Information Systems Journal最新文献

This paper examines the question of doing information systems (IS) research from a location, particularly from a developing country like India. Our analysis reveals that IS publications from India are relatively few in number, though increasing in recent years; hardly focussed on context-specific issues and concerns; and are largely in lower-ranked journals. Using neo-institutional theory, we show that the reasons are dominantly coercive (measuring up to rankings and accreditation agencies) and mimetic (following leaders). Normative (influence of professional bodies) forces appear to counterbalance this by necessitating continuous improvement in research outputs and emphasising location-specific, impactful research. Institutional responses to these forces manifest in policies and mechanisms to operationalise them, such as resource availability, balancing teaching load with research expectations, promotion and tenure policies amongst others. We examine the paths by which more rigorous and relevant research, responsible to a location can be achieved, based on the insights from a series of talks given by eminent IS scholars. We opine that there is a need to consciously seek out such paths, perhaps by actively seeking collaboration with other disciplines and practitioners; establishing programmes of research; and building contextualised theories. We conclude with a relook at the underlying dynamics of the various institutional responses, recommended paths and some policy implications of our findings.

This study explores how digital platforms generate economic and non-economic value for a specific group of users: mumpreneurs. We collected qualitative data from 26 mumpreneurs in the United Kingdom who have caring responsibilities for young children and are running a business on the community-based platform Instagram. We found that through using Instagram and its algorithms, mumpreneurs can create various types of value in this context. Drawing on previous research into value creation, we make several contributions to the information systems literature. First, we unpack and explain alternative forms of value generated by digital platforms. Our findings show that through community-based platforms such as Instagram, mumpreneurs can create various types of economic and non-economic value—engagement, cognitive, economic, and self-preservation value—that is consistent with their business, social, and personal needs. Second, we propose a process model of value creation; and we identify two mechanisms that lead to value creation through Instagram's algorithms: recommended connectivity and adaptability. Third, we identify a temporal dimension of value creation through Instagram. This article contributes to the theory in the growing body of literature on value creation linked to digital platforms and explains several implications for theory and practice.

We report on a study of high performing IT professionals in a global IT services company, whose exceptional performance in a highly demanding work environment raises the question of how they cope with their occupational demands. While literature has focused primarily on technology-induced stressors and associated coping behaviours of IT users, our study examines distinctive coping behaviours of IT professionals in response to diverse occupational demands. We combine qualitative interviews and heart rate variability data from an exemplar sample of 15 high performing IT professionals to provide insights into their psychological and physiological strain levels respectively. Our participants exhibit four strain levels, each related to a distinctive combination of coping behaviours, which we abductively theorise as coping portfolios. We find that high performing IT professionals with both a low psychological and physiological strain level apply a broad and varied portfolio of coping behaviours in response to diverse occupational demands. We contribute to IS research on IT professionals by studying the coping behaviours of an exemplar sample of high performing IT professionals in a leading IT firm. Theoretically, we complement the established concepts of coping flexibility and coping repertoires by introducing the notion of coping portfolios.

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 Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) is a prominent feature of some academic journals. Ostensibly it serves as a collection of people who are given honorary appointments with the remit of providing advice to the Editor in Chief and the journal more generally. Some might see an EAB as a collection of ‘the great and the good’, that is, some of the senior (if not actually senile) and hopefully benevolent academics in the field where the journal is situated. Their presence on the EAB confers some form of respectability, and perhaps the journal is able to borrow or leverage their authority and thus strengthen its own position vis-à-vis its many stakeholders. For instance, potential authors who recognise some of the members of the EAB may be encouraged to submit simply by their presence, that is, ‘if these people choose to be associated with this journal, then the journal must be respectable’.

In practice, the members of EABs are rarely asked for advice, and even when asked do not always provide it. Over the last dozen years or so, I have only asked the Information Systems Journal's (ISJ) EAB for advice on a handful of occasions. As a member of other journals' EABs, I have similarly infrequently been asked myself. When the ISJ was established in 1990, an EAB was created and its composition barely changed over the next 20 years. The original 25 members of the ISJ's EAB were dominated by white male European academics (there was only one female and no other ethnicities), many working at institutions that no longer exist, supplemented with a few white male practitioners. Nineteen of the 25 were in the UK, and two each in Australia, Sweden and the USA. Of the 25, I think that only two are still (more or less) in active harness: the vast majority have retired or, sadly, passed away.

When I was appointed as co-Editor of the ISJ (with Philip Powell and Eileen Trauth), in 2012, we took steps to revitalise the EAB, and further changes took place when I assumed sole Editor-in-Chiefship in 2017. We wanted to see a better gender and ethnic balance. We also attempted to persuade some of the longer-serving but no longer active members to step down, yet several steadfastly refused to do so. In the end, the grim reaper of time took its toll and when these people passed away so they stepped down. The newly constituted EAB had 38 members, with 17 Female and 21 Male, 28 White, 2 Black, 8 Asian (including Burmese, Chinese, Indian, and Korean), working in USA (14), Australia (6), United Kingdom (3), Canada (2), Finland (2), and one each in China, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea. Unfortunately, there were no practitioner members of the new EAB.

However, as a journal comes into its maturity, I suggest that the instrumental need for and the value of an EAB steadily diminishes. When it can stand on its own feet it really does not need a senior board of benevolent scholars to prop it up or