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

Digital platforms are supraorganizational entities that use digital technology to facilitate interactions between diverse actors, leading to novel forms of organisation and accompanying forms of control. The current Information Systems (IS) literature, however, struggles to describe control on digital platforms in a way that does justice to the dynamic character of the phenomenon. Taking this as an opportunity, we follow the enactment of control over time and across parties in a hybrid ethnographic study of the social commerce platform Poshmark. Specifically, we conceptualise the dynamics of control as changes in the means of control—formal or informal—and the sources of control—operator or participants—over time. Tracking these conceptual dimensions, we identify the distinct ways control has changed on Poshmark. Synthesising these findings into four dynamics of control, we show that control on digital platforms is rarely static due to aggregate effects arising from the operator and from participant interactions with each other through the digital features deployed on the platform. Based on these insights, our study contributes to the IS literature on control by broadening the conception of control on digital platforms. The theoretical and practical insights generated in this paper thereby lay the foundation for the systematic study of the dynamics of control that are unique to platform environments.

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Abstract

From #Pizzagate to anti-vaxxers, passing by 9/11 or Obama ‘birthers’, we have seen many communities growing on social media around conspiracy theories and thereby gaining public prominence. Debunking or presenting alternative views to conspiracy theories often fails because individuals within these communities can grow more resolute, encouraging and reinforcing their beliefs online. Instead of withering in the face of contradiction, such communities hunker down; escalating their commitment to their conspiratorial beliefs. By interacting over social media platforms, they develop a sense of a shared social identity, which in turn fosters escalating behaviours and can lead to radicalization. For some people, the choice of abandoning or moderating these beliefs is unthinkable because they are too deeply invested to quit. This study advances a second-order affordance for identity-driven escalation that explains the process of conspiracy theory radicalization within online communities. We offer a theoretical account of the way social media platforms contribute to escalating commitment to conspiracy radicalization. We show how the sequential and combined actualization of first-order affordances of the technology enables a second-order affordance for escalation.

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Abstract

Organisations implement a variety of knowledge mechanisms such as information security education, training and awareness (SETA) programs and information security policies, to influence employees’ secure behaviour. Despite increased efforts to provide information systems (IS) security knowledge to employees, data breaches and other security incidents resulting from insider behaviour continue. Recent IS security research, primarily grounded on assumptions of employees’ rational assessment of numerous factors, has yielded inconsistent results. Challenging this paradigm, we model secure behaviour on security knowledge mechanisms, which focuses on the multidimensional nature of security knowledge breadth, depth and finesse to represent the full array of managerial levers. We further draw on construal level theory to conceptualise users’ perceptual judgements of security messages. Two studies support our model, with the second building on the first. Study 1, an experiment with 312 participants, focused on validating the treatments. Study 2, a survey with 219 participants, validated the entire model. Results showed that our model has significantly more explanatory and predictive power than the orthodox paradigm. Our results have practical implications for optimising the organisation of knowledge mechanisms by emphasising the personal relevance of threats and defining the factors that lead to secure behaviour. We also contribute to the discourse on information security research and provide a template for integrating theories, thus opening new avenues for future research.

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Abstract

Opinion polarisation in social media has recently become a significant issue. The existing literature mainly attributes polarisation to online friends’ informational social influence, that is, users are more likely to interact with others with similar opinions, which leads to the echo chamber effect. However, the impact of social interaction on individual polarisation may also result from normative social influence, which varies with social settings on the platform. In this paper, we leverage a quasi-experiment to investigate the normative social influence of online friends on focal users’ review polarity. We use fixed effects and difference-in-differences approaches, along with propensity score matching, to address the potential endogeneity in users’ friend function adoption decisions. Our results indicate that adopting the friend function leads users to post less extreme ratings. We further separate the reviews into positive and negative, finding that the reduction in the review polarity for positive reviews is more prominent than for negative ones. Regarding user heterogeneity, our causal forest analysis uncovers that users with a higher engagement level on the platform are less affected by adopting the friend function than those with less engagement. Our study has clear implications for managers and platform designers, highlighting the importance of social function design in reducing social media induced polarisation.

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Abstract

Existing research on technology affordance rarely considers the role of social structures in shaping the interaction between human actors and technology. In this paper, we draw upon the concept of social positioning to explore how socialized affordances of technology adoption, as well as their impact in work and social life, are shaped by the social positions that human actors occupy within multiple social structures. We do so by examining the adoption of mHealth devices by community health workers in India. The study generates theoretical implications for research on affordances of technology and social structures by integrating social positioning of actors in the analysis of a digital practice, and enriching IS research by incorporating the broader social arrangements and power relations.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

The current technology epoch—sometimes called the fourth industrial revolution (4IR)—involves the innovative application of rapidly advancing digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. Societal implications of the 4IR are significant and wide-ranging, from life-saving drug development to privacy loss and app addiction. A review of the information systems literature, however, reveals a narrow focus on technology-enabled business benefits. Scant research attention has been paid to the role of humans and humanistic outcomes. To spur new research addressing these issues, formalised affordance theory is employed to develop a new 4IR conceptualization. Four groupings of affordances that capture salient 4IR action possibilities are developed within two categories: machine emulation of human cognition (expansive decision-making and creativity automation) and machine emulation of human communication (relationship with humans and intermachine teaming). Implications are explored in the context of human-machine coworking and the development of artificial intelligence safety regulations. Overall, the affordance conceptualization of the 4IR advances a new sociotechnical lexicon of action possibilities and their joint enactment in achieving humanistic and instrumental outcomes, enabling alignment of the scope of 4IR research with the scope of 4IR phenomena—and bringing humans back into the loop.

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Abstract

While organisations are increasingly interested in artificial intelligence (AI), many AI projects encounter significant issues or even fail. To gain a deeper understanding of the issues that arise during these projects and the practices that contribute to addressing them, we study the case of Consult, a North American AI consulting firm that helps organisations leverage the power of AI by providing custom solutions. The management of AI projects at Consult is a multi-method approach that draws on elements from traditional project management, agile practices, and AI workflow practices. While the combination of these elements enables Consult to be effective in delivering AI projects to their customers, our analysis reveals that managing AI projects in this way draw upon three core logics, that is, commonly shared norms, values, and prescribed behaviours which influence actors’ understanding of how work should be done. We identify that the simultaneous presence of these three logics—a traditional project management logic, an agile logic, and an AI workflow logic—gives rise to conflicts and issues in managing AI projects at Consult, and successfully managing these AI projects involves resolving conflicts that arise between them. From our case findings, we derive four strategies to help organisations better manage their AI projects.

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Abstract

The success of crowdsourcing (CS) systems depends on sustained participation, which is an ongoing challenge for the majority of CS providers. Unfortunately, participants are frequently demotivated by technical difficulties and the incorrect use of CS systems, which can result in CS failure. Although the literature generally assumes that sustained participation in CS is determined by a shift between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the role of system-use practices in facilitating such a shift remains unknown. We explore how CS system-use practices influence participants’ sustained motivation, evolving from initiation to progression to sustention. Using the notion of technology-in-practice as a lens, we develop and examine a process model using an in-depth case study of a large-scale ongoing CS project, the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program. The findings suggest that CS participants’ motivation is shaped by an evolving combination of three basic components (i.e., contextual condition, outcome and action intensity) and mediated by two types of system-use practice (i.e., passive and active). Passive-use practices facilitate sustaining motivation from initiation to progression, whereas active-use practices have a key role in sustention. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on the substantial role of system-use practices in sustaining motivation, resulting in sustained participation. The findings also offer actionable insights into improving the viability of CS systems in retaining and motivating continuous and increased contributions from participants.

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Abstract

Studies on employee responses to the information security policy (ISP) demands to show that employees who experience stress over the demands would resort to emotion-focused coping to alleviate the stress and subsequently violate the ISP. However, their intent to engage in problem-focused coping to meet the ISP demands and possibly reduce ISP violations has yet to be analysed. We argue that both types of coping responses coexist in employee responses to ISP demands and they together influence ISP violation intention. Drawing upon the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping, we examine how security-related stress (SRS) triggers inward and outward emotion-focused coping, and problem-focused coping to the ISP demands, which together influence employee ISP violations. We also examine how ISP-related self-efficacy and organisational support moderate the effects of SRS on coping responses. We surveyed 200 employees in the United States to test our model. The results indicate that SRS triggers all three coping responses, and ISP-related self-efficacy and organisational support reduce the effects of SRS on inward and outward emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping then decreases ISP violation intention, whereas inward and outward emotion-focused coping increases it. The model was further verified with ISP compliance as the outcome construct, which yielded consistent results. Understanding various coping responses to SRS and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the responses can assist managers in effectively designing and implementing the ISP to reduce employee ISP violations.

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