An emerging research agenda focuses on social media's influence on political activism. Specific attention has recently been paid to digital social movement organizing and action repertoire development. The literature acknowledges the changing face of activism at the movement level, but little is known about the relationship between social movement organizations (SMOs) and digital action repertoires. Understanding this relationship is critical because strong adherence to values is at the heart of establishing action repertoires with legitimacy and persistence. In this paper, we rely on a two-year longitudinal study of the Swedish affiliate of Amnesty International. We examine the transformation in engagement and interaction that followed the organization's introduction of new action repertoires. Drawing on resource mobilization theory and the collective action space model, we elaborate how new action repertoires both stabilized and challenged the values of the SMO, as well as gradually broadened the interactions of supporters and deepened their modes of engagement. We offer a value-based model on the antecedents and effects of new action repertoires from the SMO perspective. The empirical findings and the model build new theory on social media and digital activism at the organizational level, complementing the predominant movement level research in the extant literature.
Online participation engenders both the benefits of knowledge sharing and the risks of harm. Vigilant interaction in knowledge collaboration refers to an interactive emergent dialogue in which knowledge is shared while it is protected, requiring deep appraisals of each others' actions in order to determine how each action may influence the outcomes of the collaboration. Vigilant interactions are critical in online knowledge collaborations under ambivalent relationships where users collaborate to gain benefits but at the same time protect to avoid harm from perceived vulnerabilities. Vigilant interactions can take place on discussion boards, open source development, wiki sites, social media sites, and online knowledge management systems and thus is a rich research area for information systems researchers. Three elements of vigilant interactions are described: trust asymmetry, deception and novelty. Each of these elements challenges prevailing theory-based assumptions about how people collaborate online. The study of vigilant interaction, then, has the potential to provide insight on how these elements can be managed by participants in a manner that allows knowledge sharing to proceed without harm.
In many domains of increased turbulence and volatility, interorganizational ad hoc collaborations are common. One such domain is homeland security in which security professionals collaborate virtually with individuals outside of their own organizations in response to a security threat. In such a domain, a safe context is needed to ensure that interactions with collaborators not only help to solve the immediate threat but also avoid the improper use by outside parties of information released during these collaborations. We use the heuristic systematic model of information processing to hypothesize that the relationship between different safe context factors and a security professional's perceptions of collaboration success will be contingent on differences in geographic proximity of the collaborating parties--differences in proximity that are not related to differences in physical face-to-face contact but to differences in social proximity. Our exploratory empirical investigation finds support for the hypothesized interaction effect: safe contexts that require deeper processing are related to higher levels of perceived success when the parties are geographically proximal (with no differences in face-to-face contact), whereas safe contexts that involve heuristic-based processing are related to success when parties are geographically less proximal. Our findings suggest that the utility of safe context factors is contextualized based on the proximity of interacting parties, that geographical proximity's social space dimension plays a key role independent of differences in physical face-to-face contact, and that, practically, to be successful, ad hoc collaborators should have access to a range of safe context factors, using them in different combinations depending on the proximity of network members.
Although trust has received much attention in many streams of information systems research, there has been little theorizing to explain how trust evokes sentiments and affects task performance in IT-enabled relationships. Many studies unquestionably assume that trust is intrinsically beneficial, and dismiss the possibility that the effects of trust may be dependent on the situation (or conditions) at present. This paper theoretically and empirically examines outcomes of an individual's trust in global virtual teams under differing situations (or conditions). In Study 1, we find that early in a team's existence, a member's trusting beliefs have a direct positive effect on his or her trust in the team and perceptions of team cohesiveness. Later on, however, a member's trust in his team operates as a moderator, indirectly affecting the relationships between team communication and perceptual outcomes. Study 2 similarly suggests that trust effects are sensitive to the particular situation or condition. Combined, the studies find that trust affects virtual teams differently in different situations. Future studies on trust will need to consider situational contingencies. This paper contributes to the literature on IT-enabled relationships by theorizing and empirically testing how trust affects attitudes and behaviors.
Beliefs of organizational ownership relate to whether information and knowledge created by an individual knowledge worker are believed to be owned by the organization. Beliefs about property rights affect information and knowledge sharing. This study explored factors that help determine an individual's beliefs about the organizational ownership of information and expertise that he or she has created. Four different situations of organizational ownership (information vs. expertise/internal vs. external sharing) were considered. The study found that a belief in self-owner-ship was positively associated with organizational ownership-suggesting a collaborative type of ownership situation for both information and expertise and for both internal (intraorganizational) and external (interorganizational) sharing situations. Organizational culture and the type of employee also influenced the beliefs of organizational ownership in all four scenarios. We conclude the paper with implications for practice and future research.
This paper reports on a survey of North American IS programs and secondary data assessing the supply and demand of Information Systems (IS) doctorates. The data document a large and growing lack of supply to meet current and future demand. Demographic factors--including the number of university students, their selection of majors, and retirements among IS faculty--favor a probable scenario for continuing strong demand for IS faculty in the longer term. We argue that the severe imbalance will continue if the current state of the economy and businesses' need for technically-savvy managers continues. Implications and recommendations are presented for ensuring the long-term health of the IS discipline in addressing this imbalance.
By definition, business process redesign (BPR) represents radical change in today's bureaucratic functionally structured and managed organizations. The radical change theorists predict that to accomplish radical change requires the use of revolutionary change tactics. We propose that as the "radicalness" of the planned change increases, more revolutionary change tactics are used. We analyze the change tactics of three organizations' BPR initiatives to understand whether and how revolutionary tactics were used. The initiatives evinced a varied amount of revolutionary tactics depending on the scope and depth of planned change. The use of revolutionary tactics also varied by the phase of the initiatives. The frequency of revolutionary tactics was highest in the early phases of the initiatives and decreased as they approached implementation. We explore the reasons for reduced deployment of revolutionary tactics. We conclude by implications to BPR practice and research.
To use information technology to improve leaning processes, the pedagogical assumptions underlying the design of information technology for educational purposes must be understood. This paper reviews different models of learning, surfaces assumptions of electronic teaching technology, and relates those assumptions to the differing models of learning. Our analysis suggests that initial attempts to bring information technology to management education follow a classic story of automating rather than transforming. IT is primarily used to automate the information delivery function;in classrooms. In the absence of fundamental changes to the teaching and learning process, such classrooms may do little but speed up ineffective processes and methods of teaching. Our mapping of technologies to learning models identifies sets of technologies in which management schools should invest in order to informate up and down and ultimately transform the educational environment and processes. For researchers interested in the use of information technology to improve learning processes, the paper provides a theoretical foundation for future work.
This study was motivated by the existence of two opposing schools of thought on managing information technology (IT) in a global context. One study proposes that managing IT in a global context is largely the same as managing IT in a domestic context. The other proposes that there is a difference. The results from interviews with 65 project managers, of whom 27 had international management experience, reflect a reality that lies somewhere between the two extremes. Using Q-methodology techniques, the project managers rated the relative importance of 33 items for decisions about the distribution of IT applications' hardware, software, and data. Although the most important factors influencing an application's IT distribution decision appear to hold across both domestic and global contexts, the global context contributes variability, unfamiliarity, and complexity that cannot be ignored. Compared with their domestic counterparts, project managers with global experience tended to be more cosmopolitan in their viewpoints, emphasized more local units' responsiveness, were more sensitive to power issues at headquarters as well as in local units, stressed the need for continuous, uninterrupted 24-hour services, and took into greater account the legal issues related to governmental regulations.
Considerable uncertainty and confusion exists about what business reengineering is and when it succeeds. This paper provides a longitudinal view of CIGNA Corp.'s experiences in business reengineering since 1989. CIGNA is a leading provider of insurance and related financial services throughout the United States and the world. Between 1989 and 1993, CIGNA completed over 20 reengineering initiatives, saving more than $100 million. Each $1 invested in reengineering has ultimately brought $2-3 in returned benefits. This article describes projects with major payoffs: operating expenses reduced by 42 percent, cycle times improved by 100 percent, customer satisfaction up by 50 percent, quality improvements of 75 percent. It also highlights how CIGNA's reengineering started small and how learning was used to escalate from this quick hit to reengineering larger and more complex parts of the organization. CIGNA's reengineering successes have also required a willingness to allow failure and learn from failures. Only about 50 percent of the reengineering efforts bring the type of benefits expected initially. Repeated trials are often necessary. CIGNA's lessons can help other firms anticipate what they will experience as they ascend the learning curve of business reengineering.
Information technology is slowly becoming a part of educational classrooms and corporate training facilities. The current study examines the use and outcomes of computer-based instructional technology in the context of graduate business education. Case study data is gathered to explore how computer technology is used in the university classroom, and how computer-based teaching methods differ from traditional teaching methods in terms of class interaction and in-class learning. The study found that there are many potential computer-based teaching methods and that the methods can have different outcomes. The use of computer-based teaching methods requiring hands-on student use appear to offer an advantage over traditional methods and over computer-based methods not requiring hands-on student use in providing a forum for exploratory analysis during class and for acquiring technical procedural knowledge. A model of in-class learning is developed for future research.
Carefully crafted in vestments in global information technology offer firms an opportunity to increase control and enhance coordination, while opening access to new global markets and businesses. But engineering such global systems presents numerous challenges to management. In this article, we relate these challenges as they were described to us by 25 senior managers from Fortune 500 firms responsible for implementing and managing global applications of information technology. Among the findings of the interviews are four common approaches for managing global information technology.
Executive support is often prescribed as critical for fully tapping the benefits of information technology (IT). However, few investigations have attempted to determine what type of executive support is likely or organizationally appropriate. This article puts forward alternative models of executive support. The models are tested by examining chief executive officers' behaviors in and perceptions of IT activities. CEOs and information systems executives are surveyed and further data collected from industry handbooks and from chairmen's annual letters to shareholders. The results suggest that executive involvement (a psychological state) is more strongly associated with the firm's progressive use of IT than executive participation (actual behaviors) in IT activities. Executive involvement is influenced by a CEO's participation, prevailing organizational conditions, and the executive's functional background. CEO's perceptions about the importance of IT in their firms were generally positive, although they participated in IT activities rather infrequently.
The introduction of a large-scale image processing system at United Services Automobile Association (USAA) required both external and internal partnerships. The USAA-IBM external partnership demonstrates how the traditional arms-length relationship between a vendor and a customer evolved into a close relationship of mutual benefit with blurred boundaries between buyer and seller. Two internal partnerships, one within USAA and the other within IBM, illustrate the importance of internal partnerships in making an external partnership successful. This paper discusses the "mosaic" of relationships and the "squiggly lines" of responsibility that characterized the internal and external partnerships from the perspective of senior information systems management. The article also provides conceptual frameworks that help in generalizing from the partnership arrangements within USAA's environments to those of other organizations.
Letters to shareholders in 649 annual reports published between 1972 and 1987 were analyzed for CEOs' views about information technology. Significant differences were found across industries--banking, publishing, petroleum, and retailing--in the number of times information technology was mentioned, the types of applications discussed, and the content of the discussion. The results of the industry analysis were in keeping with expectations based on the relative information intensity of the various industries. An analysis of the letters over time suggests that the position of IT in the firm, at least as seen by the CEO, was not much different in 1987 than it had been in 1982, but has expanded considerably from its position in 1972 and 1973. Reassuringly, we also found that the number of IT related phrases in the CEOs' letters to the shareholders was positively correlated with the firm's yearly net profits as a percentage of sales. A lagged analysis on profitability data could not, however, resolve the competing explanations for the correlation between profits and the number of IT-related phrases. These findings contribute new insights concerning strategic information systems and support the use of annual report data in analyzing organizational information technology phenomena.
This preliminary study was conducted to learn about the consequences of computer support for teams working on unstructured, high-level conceptual software design problems in face-to-face group settings. A networked workstation technology and electronic blackboard technology were contrasted with their conventional counterparts. Twenty-one software designers, assigned to three teams, performed team tasks that involved generating ideas and reaching consensus. Positive effects on the thoroughness of information exchange and quality of team performance were found in the meetings in which electronic blackboard technology was available. The networked workstations provided mixed results. Significant team differences were found in performance and interaction measures. The results and their implications are discussed in terms of the necessary future developments and nature of future research in computer-based meeting support technology.