Information Systems Journal最新文献

Today's Information Systems (IS) design research projects pursue digital innovation to conquer complex societal challenges. Many of these projects reach out beyond disciplinary and organisational boundaries, as evident in interdisciplinary consortia and academia-industry collaboration. The design activities in each project differ based on contextual requirements and the team's underlying design logic. As diversity increases, shared understanding is essential for project success. Established design research methodologies need complementary tools to support design researchers in configuring their design activities and representing them faithfully, dimensions that contribute to a shared understanding. This article presents Baustein as an instance of such design tools. Baustein is tailorable to the contextual requirements of each design research project, comprising an ensemble of card-deck, ready-made configurations, and a manual. To ensure theoretical and practical relevance, the design of Baustein is based on primary empirical data (workshop and interviews with 16 IS design researchers) and a literature analysis of 99 published IS design research projects. We demonstrate its proof-of-value through three main evaluation episodes, altogether involving over 110 IS design researchers. With Baustein, design research teams can balance the trade-off between creative messiness and standardised configurations of design activities.

Micro-task crowdsourcing (MTCS) platforms offer alternative work settings outside traditional work boundaries and thus increasingly attract crowdworkers who face exclusion from access to other work. However, we know little about these crowdworkers' perspective on MTCS and its implications for their personal life. Building on insights from three qualitative surveys with responses from 538 crowdworkers and 576 forum posts in total, we show that despite the often challenging work conditions, MTCS platforms provide these crowdworkers with a work environment in which they can participate in paid work activities without feeling excluded due to their personal circumstances. As a result, MTCS platform work provides these crowdworkers with a set of positive experiences that were not possible before. These afforded experiences go beyond work-related experiences but relate directly to crowdworkers' personal situation and life. Our research yields implications for the literature on MTCS and also for policy makers and stakeholders concerned with the creation of more inclusive work settings.

The transitions individuals make between roles are critical for navigating professional and private life domains. These role transitions involve physical and psychological movements between positions and statuses in social structures. Today, digital technologies are becoming increasingly pivotal in these transitions. However, neither existing theory on role transitions nor recent contributions to the digital transformation literature have unpacked the connection between digital technologies and role transitioning. Based on a qualitative inquiry involving knowledge workers from the Global South, we develop the concepts of role emancipation, role confinement, and role conflation and examine how these types of role transitioning relate to the capabilities of digital technologies. We find that digital technologies can introduce levels of rigidity or flexibility that, in turn, either solidify or soften the domain boundaries influencing work-life role transitions in the context of digital transformation. We abstract these ideas into a theoretical model and chart a course for consolidating a ‘micro-level of analysis frontier’ within digital transformation research.

Although information systems (IS) are increasingly used to provide sustainable solutions for tourism, our understanding of the social mechanisms whereby IS contribute to a sustainable visitor economy is limited. This paper fills the gap by investigating how organisations enact the affordances of IS in preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH) to contribute to a sustainable visitor economy. Using an organisational aesthetics perspective, we explore the mechanisms through an in-depth case study of an ICH-based company in Jingdezhen, a famous historical porcelain city in China. Through the effective use of IS tools, the case organisation has successfully transformed from a ceramic manufacturing plant to a popular tourist attraction. Our study unveils six sustainable affordances of IS in three dimensions, wherein ICH aesthetics act as direct stimuli, knowledge tools and experiences. Affordances emerge from the processes of both creating and managing aesthetics. By enacting these affordances, the case organisation builds a more profound engagement with online audiences, attracts more ICH visitors and transfers ICH knowledge to potential inheritors of the tradition, creating a sustainable visitor economy. Our findings, summarised into a sustainable affordances model, contribute to the IS for sustainable tourism literature by shedding light on the black box of the social mechanisms of IS-enabled ICH preservation. The sustainable affordances model can also help ICH-based organisations reflect on how to build a sustainable visitor economy using IS.

Digital Disruption (DD) has become a hot topic in recent years, yet detailed research is surprisingly lacking. The literature offers almost no insights into how DD occurs at the industry level and what industry factors influence it. This paper advances knowledge of DD by developing and testing a configurational theory. Using a multi-method research design, we identify two types of DD and four industry factors (downstream DD, digitally enabled structural conflict, transferability of core competitive elements, and industry player size) that contingently lead to the different types of DD. We integrate those findings into a configurational theory that describes causal recipes of how these factors or conditions combine to produce the outcome of transformational DD and destructive DD. The theory offers important implications for researchers and practitioners. The research also contributes methodologically by demonstrating the merits of combining grounded theory with qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to expand the theory-building potential of QCA.

The online phenomenon of social commerce (i.e., s-commerce) platforms has emerged as a combination of online social networking and e-commerce. On s-commerce platforms, consumers can observe others' behavioural decisions and can distinguish those made by their friends from those made by their followees (i.e., the people a focal consumer follows but who do not follow that consumer back). Given this distinction, our study examines how consumers' behavioural decisions—regarding, for example, purchases, ratings, or “likes”—are made on s-commerce platforms, with a focus on how they are influenced by prior decisions of friends and followees. Combining panel data from a large s-commerce platform and two controlled experiments, we identify a strong normative social influence pattern in which consumers tend to follow others' prior decisions to gain social approval. Because the occurrence of normative social influence depends on both consumer behaviours with high public visibility and strong consumer needs to establish social ties, the unique information concerning behaviour visibility and consumers' social needs in the panel data allows us to identify normative social influence and to distinguish it from informational confounding mechanisms. Our panel data results show that on a friend network, where consumers' behavioural decisions are visible, females exhibit a greater tendency to follow others' prior decisions than males. We attribute this result to the stronger social needs of females. However, on a followee network, where behavioural decisions are invisible, these differences become less evident. Moreover, the two experiments demonstrate that making decision contexts private or activating social needs via a priming procedure can thwart (or even turn off) normative social influence. Our findings challenge prior research that identifies informational social influence as the predominant driver of conformity behaviours and thus have important implications for practice related to normative social influence, such as the development of techniques for satisfying consumers' different social needs depending on their gender or any other situational factors on s-commerce platforms.

Online freelancing, an alternative form of work where independent workers offer services on digital labor platforms, gains increasing importance in IS research. While the general understanding of this form of work is growing, research lacks understanding careers on digital labor platforms. However, these differ from careers in offline labor markets due to volatility, global matching and platform mediation, the digital and temporary nature of work, and algorithmic management as particular platform working conditions. Therefore, to understand how working conditions on digital labor platforms influence the dynamic career paths of freelancers, we conduct an exploratory analysis using 35 interviews with freelancers and clients on digital labor platforms. We thus contribute to the body of knowledge on alternative forms of work on digital labor platforms by developing a long-term freelancing career model and outlining the dynamics of advancement, decline, and exit within platform careers. We also illustrate mechanisms between career phases in terms of platform lock-in effects, which arise from the career advancement dynamics and career exit dynamics.

Crowdfunding platforms have emerged as a promising contemporary means for mobilising collective civic actions to address local or social issues, improve community cohesion and develop the public good. This empirical study taps into the understudied civic crowdfunding platforms (CCP) developed to facilitate such actions, proposing, supporting and funding public-interest projects through crowdsourcing and microfinancing. Previous studies have shown that individuals' characteristics affect their level of civic engagement with social issues. Considering the diversity of contributor motivations, we aim to shed light on the dynamics of emergent subpopulations of citizens who participate in CCPs. To this end, we use a sequential mixed-methods approach to integrate our fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) findings with the results of an in-depth qualitative study, to gain rich and robust inferences and meta-inferences. In Study 1 (n = 316), we used fsQCA to explore five distinctive configural profiles that display the heterogeneity of civic backers' motivations, including civic champions, prosocial advocates, normative supporters, reward seekers and regret-averse contributors. In Study 2, we corroborated and complemented our fsQCA inferences through an extreme-case study and identified four boundary conditions. Taken together, our inferences and meta-inferences address the heterogeneity of motivations for participating in CCPs, by understanding and theorising about diverse profiles of citizen backers. Finally, we offer practical implications for successful civic crowdfunding initiatives.