Digital nomadism allows individuals to travel worldwide while using various forms of information technology (IT) to work digitally. Places like Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Canggu, Bali/Indonesia, have gained popularity among digital nomads in the past decade. In contributing to the economies of local communities, these nomads, with their unique characteristics, are an interesting, new visitor type. Governments worldwide are starting to recognise the potential of digital nomadism to improve local visitor economies. However, the impacts of digital nomadism on local communities, their culture and economies, are not without challenges and require further understanding. Almost all existing studies on digital nomadism focus on the nomads themselves, while, in this study, we take the perspective of the locals visited by digital nomads. Using the case study of Chiang Mai, the “digital nomad capital”, we answer the following research questions: What are the impacts of digital nomadism on local communities? How do digital nomads compare to other visitor types within the visitor economy of a local community? Our findings reveal diverse socio-cultural, economic and technological impacts and how locals in Chiang Mai evaluate digital nomads differently compared to other types of visitors. This research, grounded in an in-depth case study, contributes to a better understanding of digital nomadism by offering new knowledge about its ambivalent impacts on local communities. We also discuss contributions to the wider literature and implications for policy.
Although research has shown that leveraging technologies and creating a new organisational identity are critical to staying competitive in a digital business environment, these assumptions have focused mainly on operational performance and exclude the impact on the workplace and employees. The challenge of attracting employees in the context of digital transformation is leading organisations to explore drivers of commitment. Further research is needed into the key factors that bind employees to an organisation. This study seeks to advance knowledge on this individual frontier by proposing a model in which digital leadership and a continuous learning environment mediate the impact of digital transformation capabilities on organisational commitment. Testing our model through an empirical study from Spain shows an effect of both mediators. The paper thus contributes to the IS literature by identifying two mediators and their role in achieving organisational commitment. These results also suggest a new way to approach research in digital transformation by opening a new frontier on the individual level and charting a path for future study. Moreover, the results have great practical value, generating implications for organisations and new avenues of future research to explore the boundary conditions of the individual frontier.
Renewing digital platforms is increasingly vital to ensure organisational performance and competitiveness. Managing such renewal is challenging, however, because it requires organisations to remove their exiting digital platform while at the same time building on the practises that depend on it in order to implement a new platform. Unfortunately, the literature offers little guidance on how to launch and manage this inherently complex process. Against this backdrop, we conducted a three-year case study of how a local government organisation organised and managed the renewal of its digital platform, which 4000 health professionals in eldercare use on a daily basis. We use two concepts—framing and overflowing—to reflect the complexity of the process and to describe how it unfolded. Initially, managers used persuasive language to carefully frame a vision of the change and prepare platform users for the renewal process. Despite these framing efforts, however, unexpected events led to overflow situations in which events rendered the framing untenable and threatened successful renewal. This, in turn, led to a decision to postpone the new platform's go-live date. While the postponement did defuse the situation, new overflows emerged, and management was forced to initiate further framing activities to move the platform renewal forward. Based on our insights into these events and extant literature, we present a conceptual model of framing and overflowing in organising and managing digital platform renewal that unpacks how framing–overflowing dynamics play out over time in response to the complexity of the process.
Despite constant efforts of organisations to ensure a fair and transparent personnel selection process, hiring is still characterised by systematic inequality. The potential of algorithms to produce fair and objective decision outcomes has attracted the attention of academic scholars and practitioners as a conceivable alternative to human decision-making. However, applicants do not necessarily consider an objective algorithm as fairer than a human decision maker. This study examines the conditions under which applicants perceive algorithms as fair and establishes a theoretical foundation of algorithmic fairness perceptions. We further propose and investigate transparency and anthropomorphism interventions as strategies to actively shape these fairness perceptions. In an online application scenario with eight experimental groups (N = 801), we analyse determinants for algorithmic fairness perceptions and the impact of the proposed interventions. Embedded in a stimulus-organism-response framework and drawing from organisational justice theory, our study reveals four justice dimensions (procedural, distributive, interpersonal, informational justice) that determine algorithmic fairness perceptions. The results further show that transparency and anthropomorphism interventions mainly affect dimensions of interpersonal and informational justice, highlighting the importance of algorithmic fairness perceptions as critical determinants for individual choices.
Information systems (IS) play an important role in helping organisations attain environmental sustainability targets, and how to use IS for sustainability transformation is attracting research attention. However, extant studies have mainly focused on such transformation of business enterprises, overlooking it of communities. Our study intends to fill this gap by conducting an in-depth case study at Feldheim, a small village in Germany that has successfully built a renewable energy system using IS and achieved energy self-sufficiency. Guided by the belief-action-outcome (BAO) framework, our study unveiled a process model of antecedents, belief and action formation, and outcomes specific to community-based sustainability transformation. The model also reveals three roles that IS assume in such transformation: participation objects, connectivity enablement, and fluctuation mitigation. Our study contributes to the literature on IS-enabled sustainability transformation by extending it from the business enterprise context to the community context. It also provides communities with guidelines for conducting IS-enabled sustainability transformation.
Despite the broad application of the technology–organisation–environment (TOE) framework to explain firms' adoption of technology, prior research tends to over-emphasise the independent effects of TOE elements while neglecting decision makers' strategic orientations when making organisational technology adoption decisions. This over-simplistic interpretation of the TOE framework has culminated in inconsistent findings within extant literature. Considering the interdependencies among the three TOE elements in shaping organisational technology adoption and also decision-makers' inclination to weigh the three TOE elements differently based on their strategic orientations, this study views organisational technology adoption from a systems standpoint based on a configurational approach. Particularly, we differentiate between two types of strategic orientations, namely functional orientation, which accentuates the technology-induced efficiency gains and symbolic orientation, which stresses the image or reputation afforded through technology adoption. We advance a configurational model for organisational technology adoption that: (1) conceptualises organisational technology adoption as an outcome arising from distinct configurations of TOE elements, and; (2) extends the TOE framework by incorporating strategic orientation as an inevitable aspect of decision-making for organisational technology adoption. To validate our proposed model, we conducted a field survey of 183 firms to collect data on their considerations underpinning organisational technology adoption before employing fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to derive configurations of TOE elements responsible for driving such adoption. Analytical results reveal that the TOE configurations vary across three types of organisations (namely performance enhancer, image builder and strategic transformer). The theoretical and practical implications of our study are also discussed.
Leg-length discrepancy (LLD) is a common condition that may cause posture changes and clinical consequences. Rasterstereography is a valid and reliable method that analyzes posture without radiation exposure and invasive procedures. This study aimed to assess the immediate effect of artificial LLD on pelvic position and spinal posture in athletes. Twenty-four elite karate athletes (14 men, 10 women) were included in the study. Sagittal imbalance, coronal imbalance, pelvic obliquity, pelvic torsion angle, thoracic kyphosis angle and lumbar lordosis angle were measured at different artificial LLD heights (5 -10 -15 -20 mm). Statistical analysis was performed with One-Way ANOVA with repeated measures or Friedman test. In cases where there were significant differences, pairwise comparisons were performed with least significant differences (LSD) test or Wilcoxon signed rank test. There were statistically significant differences in pelvic obliquity (p = 0.001), pelvic torsion (p = 0.001) and lumbar lordosis (p = 0.001) with varying LLD. However, there was no significant difference in sagittal imbalance, coronal imbalance and thoracic kyphosis angle. It has been observed that even a 5-mm LLD causes pelvic position and spinal posture changes. Future studies detecting these changes in populations with LLD via rastersterography may prevent possible musculoskeletal disorders.