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.
Information systems researchers have shown an increasing interest in the notion of sociomateriality. In this paper, we continue this exploration by focusing specifically on entanglement: the inseparability of meaning and matter. Our particular approach is differentiated by its grounding in a relational and performative ontology, and its use of agential realism. We explore some of the key ideas of entanglement through a comparison of two phenomena in the travel sector: an institutionalized accreditation scheme offered by the AA and an online social media website hosted by TripAdvisor. Our analysis centers on the production of anonymity in these two practices of hotel evaluation. By examining how anonymity is constituted through an entanglement of matter and meaning, we challenge the predominantly social treatments of anonymity to date and draw attention to the uncertainties and outcomes generated by specific performances of anonymity in practice. In closing, we consider what the particular agential realist concept of entanglement entails for understanding anonymity, and discuss its implications for research practice.
Virtual worlds are immersive, simulated, persistent, and dynamic environments that include rich graphical three dimensional spaces, high fidelity audio, motion, viewpoint, and interactivity. Initially dismissed as environments of play, virtual worlds have gained legitimacy in business and educational settings for their application in globally distributed work, project management, online learning, and real-time simulation. Understanding the emergent aspects of these virtual worlds and their implications for organizations will require both new theories and new methods. We propose that a performative perspective may be particularly useful as it challenges the existence of independent objects with fixed or given properties and boundaries, and focuses instead on situated and relational practices that enact entangled and contingent boundaries, entities, identities, and effects.
Embedded relationships with customers have been key in generating repeat business and economic advantage, especially in business-to-business settings. Such relationships are typically maintained through interpersonal interactions between customers and their providers. Lately, however, firms have been seeking to make their service operations more scalable by offering customers access to Internet-based, self-serve technology. This raises questions about the implications of inserting self-serve technology into embedded relationships. Recent research on the role of information technology (IT) within interfirm network relations suggests that relationships and the use of IT are complementary. However, most of this research focuses on the organizational level and fails to consider the instantiation of these interfirm relations by the actions and interactions of individual actors (e.g., customers and salespeople) representing their respective firms. In this paper, we explore the implications of using IT within interfirm relations through an analysis of customers' and sales representatives' (reps) work activities and interpersonal relationships. We apply a practice perspective that highlights how macrolevel phenomena such as interfirm relations are created and recreated through the microlevel actions taken by firm members. This analysis reveals that managing the complementarity between relationships and IT in practice is fraught with considerable tension. This study of WebGA, a bricks-and-clicks dotcom, highlights how the use of the self-serve technology made it more difficult for sales reps to build and maintain embedded relationships with their customers. The use of IT altered the nature and quality of information shared by the participants, undermined the ability of sales reps to provide consulting services to customers, reduced the frequency of their interaction, and prompted sales reps to expend social capital to promote customers' technology adoption. These chang...
The field of information systems is premised on the centrality of information technology in everyday socio-economic life. Yet, drawing on a review of the full set of articles published in Information Systems Research (ISR) over the past ten years, we argue that the field has not deeply engaged its core subject matter-the information technology (IT) artifact. Instead, we find that IS researchers tend to give central theoretical significance to the context (within which some usually unspecified technology is seen to operate), the discrete processing capabilities of the artifact (as separable from its context or use), or the dependent variable (that which is posited to be affected or changed as technology is developed, implemented, and used). The IT artifact itself tends to disappear from view, be taken for granted, or is presumed to be unproblematic once it is built and installed. After discussing the implications of our findings, we propose a research direction for the IS field that begins to take technology as seriously as its effects, context, and capabilities. In particular, we propose that IS researchers begin to theorize specifically about IT artifacts, and then incorporate these theories explicitly into their studies. We believe that such a research direction is critical if IS research is to make a significant Contribution to the understanding of a world increasingly suffused with ubiquitous, interdependent, and emergent information technologies.
The authors argue that because of important epistemological differences between the fields of information technology and organization studies, much can be gained from greater interaction between them. In particular, they argue that information technology research can benefit from incorporating institutional analysis from organization studies, while organization studies can benefit even more by following the lead of information technology research in taking the material properties of technologies into account. They further suggest that the transformations currently occurring in the nature of work and organizing cannot be understood without considering both the technological changes and the institutional contexts that are reshaping economic and organizational activity. Thus, greater interaction between the fields of information technology and organization studies should be viewed as more than a matter of enrichment. In the intellectual engagement of these two fields lies the potential for an important fusion of perspectives, a fusion more carefully attuned to explaining the nature and consequences of the techno-social phenomena that increasingly pervade our lives.
In this paper, I outline a perspective on organizational transformation which proposes change as endemic to the practice of organizing and hence as enacted through the situated practices of organizational actors as they improvise, innovate, and adjust their work routines over time. I ground this perspective in an empirical study which examined the use of a new information technology within one organization over a two-year periods. In this organization, a series of subtle but nonetheless significant changes were enacted over time as organizational actors appropriated the new technology into their work practices, and then experimented with local innovations, responded to unanticipated breakdowns and contingencies, initiated opportunistic shifts in structure and coordination mechanisms, and improvised various procedural, cognitive, and normative variations to accommodate their evolving use of the technology. These findings provide the empirical basis for a practice-based perspective on organizational transformation. Because it is grounded in the micro-level changes that actors enact over time as they make sense of and act in the world, a practice lens can avoid the strong assumptions of rationality, determinism, or discontinuity characterizing existing change perspectives. A situated change perspective may offer a particularly useful strategy for analyzing change in organizations turning increasingly away from patterns of stability, bureaucracy, and control to those of flexibility, self-organizing, and learning.
In this paper we show that systems development methodologies may contain incompatible assumptions about the role of users and information systems (IS) personnel during systems development. Using deconstruction, we analyze and interpret a systems development methodology currently receiving considerable attention—Information Engineering. We find that this methodology's characterization of IS-user relations and, in particular, its recommended partitioning of responsibility between IS and users is inconsistent and contradictory. Despite a heavy emphasis on user involvement, users are given a relatively passive role to play during development. At the same time, users are expected to sign off on projects and take responsibility for project outcomes. We suggest that such prescriptions, when put into action during systems development, make the relationship between users and IS personnel problematic. Further, we argue that the contradictions we surface in the methodology reflect contradictions and ideologies in the context within which systems development occurs. Our analysis raises important questions about the relationship between the production and consumption of information technology in organizations.
This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into two organizations' experiences with the adoption and use of CASE tools over time. Using a grounded theory research approach, the study characterizes the organizations' experiences in terms of processes of incremental or radical organizational change. These findings are used to develop a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the organizational issues around the adoption and use of these tools--issues that have been largely missing from contemporary discussions of CASE tools. The paper thus has important implications for research and practice. Specifically, the framework and findings suggest that in order to account for the experiences and outcomes associated with CASE tools, researchers should consider the social context of systems development, the intentions and actions of key players, and the implementation process followed by the organization. Similarly, the paper suggests that practitioners will be better able to manage their organizations' experiences with CASE tools if they understand that such implementations involve a process of organizational change over time and not merely the installation of a new technology.
We examined 155 information systems research articles published from 1983 to 1988 and found that although this research is not rooted in a single overarching theoretical perspective, it does exhibit a single set of philosophical assumptions regarding the nature of the phenomena studied by information systems researchers, and what constitutes valid knowledge about those phenomena. We believe that a single research perspective for studying information systems phenomena is unnecessarily restrictive, and argue that there exist other philosophical assumptions that can inform studies of the relationships between information technology, people, and organizations. In this paper, we present two additional research philosophies for consideration-the interpretive and the critical-and for each we provide empirical examples to illustrate how they are used. We conclude by suggesting that much can be gained if a plurality of research perspectives is effectively employed to investigate information systems phenomena.
Recent work in social theory departs from prior traditions in proposing that social phenomena can be understood as comprising both subjective and objective elements. We apply this premise of duality to understanding the relationship between information technology and organizations. We construct a theoretical framework in which the development and deployment of information technology in organizations is a social phenomenon, and in which the organizational consequences of technology are products of both material and social dimensions. The framework is based on Giddens' theory of structuration, and it allows us to progress beyond several of the false dichotomies (subjective vs objective, socially constructed vs material, macro vs micro, and qualitative vs quantitative) that persist in investigations of the interaction between organizations and information technology. The framework can be used to guide studies in two main areas of information systems research-systems development and the organizational consequences of using information technology.
Statistical power is a topic of importance to any researcher using statistical inference testing. Studies with low levels of statistical power usually result in inconclusive findings, even though the researcher may have expended much time and effort gathering the data for analysis. A survey of the statistical power of articles employing statistical inference testing published in leading MIS journals shows that their statistical power is, on average, substantially below accepted norms. The consequence of this low power is that MIS researchers typically have a 40 percent chance of not detecting the phenomenon under study, even though it, in fact, may exist. Fortunately, there are several techniques, beyond expanding the sample size (which often may be impossible), that researchers can use to improve the power of their studies. Some are as easy as using a different but more powerful statistical test, while others require developing more elaborate sampling plans or a more careful construction of the research design. Attention to the statistical power of a study is one key ingredient in assuring the success of the study. This article should serve as a useful guide for MIS researchers in the planning, execution, and interpretation of inferential statistical analyses.