How is value created in an online community (OC) over time? We explored this question through a longitudinal field study of an OC in the healthcare arena. We found that multiple kinds of value were produced and changed over time as different participants engaged with the OC and its evolving technology in various ways. To explain our findings, we theorize OC value as performed through the ongoing sociomaterial configuring of strategies, digital platforms, and stakeholder engagement. We develop a process perspective to explain these dynamics and identify multiple different kinds of value being created by an OC over time: financial, epistemic, ethical, service, reputational, and platform. Our research points to the importance of expanding the notion of OC users to encompass a broader understanding of stakeholders. It further suggests that creating OC value increasingly requires going beyond a dyadic relationship between the OC and the firm to encompassing a more complex relationship involving a wider ecosystem of stakeholders.
In this paper, we examine the challenges around the development and scalability of information infrastructures. We identify two possible solutions proposed in the literature, one emphasizing more top-down control and the need for a clear IT governance framework, and a second arguing for a more flexible approach since absolute control is impossible and only leads to drift and unintended outcomes. We suggest that there is a clear gap in the literature in better understanding how to govern the development of information infrastructures using a bottom-up approach. We build on research that approaches IS development as a collective action problem and focus on how different actors frame the infrastructure as a public and private good, and how the framing process is underpinned by actors' different ideologies. We use our theoretical approach to examine the framing of the development of a regional health information infrastructure in Crete. Our analysis examines how different actors frame the infrastructure as a collective action good and explore their ideological positioning. We explore the struggle around meanings attributed to the good over time as being a public or private one in establishing or sustaining relations of power, and how legitimacy is challenged or reinforced. Finally, we develop contributions on the collective action challenges in infrastructure development and suggest how a polycentric approach to governance might be further developed to promote the ongoing cultivation of information infrastructures from the bottom up.
This study integrates tenets of the behavioral theory of the firm and neo-institutional theory to identify four recurring search mechanisms that are expected to influence hospital managers’ information systems investment decisions. To account for the critical role of regulation in healthcare, senior managers’ reliance on each of these four search mechanisms is hypothesized to be contingent upon their hospital’s regulative legitimacy. Analyses of panel data from all 153 public nonspecialist hospital organizations in England reveal that hospital managers invest in IS not only to find solutions to performance shortfalls (problemistic search), but also to achieve continuity and predictability in resource allocation (institutionalized search) and signal conformity with external norms and expectations (mimetic search). We find that the desire to make adequate use of uncommitted financial resources (slack search) is salient only among hospitals with low levels of regulative legitimacy. These new insights into the motives that trigger—and constrain—senior managers’ IS investment decisions will help IS managers to strengthen their case for IS investment and guide policy makers in how best to allocate resources to IS in healthcare and possibly beyond.
This paper develops a sociomaterial perspective on digital coordination. It extends Pickering’s mangle of practice by using a trichordal approach to temporal emergence. We provide new understanding as to how the nonhuman and human agencies involved in coordination are embedded in the past, present, and future. We draw on an in-depth field study conducted between 2006 and 2010 of the development, introduction, and use of a computing grid infrastructure by the CERN particle physics community. Three coordination tensions are identified at different temporal dimensions, namelyobtaining adequate transparency in the present, modeling a future infrastructure, and the historical disciplining of social and material inertias. We propose and develop the concept of digital coordination, and contribute a trichordal temporal approach to understanding the development and use of digital infrastructure as being orientated to the past and future while emerging in the present.
Building on recent developments in mixed methods, we discuss the methodological implications of critical realism and explore how these can guide dynamic mixed-methods research design in information systems. Specifically, we examine the core ontological assumptions of CR in order to gain some perspective on key epistemological issues such as causation and validity, and illustrate how these shape our logic of inference in the research process through what is known as retroduction. We demonstrate the value of a CR-led mixed-methods research approach by drawing on a study that examines the impact of ICT adoption in the financial services sector. In doing so, we provide insight into the interplay between qualitative and quantitative methods and the particular value of applying mixed methods guided by CR methodological principles. Our positioning of demi-regularities within the process of retroduction contributes a distinctive development in this regard. We argue that such a research design enables us to better address issues of validity and the development of more robust meta-inferences.
In this paper we examine the use of electronic patient records (EPR) by clinical specialists in their development of multidisciplinary care for diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. We develop a practice theory lens to investigate EPR use across multidisciplinary team practice. Our findings suggest that there are oppositional tendencies towards diversity in EPR use and unity which emerges across multidisciplinary work, and this influences the outcomes of EPR use. The value of this perspective is illustrated through the analysis of a yearlong, longitudinal case study of a multidisciplinary team of surgeons, oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and nurse specialists adopting a new EPR. Each group adapted their use of the EPR to their diverse specialist practices, but they nonetheless orientated their use of the EPR to each others' practices sufficiently to support unity in multidisciplinary teamwork. Multidisciplinary practice elements were also reconfigured in an episode of explicit negotiations, resulting in significant changes in EPR use within team meetings. Our study contributes to the growing literature that questions the feasibility and necessity of achieving high levels of standardized, uniform health information technology use in healthcare.
The integration of information and communications technologies (IT) is playing a key role in transforming the nature of work. The link between IT and transformation is poorly understood, and further theoretical developments are needed to advance our current knowledge of this relationship. In this paper, we develop a conceptual scheme by drawing on and extending Giddens' social theory of transformation that relates changes in modern institutions to shifts in self-identity. We illustrate the value of these ideas in making sense of the introduction of an electronic trading system, LIMNET EPS, across the London Insurance Market. Furthermore, our case analyses suggest some practical implications on electronic trading and work transformation.