To manage work interdependencies, online communities draw on a variety of arm's length coordination mechanisms offered by information technology platforms and associated practices. However, Òunresolved interdependenciesÓ remain that cannot be addressed by such arm's length mechanisms. These interdependencies reflect, for example, unidentified or emerging knowledge-based dependencies between the community members or unaccounted relationships between ongoing community tasks. At the same time, online communities cannot resort to hierarchical coordination mechanisms such as incentives or command structures to address such interdependencies. So, how do they manage such interdependencies? To address this question, we conduct an exploratory, theory-generating case study involving qualitative and computational analyses of development activities within an open source software community: Rubinius. We analyze the ongoing management of interdependencies within the community and find that unresolved interdependencies are associated with alternatively structured sequences of activities, which we define as routines. In particular, we observe that two distinct classes of interdependenciesÑdevelopment and developer interdependenciesÑare associated with alternative forms of routine variation. We identify two generalized routine componentsÑdirect implementation and knowledge integration, which address these two distinct classes of unresolved interdependencies. In particular, direct implementation deals with development interdependencies within the code that are not already coordinated through modular interfaces, while knowledge integration resolves unaccounted interdependencies between developers. We conclude with implications for research into organizing principles for online communities and note the significance of our findings for the study of coordination in organization studies in general.
In this paper, a computational, mixed methods approach that combines qualitative analysis with a novel approach to sequence analysis for studying the entanglement of human activities and digital capabilities in organizational routines is described. The approach is scalable across multiple contexts and complements the dominant idiographic modes of sociomaterial inquiry. The approach is rooted in the epistemology of a “rational reconstruction” consistent with the interpretive stance underlying the sociomaterial position. It arms researchers with the means to seek and uncover regularities in the ways human activities and digital capabilities become entangled across contexts by enabling the identification and articulation of generalizable patterns of sociomaterial activity. The computational approach is founded on sequence-analytic techniques that originated from the field of computational biology (genetics), but are now gaining popularity in the study of temporally ordered social phenomena such as organizational routines. These techniques are extended by drawing upon theoretical insights gained within sociomaterial scholarship on how the digital and the social become entangled. By detecting the variation in activities, actors, artifacts, and affordances that comprise what we denote a sociomaterial routine, the approach directly attends to ways in which human actors and the material features of technology become entangled in patterns of practice. Beyond motivating and describing the approach, the different insights that researchers can generate through its application in the study of the digitalization of organizational routines are illustrated. We conclude by suggesting several lines of inquiry that can enrich sociomaterial research.
Information systems journal rankings and ratings help scholars focus their publishing efforts and are widely used surrogates for judging the quality of research. Over the years, numerous approaches have been used to rank IS journals, approaches such as citation metrics, school lists, acceptance rates, and expert assessments. However, the results of these approaches often conflict due to a host of validity concerns. In the current scientometric study, we make significant strides toward correcting for these limitations in the ranking of mainstream IS journals. We compare expert rankings to bibliometric measures such as the ISI Impact Factor™, the h-index, and social network analysis metrics. Among other findings, we conclude that bibliometric measures provide very similar results to expert-based methods in determining a tiered structure of IS journals, thereby suggesting that bibliometrics can be a complete, less expensive, and more efficient substitute for expert assessment. We also find strong support for seven of the eight journals in the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars' "basket" of journals. A cluster analysis of our results indicates a two-tiered separation in the quality of the highest quality IS journals-with MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems belonging, in that order, to the highest A+ tier. Journal quality metrics fit nicely into the sociology of science literature and can be useful in models that attempt to explain how knowledge disseminates through scientific communities.