Managers' perceptions of social software use in the workplace: Identifying the benefits of social software and emerging patterns of its use

Adoption and use of social software within the organization is an area of interest for both industry and academia. Yet, studies examining how managers use these technologies and adapt them in their daily practice are very few. In this study, we interview selected managers, proficient with the use of such applications within the workplace. We explore their perspectives on the benefits of social software, and ways in which they use these tools within the workplace. Through in-depth analysis of semi-structured interviews, we identify information, communication, and organization benefits as the major benefits. Further, we identify emerging patterns in the social software behavior within the workplace such as managing of self-image, spatial, device, and temporal patterns in use

A Psychosocial Behavioral Attribution Model: Examining the Relationship Between the “Dark Triad” and Cyber-Criminal Behaviors Impacting Social Networking Sites

This study proposes that individual personality characteristics and behavioral triggering effects come together to motivate online victimization. It draws from psychology’s current understanding of personality traits, attribution theory, and criminological research. This study combines the current computer deviancy and hacker taxonomies with that of the Dark Triad model of personality mapping. Each computer deviant behavior is identified by its distinct dimensions of cyber-criminal behavior (e.g., unethical hacking, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and identity theft) and analyzed against the Dark Triad personality factors (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). The goal of this study is to explore whether there are significant relationships among the Dark Triad personality traits and specific cyber-criminal behaviors within social network sites (SNSs). The study targets offensive security engineers and computer deviants from specific hacker conferences and from websites that discuss or promote computer deviant behavior (e.g., hacking). Additional sampling is taken from a general population of SNS users. Using a snowball sampling method, 235 subjects completed an anonymous, self-report survey that includes items measuring computer deviance, personality traits, and demographics. Results yield that there was no significant relationship between Dark Triad and cyber-criminal behaviors defined in the perceived hypotheses. The final chapter of the study summarizes the results and discusses the mechanisms potentially underlying the findings. In the context of achieving the latter objective, exploratory analyses are incorporated and partly relied upon. It also includes a discussion concerning the implications of the findings in terms of providing theoretical insights on the Dark Triad traits and cyber-criminal behaviors more generally

A Sociomateriality Practice Perspective of Online Social Networking

Social networking using social media has fundamentally changed the way people maintain friendship networks, and the way people interact and communicate with others on their social networks. Traditional research on social networking uses associations between or relationships among actors. Using a sociomateriality perspective in this paper, we address calls to the IS research community to explore new ways of seeing and theorizing IS in society, inspired and enabled by an emerging sociomaterial world view. We argue that in the case of social networking, actors (social users and their friendship networks, social network designers etc.) and artifacts (hardware, social network interface / software, Internet, social media devices etc.) are so entangled with each other that studying them as one entity instead of two makes more sense than treating them as distinct or interdependent entities. In this paper, we aim to address how sociomateriality entails itself in the phenomenon of social networking

Social media enabled collaborative learning environments: a design science research approach

Collaborative technologies such as Group Decision Support Systems were proclaimed to be able to impact the learning environments of educational institutions twenty years ago, where the Information Systems discipline was interested in determining whether they were capable of transforming the traditional methods of teaching. It was understood that these technologies were effective at transforming learning environments from a traditional approach to a collaborative one, where the learner is part of the learning process, but little has actually changed in this time. However, new generations of these collaborative technologies often emerge, and the platforms of social media are one such technology. In a similar fashion to previous collaborative technologies, social media have been proclaimed as impacting the learning environments of educational institutions through better communication and collaboration, in new and exciting ways. However, a problem that has been identified is there is a lack of understanding on whether the platforms that are enabled by social media are effective at enabling collaborative learning. This study helps improve this understanding. A design science research (DSR) approach was adopted to build an evaluation framework to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of social media enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLEs). The evaluation framework was developed during a five year DSR study, over six design cycles. These incorporated insights from existing literature on DSR, social media, and collaborative learning, using 272 journal and conference articles. Further, data was gathered from six SMECLEs, which consisted of 857 tweets, 1439 blog posts, and 3376 blog comments. The resulting framework was then used to evaluate the six SMECLEs, where a number of trends were identified, which suggests that the tool is effective for its intended purpose. Thus, the primary contribution of this study, to both practice and the knowledge base, is the evaluation framework for social media enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLEs)