Information and Organization最新文献

Digital platforms contribute significantly to sustainable development yet pose specific risks to developing countries. Using a World Bank global database of antitrust actions complemented by secondary data, we empirically analyze developing countries' regulatory responses to threats to competition and innovation associated with digital platforms. We ask: (1) Which types of anticompetitive agreements and abuse of dominance practices were associated with various platform types? (2) For mergers, which salient characteristics of the acquiring platform drove the antitrust investigations, and what actions were taken by the enforcement authorities? We find that two types of platforms (transaction and hybrid) give rise to distinct competitive concerns and elicit different responses from enforcement authorities. We then discuss our findings in the broader context of policy responses from developing countries to challenges related to digital platforms. We offer recommendations for policymakers and suggest avenues for future research.

Consider the massive recovery response that included over 25,000 professionals and volunteers representing more than 120 organizations tasked with locating both human remains and vehicle debris following the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy. Despite the daunting scope of the initial search area – 2.28 million acres of land – participating members were successful in their efforts to achieve the collective's goals. We contend that the response effort was effective because relatively disparate organizations and governmental agencies came together and ultimately exemplified the hallmarks of high reliability organizing (HRO). Our study explores how the transition in boundaries made this possible. Using interview and secondary data from our case study, we explore how individuals engaged in boundary work that facilitated boundary transformation. Specifically, we document how individuals interacted with a data visualization system to temper the physical, social, temporal, and scope boundary tensions initially present following the disaster. Amidst an emergent, messy, and complex setting, the interaction with a boundary object allowed for unity in diversity of participating organizations, a common language through mapping, a form of trichordal temporal and rapid sensemaking, and a foundation for dynamic decision making. Therefore, our study yields critical insights into how organizational members engage in boundary work to aid HRO collaborations.

Despite the importance of digital platforms in the global economy, there has been little systematic or quantitative analysis of how investors value platforms and the scope of their business models in private or public markets. This paper seeks to fill this gap in part by analyzing how unicorn valuations are affected by “platformness” (the degree to which a firm incorporates at least some elements of a multisided business model with the potential to generate network effects). We investigated 959 unicorns (private companies valued at $1 billion or more) existing as of December 31, 2021, to assess whether investors placed a higher value on firms in different regions of the world and operating with platform businesses rather than offering only “standalone” products or services. We found that companies with some elements of a platform business model commanded a significantly higher average valuation compared to non-platform companies. These higher average valuations also varied by location: North America 129%, Europe 68%, and Asia-Pacific (APAC) 39%. The geographical variations are likely due to greater investor interest in platform businesses in the United States as well as other characteristics more common among North American unicorn platforms. More than half of the unicorn sample and more than half of platform unicorns originated in North America. We also found that investors paid 34% more for “innovation platforms” (these enable third-party complementary innovations through application programming interfaces) versus “transaction platforms” (these bring together two market sides as in product or service marketplaces, financial exchanges, or social media and messaging websites). Platform unicorns with the potential to generate and exploit global network effects also had approximately 26% higher valuations than platforms limited to non-global network effects.

Drawing inspiration from bureaucracy and information security literature, we develop the theory of security bureaucracy—an evolutionary framework that describes how organizations arrive at their information-securing approaches. Within this framework, we describe three general bureaucratic archetypes (i.e., Security Prototype, Security Structure, and Security Superstructure) that emerge from the interplay between control and expertise. We also expound on the phenomenon of security bureaucracy and delineate how organizations can transition from coercive “iron cages” to enabling “iron shields” in information securing. We also use our security establish-enforce-enculturate (3E) evolutionary framework to inform a proposed variance model of security bureaucracy. Our efforts offer significant insights and implications for organizational information security research and practice.

Many blockchain consortia have been established to build blockchain information systems. While the developed blockchain information systems were promising, few have reached market entry. Indeed, blockchain consortia often lost development focus due to high system complexity and a lack of understanding of how to create a system that will serve the needs and bring value to all stakeholders. Thus, stakeholders struggled to leverage blockchain information systems' full value. Prior studies demonstrated that blockchain systems pose not only technical but also organizational challenges. Analysing six blockchain consortia, we identify their value mechanisms, organizational problems, and organizational solutions that successful blockchain consortia experience while organizing themselves for value. As a result, we propose a new organizational form, i.e., a layered organization, for blockchain consortia to achieve better value creation.

Although digital technology (DT) is often introduced with the aim of enhancing organizational knowledge transfer and learning, these aims often fail to materialize. The information systems (IS) literature attributes such unexpected outcomes to inappropriate technology design and implementation, as well as to overuse, misuse, and non-use of technology. However, we know little about how actors misuse or fail to use technology and data, thereby failing to acquire and act upon the knowledge necessary to achieve organizational learning. Leveraging the literature on strategic ignorance, we explore how actors expected to use technology for learning purposes justify their non-engagement with it. Studying an implementation of a DT with the purpose of facilitating organizational learning on basis of provided data in health care, we identify seven ignoring justifications through which the target users of the DT avoided key knowledge acquisition and knowledge-based action activities. These sensemaking behaviors accumulated to a state of collective passivity in relation to the DT. Our conceptualization contributes to and connects theories of organizational learning in the IS literature and strategic ignoring.

Social-mission platforms (SMPs), or platforms that facilitate the interactions between stakeholders across sectors and help them exchange resources to make progress on social and environmental problems, have emerged on a global scale. However, despite their prevalence, little is known about how SMPs organize to orchestrate collective efforts of social innovation. Taking stock of information systems and organizational literature on platforms, we identify four dimensions inherent in platform organizing (i.e., identity, boundary, governance, and technology). We then analyze three case studies to interrogate how these organizing dimensions manifest in SMPs. As a result, we offer a conceptual framework highlighting the trade-offs SMPs face, specifying the design choices they can make, and exposing the interdependences between dimensions. We further illustrate how these interdependences inform a configurational perspective of SMPs and suggest avenues to advance a configurational research agenda to deepen understanding of SMPs as effective vehicles to address Grand Challenges.

This sociomaterial study analyzes the ways that material agency plays a key role in the organizing dynamics of risky work through a study of the carrying and use of handguns by U.S. and U.K. police officers. Qualitative data (interviews and focus groups) were collected over a three-year period with police (N = 61) in New York, where officers routinely carry guns, and in London, where they typically do not. Police unanimously describe the agentic role non-human artefacts like guns play in: a) framing their cognitive processes, b) influencing their behaviour and decision-making processes, and c) impacting individuals around them. Expanding Pickering's theorization of a mangle of practice, we inductively develop a mangle of risk to explain how human and non-human agency become entangled in risky work contexts, where danger is real and time pressure is high. Understanding these dynamics requires analysis of both frontline police narratives and the prescribed organizational policies, procedures, and routines intended to contain risky situations. Findings reveal that the tools provided to police to do their job both frame and constrain operational capabilities, potentially escalating danger for police, suspects, and the community in a mangle of risk.

Technology entrepreneurship, by which we mean entrepreneurship on behalf of a new technology and its organizational and social acquisition, is more than one might think, given present use of the term, which focuses on technology as device. Here, taking the perspective of technology as routine capability, we reframe the concept to incorporate not only distributed agency involved around devices, but also distributed agency concerned with use through associated routines. We argue that technology acquisition in the form of capabilities concerns use and that technology entrepreneurship typically entails substantial institutional work in the promotion of adoption and use. We illustrate this in the case of the long and painful history of the acquisition of electronic health records (EHR). Our reframing leads to new insights. Among these is the identification of what we term path convergence and its importance in the social acquisition of a technology. We argue that technology entrepreneurs must attend to this path convergence, or the technology may not be widely taken up.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises various new opportunities to create and appropriate business value. However, many organizations – especially those in more traditional industries – struggle to seize these opportunities. To unpack the underlying reasons, we investigate how more traditional industries implement predictive maintenance, a promising application of AI in manufacturing organizations. For our analysis, we employ a multiple-case design and adopt a critical realist perspective to identify generative mechanisms of AI implementation. Overall, we find five interdependent mechanisms: experimentation; knowledge building and integration; data; anxiety; and inspiration. Using causal loop diagramming, we flesh out the socio-technical dynamics of these mechanisms and explore the organizational requirements of implementing AI. The resulting topology of generative mechanisms contributes to the research on AI management by offering rich insights into the cause-effect relationships that shape the implementation process. Moreover, it demonstrates how causal loop diagraming can improve the modeling and analysis of generative mechanisms.