Information and Organization最新文献

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.

Existing discourse on the research-practice gap underplays the role of practitioners and assumes that the existence of the gap is due primarily to deficiencies in theory. This conceptual paper problematizes this assumption and explores in practice why practitioners have not been able to harness and apply insights from organisation theory (OT) and information systems (IS) research . Drawing on the concept of knowledge boundaries, several key arguments are made. Firstly, a pragmatic knowledge boundary divides academics and practitioners. Secondly, the novelty of OT and IS research at this knowledge boundary hinders practitioners' ability to constructively assess it, which results in contradictions and discourages its application in practice. Finally, when academics and practitioners collaborate to promote deeper engagement, and when effective boundary-spanning objects are used, there are signs that the research-practice gap can be overcome. These arguments are illustrated through a case-study of employees in a medium-sized IT consulting company.

Management research is increasingly using fiction as an insightful way to analyze complex organizational dynamics. Focusing on user appropriation of Knowledge Management Systems, we describe how we used the popular Astérix, a well-known French cartoon to better understand KMS appropriation. We came to use this approach in an action research project in a large French construction firm initially designed to help Chief Knowledge Officers address KMS non-use. After our first findings showed paradoxical cultural issues, and based on the idea that culture is central to sensemaking and appropriation, we used the notion of the cultural metaphor to help better understand the cultural aspects associated with KMS appropriation. These results contribute knowledge in three different areas. First, we underline the role of cultural metaphors in information systems appropriation. Second, we enrich the literature on the role of fiction in management by illustrating the role of cultural metaphors. Third, we report on how this can be used in an action research project to help better understand KMS appropriation issues, which has the potential of leading to practical managerial action.

A key challenge for managing interorganizational relationships in high-tech sectors is to design information sharing practices for supporting cooperative activities without leaking competitive proprietary information. In this paper, we use a qualitative multi-case study to explore the role of communication in supporting cooperative information sharing while keeping competitive information concerns at bay. We study two contrasting dyads of a Taiwanese buyer and Korean supplier in the digital home entertainment industry --- one which was a successful interorganizational relationship and led to further collaboration and the other which was unsuccessful and thus terminated. Drawing insights from Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), we develop a process model that explores the combination of communication media with communication content and processes for effective (ineffective) communication that promotes trust, information sharing and open communication in successful (unsuccessful) interorganizational relationships.

Past research has focused on understanding the characteristics of work that are fully virtual or fully collocated. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of team work by studying knowledge workers' experiences as they were suddenly forced to transition to a fully virtual environment. During the height of the US lockdown from April to June 2020, we interviewed 51 knowledge workers employed on teams at the same professional services firm. Drawing from in situ reflections about teams' lived experiences, this paper explores how the shift to virtual work brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the fundamental activities that team work requires, facilitated and undermined the performance of team activities, and prompted employees to adapt and reflect on their use of digital technology to perform these activities. Using the shift to virtual work as a unique learning opportunity, our findings demonstrate that team work entails several core activities (task, process, and relationship interactions) that require additional adjustments to successfully enact in the virtual (vs. collocated) environment.

Much recent scholarly investigation has been focused on the promise of digitalization and the new ways of working and organizing it makes possible. In this paper, we analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic has acted as a natural breaching experiment that has challenged taken-for-granted expectations about digitalization and revealed four important issues: uneven access to digital infrastructures, the persistence of the analog in digitalization, the brittleness of unchecked digitalization, and panoptical surveillance. The sudden shift to digital work has exposed taken-for-granted assumptions about the universality of digital access. The crisis has also revealed that many highly digitalized processes still rely on analog elements. The pandemic has also exposed that many algorithms used in digitalized inter-organizational processes are brittle due to overreliance on historic patterns. Finally, the pandemic has breached fundamental expectations of privacy when organizational surveillance was extended into private and public spaces. Thus, the pandemic has laid bare fundamental challenges in digitalization and has exposed the limits of rose‑tinted thinking about the relation between technology and organizing.

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has been a devastating crisis affecting the physical, social, and financial well-being of people the world over. Unlike business-as-usual, crises create unique context conditions in which to study digital innovation. Crises can create widespread suffering. Crises can also trigger the creation of “compassionate ventures” started by emergent entrepreneurs, who, by being themselves victims of adversity, are driven to start ventures to alleviate people's suffering. In this essay, we appropriate the literature from management and entrepreneurship on compassionate venturing to suggest a framework for helping to clarify distinctions in the ways in which digital innovation may emerge during crises.

As conditions of crisis disrupt established practices, existing ways of doing things are interrupted and called into question. The suspension of routine sociomaterial enactments produces openings for liminal innovation, a process entailing iterative experimentation and implementation that explores novel or alternative materializations of established work practices. We draw attention to three distinct tensions on the ground that arise in conditions of crisis — pragmatic, tactical, and existential — and show how these may be leveraged to produce liminal innovations in practice. While the process of liminal innovation can be challenging, it can also be generative, creating opportunities for the reconfiguration of digital work in conditions of crisis.

How do crises shape digital innovation? In this paper we examine the rapid adoption of digital telemedicine technologies in an Israeli hospital with a focus on the role of the institutional logics held by the stakeholders responding to emerging events. With the onset of COVID-19, the need for social distancing and minimal physical contact challenged and interrupted hospital practices. In response, remote audio-visual functionality of digital technologies were appropriated in different ways, as stakeholders – state actors, managers, health professionals, and family members – sought to improvise and enhance the protection of persons concerned. We show how emerging practices were guided by the dominant institutional logics of stakeholders responding to the crisis. Acting for many as a digital form of ‘personal protective equipment’ (PPE), the technologies enabled diverse action possibilities to become manifest in practices. We add to understanding the role of institutional logics in directing the attention of stakeholders to shape digital innovation in times of crisis.

We live in a technologically advanced era with a recent and marked dependence on digital technologies while also facing increasingly frequent extreme and global crises. Crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, are significantly impacting our societies, organizations and individuals and dramatically shifting the use of, and dependence on, digital technology. The way digital technology is used to cope with crises is novel and not well understood theoretically. To explore the varied uses and impact of digital technologies during crises, we propose to view crisis as (1) opportunity, (2) disruption, and (3) exposure. Examining crisis as opportunity reveals how digital technologies enable experimentation and accelerate innovation while raising coordination challenges and risky implementation. Viewing crisis as disruption highlights how digital technologies enable the rapid shifting of organizational and occupational practices to new digital spaces, allowing work continuity, yet potentially distorting work practices and raising challenges of over-dependence. Finally, crisis exposes the societal implications in making visible and exposing digital inequalities and producing moral dilemmas for us all. We use these three perspectives to shed light on the varied uses of digital technologies in the COVID-19 crisis and suggest new avenues for research on crises more broadly.