The digital age has seen the rise of service systems involving highly distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-integrating actors whose relationships are governed by shared institutional logics, standards, and digital technology. The cocreation of service within these service systems takes place in the context of a paradoxical tension between the logic of generative and democratic innovations and the logic of infrastructural control. Boundary resources play a critical role in managing the tension as a firm that owns the infrastructure can secure its control over the service system while independent firms can participate in the service system. In this study, we explore the evolution of boundary resources. Drawing on Pickering’s (1993) and Barrett et al.’s (2012) conceptualizations of tuning, the paper seeks to forward our understanding of how heterogeneous actors engage in the tuning of boundary resources within Apple’s iOS service system. We conduct an embedded case study of Apple’s iOS service system with an in-depth analysis of 4,664 blog articles concerned with 30 boundary resources covering 6 distinct themes. Our analysis reveals that boundary resources of service systems enabled by digital technology are shaped and reshaped through distributed tuning, which involves cascading actions of accommodations and rejections of a network of heterogeneous actors and artifacts. Our study also shows the dualistic role of power in the distributed tuning process.
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.
Through a grounded analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA's) enterprise information system (IS) implementation in the months immediately following the go-live, we show how NASA can be characterized as an institutionally plural organization, rife with diverse institutional logics, some consistent and some contradictory to each other. The enterprise system is introduced in accordance with the logic of managerial rationalism, but some of the institutional logics that organizational actors draw upon and reproduce contradict the logic of managerial rationalism in certain situations. In these situations, organizational actors loosely couple elements of their practices from the practices implied by the enterprise system, thus satisfying the demands associated with both institutional fields. We identify four generalizable forms of loose coupling that result from these institutional contradictions: temporal, material, procedural, and interpretive, and discuss their effects on both the system implementation and local practices. Further, we show how, through the use of institutional logics, researchers can identify fundamental institutional contradictions that explain regularities in the situated responses to enterprise system implementations-regularities that are consistently identified in the literature across a variety of organizational contexts.
In this essay, we argue that pervasive digitization gives birth to a new type of product architecture: the layered modular architecture. The layered modular architecture extends the modular architecture of physical products by incorporating four loosely coupled layers of devices, networks, services, and contents created by digital technology. We posit that this new architecture instigates profound changes in the ways that firms organize for innovation in the future. We develop (1) a conceptual framework to describe the emerging organizing logic of digital innovation and (2) an information systems research agenda for digital strategy and the creation and management of corporate information technology infrastructures.
The information systems field emerged as a new discipline of artificial science as a result of intellectual efforts to understand the nature and consequences of computer and communication technology in modern organizations. As the rapid development of digital technology continues to make computers and computing a part of everyday experiences, we are once again in need of a new discipline of the artificial. In this essay, I argue that the IS community must expand its intellectual boundaries by embracing experiential computing as an emerging field of inquiry in order to fill this growing intellectual void. Experiential computing involves digitally mediated embodied experiences in everyday activities through everyday artifacts that have embedded computing capabilities. Experiential computing is enabled by the mediation of four dimensions of human experiences (time, space, actors, and artifacts) through digital technology. Drawing on a research framework that encompasses both behavioral and design sciences, six research opportunities that the IS research community can explore are suggested. Ultimately, I propose that the IS field return to its roots, the science of the artificial, by decisively expanding the scope of its inquiry and establishing a new domain of research on computing in everyday life experiences.
In contemporary knowledge-based organizations, teams often play an essential role in leveraging knowledge resources. Organizations make significant investments in information technology to support knowledge management practices in teams. At the same time, recent studies show that the transactive memory system (TMS)-the specialized division of cognitive labor among team members that relates to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of knowledge-is an important factor that affects a team's performance. Yet little is known of how IT support for knowledge management practices in organizations affects the development of TMS. Furthermore, the precise role of TMS on knowledge sharing and knowledge application, which in turn influences team performance, has not been fully explored. In order to close this gap in the literature, we conducted a field study that involved 139 on-going teams of 743 individuals from two major firms in South Korea. Our results show that IT support in organizations has a positive impact on the development of TMS in teams, and that both TMS and IT support have a positive impact on knowledge sharing and knowledge application. Furthermore, we found that knowledge sharing has a positive impact on knowledge application, which in turn has a direct impact on team performance. However, contrary to our expectation, knowledge sharing does not have a direct impact on team performance and its impact on team performance was fully mediated by knowledge application. Our research shows that organizations can improve team members' meta-knowledge of who knows what through the careful investment in information technology. Finally, our results show that sharing knowledge alone is not enough. Organizations must ensure that shared knowledge is in fact applied in order to improve team performance.
As the role of virtual teams in organizations becomes increasingly important, it is crucial that companies identify and leverage team members' knowledge. Yet, little is known of how virtual team members come to recognize one another's knowledge, trust one another's expertise, and coordinate their knowledge effectively. In this study, we develop a model of how three behavioral dimensions associated with transactive memory systems (TMS) in virtual teams--expertise location, task--knowledge coordination, and cognition-based trust--and their impacts on team performance change over time. Drawing on the data from a study that involves 38 virtual teams of MBA students performing a complex web-based business simulation game over an 8-week period, we found that in the early stage of the project, the frequency and volume of task-oriented communications among team members played an important role in forming expertise location and cognition-based trust. Once TMS were established, however, task-oriented communication became less important. Instead, toward the end of the project, task--knowledge coordination emerges as a key construct that influences team performance, mediating the impact of all other constructs. Our study demonstrates that TMS can be formed even in virtual team environments where interactions take place solely through electronic media, although they take a relatively long time to develop. Furthermore, our findings show that, once developed, TMS become essential to performing tasks effectively in virtual teams.
A nomadic information environment is a heterogeneous assemblage of interconnected technological, and social, and organizational elements that enable the physical and social mobility of computing and communication services between organizational actors both within and across organizational borders. We analyze such environments based on their prevalent features of mobility, digital convergence, and mass scale, along with their mutual interdependencies. By using a framework that organizes research topics in nomadic information environments at the individual, team, organizational, and interorganizational levels and is comprised of both service and infrastructure development, we assess the opportunities and challenges for IS research. These deal with the design, use, adoption, and impacts of nomadic information environments. We conclude by discussing research challenges posed by nomadic information environments for information systems research skills and methods. These deal with the need to invent novel research methods and shift our research focus, the necessity to question the divide between the technical and the social, and the need to better integrate developmental and behavioral (empirical) research modes.
Advances in information and communication technologies have fueled rapid growth in the popularity of technology-supported distributed learning (DL). Many educational institutions, both academic and corporate, have undertaken initiatives that leverage the myriad of available DL technologies. Despite their rapid growth in popularity, however, alternative technologies for DL are seldom systematically evaluated for learning efficacy. Considering the increasing range of information and communication technologies available for the development of DL environments, we believe it is paramount for studies to compare the relative learning outcomes of various technologies. In this research, we employed a quasi-experimental field study approach to investigate the relative learning effectiveness of two collaborative DL environments in the context of an executive development program. We also adopted a framework of hierarchical characteristics of group support system (GSS) technologies, outlined by DeSanctis and Gallupe (1987), as the basis for characterizing the two DL environments. One DL environment employed a simple e-mail and listserv capability while the other used a sophisticated GSS (herein referred to as Beta system).Interestingly, the learning outcome of the e-mail environment was higher than the learning outcome of the more sophisticated GSS environment. The post-hoc analysis of the electronic messages indicated that the students in groups using the e-mail system exchanged a higher percentage of messages related to the learning task. The Beta system users exchanged a higher level of technology sense-making messages. No significant difference was observed in the students' satisfaction with the learning process under the two DL environments.
The article discusses the paper "Media and Group Cohesion: Relative Influences on Social Presence, Task Participation, and Group Consensus," by Youngin Yoo and Maryam Alavi.