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 creativity (DC) stands for employee’s generation of useful and fresh ideas through the use of digital technologies, which is one of the prominent consequences of effective digital technology use. Drawing insights from the tripartite view of technology use (ie, technology, individual and task elements) and the social role lens, our study proposes and tests an integrative theoretical framework to understand how female and male employees progress from ambidextrous learning in digital technology use to DC. We first interviewed five frontline employees and then surveyed 221 employees that were different from the interview sample from eight organisations. All participants utilised a similar version of internet-of-things (IoT) in their daily work. We find that (a) exploitative use has a stronger influence on DC for women than for men, while explorative use displays a higher impact on DC for men than for women, and (b) technology digital affordance (TDA), digital knowledge (DK), and task variety (TV) exhibit significant influences on both exploitative and explorative uses to varying extents. The post-hoc analysis reveals that exploitative use mediates the influences of TDA and DK on DC only for women; explorative use mediates the impacts of TDA and TV on DC only for men. Our study advances the understandings of the downstream impact of technology use in the digital context.

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Abstract

In software platform ecosystems, the technological and structural peculiarities vest the platform owner with an extremely powerful position that puts any complementor at the mercy of the platform owner’s actions. Paradoxically, it is the self-determination and proactivity of the complementors that determine the ecosystem’s success through their surprising outside innovations. This study addresses this power paradox by unpacking the power dynamics between platform owners and complementors. Based on an exploratory multiple-case study of six platform partnerships, we find that power in platform ecosystems unfolds as a reciprocal process of three interlocking cycles, in which both the platform owner and the complementors take an active role. The modus operandi of power in platform ecosystems is a “central power cycle” in which the complementors repeatedly evaluate whether to accept or reject the platform owner’s domination power. Thriving partnerships sustain this central power cycle over time, which requires that the platform owner and the complementors dynamically adapt their wielding of power to the changing needs of the partnership (partnership adaptation cycle) or the ecosystem (ecosystem redefinition cycle). For the platform owner, this entails the occasional use of manipulation to favour a particular partnership or redefining the ecosystem’s framework and sporadically wielding coercion in favour of the broader ecosystem. For the complementor, this entails over-subjectification to entice the platform owner to wield its power in favour of their partnership. Our findings have important implications for platform ecosystem and power theory, as well as managerial practice.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

This research examines the socially significant issue of doctors’ resistance to healthcare information technology (HIT) from the radical power perspective. It adopts Bourdieu’s social practice theory to examine the interaction of HIT with the reproduction of doctors’ historically rooted social standing through the doctor-patient-interaction (D-P-I) practice. Findings from our ethnographic enquiry at a large corporate healthcare organisation in India link doctors’ historically rooted social standing to the symbolic recognition of their embodied emotional capital existing in tandem with their habitus. The symbolic recognition of emotional capital provided a better valorisation of clinical capital and allowed the accumulation of other forms of capital—institutionalised capital, social capital and economic capital—that formed doctors’ capital structure and contributed to their social status. Doctors produced emotional capital by putting their habitus into practice and, in the process, reproduced its symbolic status and their social status linked to it. HIT challenged doctors to put their habitus into practice, thereby creating a perception of threat to emotional capital. Doctors’ HIT resistance was a conservation strategy to reproduce their historically rooted higher social status. Findings from this study contribute to the literature on Power and IT resistance.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

E-participation platforms create spaces and opportunities for participation and collaboration between governments and citizens. This paper aims to investigate the role of power on formal e-participation platforms and digital spaces that are controlled by the governments. Although those types of platforms have been increasing in numerous countries, they have been criticised as often leading to a lack of or decrease in citizen engagement. We propose a relational view that examines how power is related to the use of resources in practice, that is, to resourcing. To explore this issue, we examine citizens’ participation on three urban mobility platforms in three major Brazilian cities. Our study makes two main contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on e-participation by explaining how a relational view of power helps to understand the nature and consequences of citizen participation in public policy-making. Second, we integrate the concept of resourcing as both a source and constitutive element of relational power. We propose a process-based model of resourcing as power that opens the black box of resourcing through the identification of three distinct phases in time: resourcing IN, resourcing WITHIN and resourcing OUT.

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The discontinuance of volitional IS (i.e., information systems adopted, used and discontinued at will) has recently attracted remarkable attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, most research to date has been ahistorical. Ignoring the temporal progression can be problematic when the phenomenon under investigation is dynamic and evolving. To balance this, we adopt a stage modelling approach to understand the process ending with the technology use being discontinued by users of a popular crowdsourcing platform. Two questions guided our investigation: (1) Why do users discontinue using an IS they have volitionally adopted and used? (2) How does IS discontinuance occur over time in such context? We develop a stage model demonstrating that five stages are critical in understanding IS discontinuance: IS framing, goal pursuit, frame disruption, dormancy and quitting, after which possible switching denotes a new cycle. Furthermore, we identify two frames that help us understand why different users interpret and evaluate the technology differently – namely, the gain frame and the hedonic frame. On one hand, a gain frame is linked to the goal of improving one’s resources and thus directs the user’s attention to the technology’s instrumental value. On the other hand, a hedonic frame is linked to the goal of having fun and thus directs the user’s attention to the technology’s enjoyment value. But, most importantly, we show that the technology’s use lifecycle as a whole from initial use to discontinuance is shaped and guided by the user’s dominant frame. Our insights elicit a number of important theoretical and practical implications.

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This paper investigates the embeddedness of digital entrepreneurship in the entrepreneurs’ indigenous value system by examining the influence of ‘Ubuntu’ on digital entrepreneurship activities in the South African context. We do so through an interpretive field study of two innovation clusters in South Africa. Our findings reveal Ubuntu as the basis of a community orientation to digital entrepreneurship that offers an alternative to the prevalent heroic view in which digital entrepreneurship narratives are centred around the individual entrepreneur(s). They also highlight the tensions faced by digital entrepreneurs as they attempt to uphold the Ubuntu values of humility, reciprocity, and benevolence while operating in a competitive and fast-paced environment. In addition, our study indicates that the way entrepreneurs draw on their indigenous value system is dynamic, giving rise to what we call digital Ubuntu, reflecting a reworking of Ubuntu values into their increasingly digital reality. The concept of digital Ubuntu brings to light how indigenous values can become entangled with the capabilities of digital technologies and highlights the need for indigenous perspectives to advance our understanding of the diversity of digital phenomena, such as digital entrepreneurship, across cultural contexts.

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Abstract

Digital platforms are restructuring how many companies and industries function, including humanitarian organisations that operate in complex environments and serve vulnerable populations. To date, however, there has been limited study of their use in humanitarian and particularly refugee contexts. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on the concept of platformisation to study the opportunities and challenges arising from UNHCR’s transition from a closed transactional system to an open innovation platform focusing on core processes of identification, value creation and platform governance that are relevant for refugee management and protection. Our empirical study captures the perspectives of the UNHCR, organisational stakeholders and refugees in the world’s largest refugee camp in Northern Uganda with regards to UNHCR’s strategy towards platform openness. We find that UNHCR’s data transformation strategy introduces the potential for increasing institutional value in the form of more effective service delivery to refugees. However, these technological opportunities do not necessarily translate to greater value if they do not mesh with current work practices, incentives and activities of service provider organisations and refugees. Our study helps identify opportunities to address these constraints, primarily through improving understanding of the emergent governance-related tensions that exist for digital platforms for development and surfacing existing issues of exclusion and vulnerability. We conclude with insights for the broader theorisation of identification platforms and with recommendations for policies and practices that together might help realise the potential value creation introduced through the platformisation of identification systems.

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Abstract

New assistive technology (AT) is at our disposal for improving the everyday life of people in need. Yet, the current way how AT is produced and provisioned is hindering certain marginalised groups in the population, particularly elderly people, to get access to it. To expedite time-to-market, reduce costs, and increase accessibility to otherwise unattainable AT, we explore if do-it-yourself (DIY) could be a feasible and desirable alternative to commercial applications. We provide answers to the following research questions: (1) For whom does the DIY approach work in the context of assistive technology? (2) Under which circumstances do DIY work? and (3) How can researchers make DIY a satisfying experience? The evidence we collected during the “iCare” project suggests that DIY attracts both, elderly people with a need-based motive and a hedonic motive. It also shows that a participatory approach and an early engagement with potential users, their family members, and informal caregivers is beneficial for improving design and use-related aspects of the AT and the DIY intervention.

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