The 2019 impact factor (announced end of June 2020) for ISJ is 4.188. This is the third best impact factor in the Basket of Eight IS Journals. See past ISJ impact factors and the Editor’s comment on impact factors here. The next impact factor (2020) will not be available until around mid June 2021.

Abstract

While common wisdom suggests that big data facilitates better decisions, we posit that it may not always be the case, as big data aspects can also afford and motivate knowledge hiding. To examine this possibility, we integrate adaptive cost theory with the resource?based view of the firm. This integration suggests that the effect of big data characteristics (i.e., data variety, volume, and velocity) on firm decision quality can be explained, in part, by data analysts’ perceived knowledge hiding behaviours, including evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding. We examined this model with survey data from 149 data analysts in firms that use big data to varying degrees. The findings show that big data characteristics have distinct effects on knowledge hiding behaviours. While data volume and velocity enhance knowledge hiding, data variety reduces it. Moreover, evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding have varying effects on firm decision quality. Whereas evasive hiding reduces firm decision?making quality, playing dumb does not affect it, and rationalized hiding improves it. These results are further validated with applicability checks. Ultimately, these results can explain inconsistent past findings regarding the return on investment in big data and provide a unique look into the potential “dark sides” of big data.

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Abstract

In this article, we aim to sensitise the information systems community about the dispossession of choice that the extended reliance on Internet technology creates for individuals. The overemphasis of digital inclusion as a solution to the digital divide problem frames Internet use as desirable in a progressive society but labels non?use as problematic or a deficiency that needs to be remedied. This situation, we argue, creates a new modality of inequality that we term digital enforcement, defined as the process of dispossession that reduces choices for individuals who prefer to minimise their reliance on the Internet if given the opportunity or those who want to live their lives offline altogether. We present digital enforcement as an ethical problem and draw on the concepts of governmentality and technologies of power to explain how practices around Internet use in society result in digital enforcement. We conclude with a hopeful perspective to call for an ethical agenda to develop desirable futures.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

One of today’s grand societal challenges is to replace the current ‘take?make?waste’ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has not fully explored the potentials of information systems (IS) for a CE. Considering recent technological advances in software and hardware and our history of helping address wicked challenges, we believe the time is ripe to mobilise IS scholarship for a CE. Our findings from an interdisciplinary literature review show that research has primarily examined IS potentials for increasing efficiency of isolated intra?organisational processes while neglecting the larger sustainability potential of IS to establish circular material flows—that is, slow down and close material loops across entire product lifecycles. In response, we propose directions for IS research that develop our knowledge of how IS can help understand and enact circular material flows to intensify and extend use of products and components and recycle waste materials. Our directions offer pathways to building and evaluating the problem?solution pairing that could characterise a prolific CE?IS relationship.

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Abstract

To realize their strategic goals and maintain a competitive advantage in the digital era, organizations must periodically renew their digital platforms and infrastructures. However, knowledge about such technology renewal is scattered across diverse research streams, so insights into the process are both limited and fragmented. In this article, we consolidate insights from previous research to conceptualize technology renewal as an inherently paradoxical digital transformation process that requires organizations to simultaneously remove their technological foundation and build on the practices that depend on it to implement a new technological foundation. Previous research suggests that technology renewal initiatives are driven by three paradoxical tensions: (a) established vs renewed technology usage, (b) deliberate vs emergent renewal practices and (c) inner vs outer renewal contexts. We apply this framing to a longitudinal case study in which we analyse and explain how an organization’s responses to manifestations of these tensions eventually led to a vicious cycle of continued investments into two overlapping and largely incompatible digital platforms over a 9?year period. Based on these conceptual and empirical insights, we theorize technology renewal as a paradoxical, and increasingly critical, digital transformation process that forces managers to make decisions in complex and ambiguous choice situations.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

Based on three case studies of Chinese Internet start?ups, this study seeks to address the research question: “How is digital entrepreneurship enacted in China?” Our findings reveal that there was a common theme that underpinned the start?ups we studied, which we termed ‘Qinghuai’ in the language of the informants we spoke with. In this paper, we explain the roots of the concept and its six constituent elements at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels. These elements are then abstracted into two dimensions: (a) spiritual idealism and (b) perpetual development. We argue that Qinghuai as a concept is a product and reflection of the cultural and institutional complexity of contemporary China. Further, we discuss how Qinghuai facilitates digital entrepreneurship across the business, organizational, and technological domains. This explanation is substantiated by data from our three cases and juxtaposed with what has been discussed in the existing digital entrepreneurship literature. Finally, as we present the contributions of our study, we elaborate on (a) how Qinghuai reflects the contemporary context of China; (b) how Qinghuai is instrumental to digital entrepreneurship in China; and (c) how Qinghuai is different from other related concepts including Guanxi, collectivism, collective action and social entrepreneurship. We conclude the paper by discussing its limitations, future research opportunities, as well as its practical implications.

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Abstract

Software process tailoring (SPT) is a team?based and learning?intensive activity that addresses the particular dynamic characteristics of a development project. Because SPT critically influences how projects are conducted, its performance should be investigated. However, the extant literature lacks empirical evidence on how the underlying effects of SPT performance and its team?supportive factors operate and influence software project performance. From the knowledge perspective, this study adopts dynamic capabilities theory and considers the learning ability and absorptive capacity of software project teams to develop a theoretical model to address this gap. The results of an empirical examination of the model with 135 software project teams advance our understanding of how team?level learning antecedents—experience, communication quality and trust—dynamically facilitate teams’ absorptive capacity (AC) when they conduct SPT, which in turn reinforces project performance. The mediating effects of the proposed model are unveiled and discussed, and theoretical implications as well as practical guidance for how AC and these factors promote SPT and project performance are suggested.

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Abstract

The study explores how online health communities produce social value by uniting individuals under a common purpose, to advance healthcare in post?conflict states. We selected MedicineAfrica – a digital platform known for creating social value by providing medical education in regions with under?resourced healthcare systems – and drew on multiple data collection methods. We found that it is through a unique form of digital health activism that social value is created in this context. Drawing on a sociological understanding of digital health activism, we make the following contributions: First, we identify three types of non?economic, social value: cognitive, professional and epistemic. Second, we indicate that social value creation is enabled by three emergent forms of digital health activism (ie, philanthropic, moral and reciprocal activity). Third, we elicit three enabling mechanisms explaining how these forms of activism are technically and socially afforded through the platform’s connective capacity and emerging collective practices in tandem with its members’ growing commitment. Our article contributes to the growing IS literature on digital activism by offering a framework that elucidates how digital health activism relates to social value creation. The article provides practical implications as to how platforms can enable sustainable online (health) communities.

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EarlyView is Wiley’s online repository for papers accepted but not yet published in an issue. The latest EarlyView papers are detailed below. For full details and access to all of the ISJ please go to the publishers website – see Wiley link in Weblinks in the next column.