Information and Organization最新文献

While most previous research on orchestration of digital innovation ecosystems has examined governance structures, our knowledge of relevant dynamic capabilities remains abstract and lacks conceptual integration. This imbalance limits current knowledge to the extent that digital innovation ecosystem orchestration is mainly considered a structural issue. Based on a synthesis of related literature, we present a novel dynamic capabilities framework that builds on sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities for digital innovation ecosystem orchestration. We differentiate two major challenges addressed in orchestrating such ecosystems: component challenges and complement challenges. We propose six concrete routines that collectively help address these challenges. These include co-creating architectural knowledge, cultivating boundary objects, renegotiating system integration, screening complementors, co-specializing interfaces, and restructuring complementarities. We illustrate each of these routines with examples from the automotive sector. In addition, we sketch trajectories for future research both at the level of the individual routines and at the level of the overall framework.

Extant approaches to information provisioning to farmers to improve agricultural productivity, and thereby alleviate poverty have relied on top-down external expert-driven knowledge. Such external knowledge involves decontextualised content and the use of technical language, and is resource-intensive. An alternative view emphasises the need to explore indigenous knowledge exists in rural communities, which, in contrast, requires the use of local resources, is easily understandable, and has greater potential for adoption. This paper explores how information and communication technologies, specifically videos, can be leveraged to curate such indigenous knowledge and convert it to knowledge commons. Adopting a case study approach that involved multiple sources of data collection over a nine-year period, we unearthed a dynamic process model that we labelled as knowledge commoning. It is a process through which latent-action-oriented knowledge from high-yield farmers embedded within its social context is made available as commons. The creation of knowledge commons is an iterative process between knowledge curation and knowledge dissemination, and is guided by the demand and uptake potential within local farming communities. Further, we describe how socio-cultural barriers in knowledge commoning can be overcome through scaffolding, involving the concealment of social transformation objectives within another goal desired by the community. Technological challenges can be overcome through the process of technoficing, which encompasses pursuing social objectives using technology that is appropriate for the purpose. Building on our process model, we offer contributions to theory, practice, and policy.

Advances in digitalization have changed our apprehension of technology from discrete devices and application software as bounded artifacts, to dynamically evolving social-material entanglements in Digitalized Work Arrangements (DWA). This development makes studying DWAs increasingly difficult and challenges us to advance our methods that define how we can study, observe, and conceptualize DWAs. In this essay, we draw on the mathematical-logical formalism of the Laws of Form (LoF) (Spencer-Brown, 1969) to analyze how six illustrative IS studies conceptualize the social and the material to arrive at distinct perspectives on DWAs. Our analysis reveals three archetypes that capture these studies' conceptualizations and that inform a discussion of how IS research can extend qualitative methods beyond those six works. We offer two contributions. First, we provide novel insights and explanations to key conceptualizations in the study of DWAs. Second, we present the LoF as a pre-ontological and pre-theoretical formalism that enables commensurability of methods and development of novel qualitative empirical methods. Specifically, we demonstrate how the formalism helps articulating the distinctions we draw to refine our object of study and to critically examine and reconstruct other researchers' reasoning.

This study investigates linguistic devices and discursive strategies employed by online social movement organizations (SMOs) in attempts to deinstitutionalize long-standing, institutionalized behaviors. The research draws from an in-depth analysis of public discourse within anti-vaccine online communities in Italy and contributes to the social movement literature on framing and the theory of discursive institutionalization. It employs semi-automated text-analysis methods and interpretive analysis of textual data from seven anti-vaccine social media communities, before and subsequent to the 2017 regulatory intervention of the Italian government to increase vaccination rates. This intervention followed a phase of intense debate centered on the decrease in vaccination coverage and the spread of anti-vaccine ideas in social media as well as in the broader public discourse. The study analyzes the discursive strategies and linguistic devices of community leaders (moderators) and followers (members), and investigates shifts in micro-level online anti-vaccine discursive strategies that developed after the government regulation. The findings suggest that anti-vaccine online SMOs employ specific sets of linguistic devices, namely rhetorical fallacies, that support well-defined discursive strategies such as those aiming to delegitimize actors that endorse vaccines. Furthermore, the evidence shows that these linguistic devices and discursive strategies, after the government regulation, shift from an evidence-based stance towards values and emotions-based argumentations.

When analyzing empirical phenomena, the implicit or explicit assumptions we have of relationality guide what we take as the primary units of analysis and how we study them. This paper investigates and expands on the notion of relationality and relational explanations in the Critical Realist (CR) paradigm of Information Systems (IS) research. As digital technologies are becoming increasingly adaptive to the social and socio-technical structures they are embedded in, it is necessary to expand the field's conceptual tools in its study of digital phenomena. Therefore, to explain why the digital seems more tightly coupled to social phenomena than other types of technologies, the concept of transformational emergence is introduced. The key argument is that the malleability of digital entities entails that they are disposed to transform by emergence, which is key to understanding the constitutive relationality between the social and the technical in contemporary digital phenomena. This has fundamental implications for CR-based theories in the IS field, most notably Affordance theory and Representation theory.

This paper examines how heterogeneous technologies impact the coordination of knowledge work in complex socio-technical settings. It is based on an in-depth field study of critical care practices characterized by intensive knowledge work and technological heterogeneity. We observe that heterogeneous technologies create workflow gaps within which health professionals adapt technology use to contingencies and local needs, prioritize interventions, and identify problems before they become detrimental to patient care. These adaptations provide opportunities for health professionals to continuously align work across heterogeneous technologies and to accomplish broader professional and ideological goals. Our analysis shows that health professionals use three coordination practices when working across heterogeneous technologies: controlling and enhancing information, reconstructing workflows, and circumventing requirements. We theorize how these practices address coordination needs associated with heterogeneous technologies and discuss implications for knowledge work. We provide a more complete understanding of coordination practices in complex, socio-technical settings which contributes to both knowledge work and coordination literatures.

The global pandemic has escalated the demand for telemedicine systems across the world, particularly for vulnerable populations such as the elderly in nursing homes. However, challenges in implementation and high failure rates continue to affect the sustainability and capability of telemedicine systems. This study therefore addresses the question of how to sustain and develop telemedicine systems, and offers a conceptual model developed from longitudinal study data and paradox theory. We found that in the inter-organizational context of telemedicine systems, paradoxical tensions arise from conflict between demands and interests of the telemedicine system versus those of its members. We also identified when the specific tensions of belonging, learning, organizing, and performing are likely to occur. These tensions are addressed through responses, initiated by the hub, that address both system and member level demands and interests through creating collaborative governance, uplifting member capabilities, and targeted resourcing. We further demonstrate the temporal dynamics of how the hub's responses create inter-organizational norms and structures that in turn influence responses to tensions in subsequent phases. We examined variations in members' reactions to the responses, and found that they were influenced by member-specific resource factors, suggesting that while the hub does sustain the development of the telemedicine system through addressing common member demands, there are limits with regard to aspects that are more member-specific. Finally, we show how technology can be both enabler-trigger and enabler-response due to its inherent attributes of malleability and reconfigurability.

Emergent digital technologies need to be legitimated for them to enable new marketplaces to diffuse and scale. The extant literature has emphasized the role of discourse in framing legitimation efforts. Despite recognizing the broader role of technology in the legitimation process, these studies have not examined the specific affordances of digital technologies used by field members and also how this relates to the institutional infrastructure of the field to influence the legitimation process. In our study of an industry exchange field, we drew on archival data between 1997 and 2001 to examine how members of the then emergent e-commerce industry exchange field achieved legitimation of digital signatures in electronic transactions through legislation. Our research contributes to extant research by showing how the legitimation process involves invoking and scaling affordances through sensegiving, translating, and decoupling mechanisms. We also show how affordances are conditioned by the specific institutional infrastructure that supports and enables them, and how issue fields can arise within exchange fields as spaces to (re)negotiate and shape institutional changes. We conclude with implications for further research into the diffusion and scale of digital marketplaces that is of increasing importance in light of recent regulatory debates.

Management research has long been criticized for its perceived lack of relevance or impact beyond academia. How can we, as management scholars, create research that is more relevant and impactful? I argue that Edgar Schein's process consultation approach can be part of the answer. Process consultation's ultimate aim is to help client organizations. Key aspects of what is now recognized as engaged scholarship were fundamental to process consultation even before engaged scholarship was part of the management vocabulary. Based on my engagement process with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration since 2013, I argue that trust can fruitfully be seen as an outcome and an enabler of productive long-term helping relationships and of engaged scholarship; that what I call pragmatic bricolage is important in terms of offering help based on the client's needs as they develop at different junctures; and that unexpected dilemmas in such relationships are inevitable, but ways forward can be found by applying key principles of social systems. I conclude by outlining guidelines for impactful research and for disseminating research to wider audiences.

The paper explores the emergence of organizational scandals on social media, and how the communicative dynamics of such scandals evolve as a social drama. I propose that when whistleblowers utilize information technologies to expose evidence of organizational misconduct, they, and their audiences, engage in meta- organizational discourse: The reflexive – immediate and durational – interactions through which organizational stakeholders instigate organizational scandals on social media, negotiate the normative boundaries of whistleblowing, and (de)legitimize the act of disclosing managerial transgressions online. I examine an organizational scandal embedded in the recent wave of workers’ unionization struggles in Israel in which whistleblowers performed the role of investigative journalists by posting a video on YouTube exposing a senior manager trying to dissuade workers from joining the union. Following that, on workers’ unionization Facebook pages, union supporters and opponents vigorously deliberated the intentions and consequences of publicly shaming their manager and damaging the reputation of their company. Analyzing workers’ discourse suggests that participants from both sides experienced the scandal as something that affected all company employees. They acknowledged the high visibility of their social drama and recognized the potential impact of whistleblowing online across organizational spatial and temporal boundaries.