approach using multiple sources of qualitative data including interviews, participant observations, documents review, observation of social media chat rooms and online forums. The study reveals that as they lack organisational, occupational and professional context and referent, crowdworkers rely on social affirmation in the construction of their work identity. They construct a work identity of who they are that cuts across the boundaries between themselves, the digital work they do and their social environment. This constructed work identity then frames how they do crowdwork and their relationships with digital platforms and employers. This study advances theories about crowdwork contesting the dominant assumptions and showing that it is not context free, neither it is a simple exchange of labour. Further, it shows that the construction of a crowdwork identity in context plays a significant role in shaping the way this digitally-grounded work is conducted and managed.

Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on digital technologies structuring how work gets done. Algorithms in particular are fundamental for such technologies. Management literature on digital transformation has studied how algorithms either automate or augment work. In doing so, this literature treats algorithms as largely independent from existing work practices. This paper, on the contrary, theorizes and empirically illustrates how algorithms transform the workplace in a spatiotemporal sense by introducing a new epistemic vantage point through which work is understood. We do so by drawing on previous work on reconfiguration and ‘Ways of Seeing’, and through a qualitative case study on sports trading. Our analysis shows that traders and algorithms each perceive and see the market in specific, though incomplete ways. Since this market is partly virtual and constituted via a range of heterogeneous actors, ‘seeing’ the market entails knowing its distributed nature and pulling spatiotemporal distant elements together. Our paper contributes to the literature on the effects of algorithms on work by putting forward the conceptual lens of ‘distributed seeing’. This highlights that digital transformation is more than an instrumental optimization process by automating or augmenting tasks with technology but that it actively reconfigures the work to be done. We show that digital transformation 1) is reciprocal and thus irreversible; 2) patchworked and thus requires mending work; 3) introduces new organizational vulnerabilities.

Existing studies on flexwork stress its individualizing inclination by showing how it gives autonomy to employees, boosts individual productivity, or supports personal well-being at the expense of group cohesiveness, social ties and other characteristics of the “collective” in organizations. Obviously, flexwork both continues and contributes to an individualization process of working activities and relationships. But, how exactly does flexwork re-regulate working relationships and communities? Is the “collective” irremediably damaged and doomed to disappear? Building on a case study conducted in an insurance company having implemented flexwork, we observe invisibilized employees working from diverse premises (e.g., home, office, etc.) initiating alternative ways of staying united and close. This article shows the re-regulation of these working relationships and communities' through a collective identity process involving de/re-spacing identity; i.e., the spatial and material aspects of flexible work in relation to identity.

In the introductory paper of this special issue on new ways of working (NWW) the editors first reflect on the meaning of the ‘new’, finding inspiration in Hannes Meyer's essay “The New World” (1926). The ‘new’ is always relative, of course, closely associated with technological innovation, in our case digitalization, and integrates spatiotemporal, technological and socio-cultural dimensions of life and organizing. This SI seeks to offer a reflection on and contribution to deeper understanding of ongoing flexibilization, virtualization and mediation of work practices. The authors go on to contextualize and discuss the contributions of the papers included in this special issue, focussing on significant technological, spatiotemporal, organizational and individual developments associated with new ways of working. Finally, they reflect on the possible relevance of the recent Covid-19 pandemic for the future of work, arguing that this pandemic accelerated NWW in many ways and – given the many paradoxical NWW dynamics and developments – that there could very well be unexpected and adverse consequences, including a turn away from formal ways of working.

This paper explores the technology-induced transformation of work by examining two fields, robotic surgery and teaching from home via Zoom. We begin by examining the perspectives of individual surgeons and lecturers and the relational, organizational, and institutional settings in which they are embedded. Recognizing and emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of these cases, we develop theoretical lenses that allow us to identify the dynamics of the transformation and patterns in reconfiguration work.

To investigate these illustrative cases of digital work and their implications, we employ two conceptual frames, 1) configuration work (Suchman, 2012), specifically emergent configurations of digital-human work, and 2) orders of change (Bartunek & Moch, 1987), emphasizing the role and development of frameworks in making sense of organizational change.

We thus combine multi-faceted accounts of individuals' experiences of “figuring out” how to make digital work feasible with reflections on how the transformation of work affects the identities of individuals, organizations, and institutions. We propose that this transformation affects the ways in which we think about ourselves, our colleagues and employers, and the institutions that shape our work.

Mobile and network technologies enable new ways of working (NWW) that disrupt spatial relations and move work to spaces outside formal organizational boundaries. This article addresses this shift by examining the spatial consequences of everyday practices of technology in the context of coworking spaces (CWS) as a pronounced example of where NWW take place. Conceptually, this article links research on technology as a sociomaterial practice with literature on organizational space. Empirically, it draws from a qualitative study of 25 CWS and offers a theorization of the co-constitutive processes with relevant insights for both technology and organization studies. First, this article adds to research on the relational and dialectic nature of technology by documenting its implications in the constitution of CWS as site, contestation, and atmosphere. Second, it contributes to existing knowledge on space by shifting the focus from physical sites to spatial atmospheres and vibes that are produced through technology use and the copresence of others. It problematizes engagement with NWW by highlighting how the flexibility to work anytime, anywhere is tied to new responsibilities, including spacing work and spatial self-management, as workers are required to coproduce and aptly navigate the sites and vibes of NWW to achieve personal productivity and affective sociality.

Uncertainty is inherent to outbreaks of infectious diseases; a topic of global concern. Addressing global outbreaks requires – among other things – well-functioning systems to produce information. The aim of the paper is to understand uncertainty in the context of information systems (IS) and to analyze the role of formal and informal information practices in identifying and responding to communicable diseases in the context of developing countries. Our empirical focus is on a dengue outbreak in 2016 in Burkina Faso- Dengue was then unknown in the context and formal “techne” based information systems were inadequate in dealing with it. Drawing on work defining uncertainty as a resource, we extend our practice-based theoretical lens with the concepts of “general and specific metis” to describe practices neither established formally or informally, but which evolve as the disease unfolds. While general metis represents practices based on the broader understanding of the context which the health staff have, specific metis relates to the particular practices they construct to acquire, share, and react on information as the disease unfolds. Our paper contributes primarily in foregrounding the role of uncertainty in information systems research and how this relates to formal, informal and emerging information practices.

Peer-production communities can create great value and foster innovation for their members, even in situations where resources are extremely scarce. How these communities create or acquire necessary resources in such settings is an important theoretical and practical question. In this paper, I investigate how a peer-production community overcame substantial resource challenges, using the analytic lens of bricolage theory, in a longitudinal study of HomeNets, communities of residents that developed residential Internet infrastructures and services for a million users in Minsk, Belarus, without funds, material resources, knowledge, or formal legal status. The findings illustrate that communities develop their missing resources by engaging in multiple coexisting bricolage forms and processes, which help them to successfully incorporate the individual and collective resource building efforts of their participants and address the challenges specific to the continuously evolving community. Based on the findings, I propose a model of community resource development with bricolage, discuss theoretical and practical implications for studies on communities and bricolage, and suggest areas for further research.

Individuals are becoming more technologically savvy and self-sufficient, often transferring what they have learned in the personal realm of apps and chats into the organizational realm. Self information technology (IT) service, or an employees' attempts to solve their technological problem without first seeking the assistance of the IT department personnel, is a phenomenon that has been witnessed for a while but has not yet achieved sufficient theoretical scrutiny. Grounded in qualitative data collected from IT department personnel, an initial theory of self IT service is presented that denotes self IT service as a distinct concept with its own set of drivers and effects. Our study not only informs and expands existing conceptualizations of IT service, but also provides insights for researchers and organizations on how to harness the self IT service phenomenon for their advantage.