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

Control is necessary for aligning the actions of management (i.e., controllers) and subordinates (i.e., controlees) around common goals. The enactment of control often fails in practice; however, as controlee perceptions may not match those of controllers, leading to a myriad of possible outcomes. Through an interpretive case study of two inter-organisational IT projects, we reveal how controlees’ appraisals and responses to controls are context-dependent and play out across multiple levels (e.g., personal, professional, project and organisational contexts). We build on a coping perspective of IS controls to theorise the ‘coping strategies’ that controlees pursued relevant to these contexts and the ‘coping routes’ followed when combining different consecutive coping strategies. We find the process need not end with the selection of a single strategy but can potentially continue as both the controller and controlees make ongoing readjustments. While Behavioural Control Theory traditionally assumes the presence of a single control hierarchy, interorganisational IT projects are multi-level entities that amalgamate different structures and cultures. Our study moves beyond the existing assumptions of Behavioural Control Theory to discuss how a controller’s choice of activities shapes the salience of different contexts in controlee appraisals.

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Abstract

Although off-the-shelf enterprise systems (ES) have been widely adopted in organisations, the extant literature repeatedly documents ES failures caused by misfits between organisational processes and the ES. Although some misfits can be identified early in the ES lifecycle, others emerge in the onward and upward phase (i.e., after the implementation) and, hence, must be resolved reactively. Prior research on misfits and resolution strategies has primarily focused on the implementation phase, often assuming that close-to-perfect information on the misfit’s nature and characteristics is available. However, no study has examined how to effectively complete a shared diagnosis and resolution of misfits when diverging individual user perceptions are taken as the starting point. Such situations may be particularly pronounced in pluralistic organisations, where a variety of interdependent processes and potentially competing perceptions of processes are prevalent. The main objective of this study is to address this gap. To this end, we propose a pragmatic method for the diagnosis and resolution of misfits between organisational processes and enterprise systems, which builds on an actionable conceptualization of misfits. This method builds on theoretical concepts of affordances, affordance actualization, user participation, and change agentry. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted an action research study in a university hospital. Our analysis focused on a specific misfit involving the hospital’s ES-supported clinical processes. The findings suggest that the method effectively diagnoses and resolves misfits and optimises the resources required for their resolution through efficient management of user participation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical contributions of our work.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

The use of digital technologies for extracting information from various data sources can help organisations to reduce uncertainty and improve decision-making. The increasing availability in volume, velocity, and variety of data, however, can give rise to significant risks and challenges in ensuring a high level of information quality (IQ). Pre-digital organisations can be particularly susceptive to such challenges due to their limited experience with digital technologies and IQ governance. We adopt a theory-infused interventionist research approach to assist a pre-digital multinational military organisation in navigating its digital transformation (DT) by focusing on IQ. We design and implement an IQ strategy (IQS) by drawing upon organisational information processing theory and examining how the level of IQ can affect the balance between information processing requirements and capacity. We demonstrate that an IQS that incorporates both technological, as well as IQ governance solutions, can support organisations in setting the scope of their DT, decreasing employees’ resistance to change, and increasing their satisfaction, while concurrently improving organisational efficiency. Our work stresses the importance of IQ in the digital era and delineates how pre-digital organisations can navigate DT by strategically addressing IQ.

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Abstract

Scale adaptation, where authors alter the wording of an already published scale, is a deeply rooted social practice in IS research. This paper argues that the time is ripe to question this activity as well as the beliefs that have progressively formed around it. We identify and challenge five fallacious scale adaptation beliefs that hinder the development of more robust measure development norms. Contributing to this area of research, this paper offers a conceptual definition of the cognitive validity concept, defined as the extent to which a scale is free of problematic item characteristics (PICs) that bias the survey response process and subsequent empirical results. Building on this conceptualization effort, a new methodological process for assessing the cognitive validity of adapted IS measures is introduced. Through a series of three programmatic studies, we find converging evidence that the method can benefit the IS field by making the scale adaptation process more robust, transparent, and consistent. Along with the method, we introduce a new index that IS scholars can use to benchmark the cognitive quality of their scales against venerable IS measures. We discuss the implications of our work for IS research (including detailed implementation guidelines) and provide directions for future research on measurement in IS.

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Abstract

Recent developments in information and communication technology have blurred the line between the workplace and the home. This can have a negative influence on employees’ well-being and thus has gained increasing attention from academics and practitioners. In this study, we developed a research model based on the transactional perspective of stress and the challenge–hindrance stressor framework. We defined the two dimensions of work–family conflict as the perceptual stress resulting from a chronic challenge and hindrance technostressors, which ultimately affect employees’ satisfaction in both the work and family domains. We tested our model using a three-wave time-lagged survey study with data collected from 268 employees. Challenge and hindrance technostressors had different effects on these two main forms of work–family conflict (time-based and strain-based) but further induced negative effects on both job and family satisfaction. Overall, we make both scientific and practical contributions to the fields of work-related technology use and work–family conflict.

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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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