Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting.

Current awareness services are designed to keep users informed about recent developments based around user need profiles. In organisational settings, they may operate through both electronic and social interactions aimed at delivering information that is relevant, pertinent and current. Understanding these interactions can reveal the tensions in current awareness dissemination and help inform ways of making services more effective and efficient. We report an in-depth, observational study of electronic current awareness use within a large London law firm. The study found that selection, re-aggregation and forwarding of information by multiple actors gives rise to a complex sociotechnical distribution network. Knowledge management staff act as a layer of “intelligent filters” sensitive to complex, local information needs; their distribution decisions address multiple situational relevance factors in a situation fraught with information overload and restrictive time-pressures. Their decisions aim to optimise conflicting constraints of recall, precision and information quantity. Critical to this is the use of dynamic profile updates which propagate back through the network through formal and informal social interactions. This supports changes to situational relevance judgements and so allows the network to ‘self-tune’. These findings lead to design requirements, including that systems should support rapid assessment of information items against an individual’s interests; that it should be possible to organise information for different subsequent uses; and that there should be back-propagation from information consumers to providers, to tune the understanding of their information needs

Pick-n-mix approaches to technology supply : XML as a standard “glue” linking universalised locals

We report on our experiences in a participatory design project to develop ICTs in a hospital ward working with deliberate self-harm patients. This project involves the creation and constant re-creation of sociotechnical ensembles in which XML-related technologies may come to play vital roles. The importance of these technologies arises from the aim underlying the project of creating systems that are shaped in locally meaningful ways but reach beyond their immediate context to gain wider importance. We argue that XML is well placed to play the role of "glue" that binds multiple such systems together. We analyse the implications of localised systems development for technology supply and argue that inscriptions that are evident in XML-related standards are and will be very important for the uptake of XML technologies

A strategic perspective on the emergence and evolution of e-Banking in Saudi Arabia

The aim of the thesis is to look at the emergence and evolution of e-banking in Saudi Arabia, with particular emphasis on the processes of how banks implement e-banking to build their capabilities and create new value strategies. The research process focuses on understanding (1) how banks implement e-banking to build their capabilities as well as to create new value strategies, (2) how e-banking capabilities have been built, and (3) the role played by e-banking in shaping the strategic direction of banks. This requires understanding of a variety of aspects (i) the value created by e-banking products and services within different banks, (ii) the process of e-banking development within the different banks, (iii) how banks approach e-banking products and services, and (iv) how the banks align the demand and supply factors surrounding e-banking products and servicesThe theoretical approach blends inputs from different disciplines relevant to understand and deal with the subject matter of this thesis, including value creation and capability-building literature, technology implementation literature, with particular emphasis on the processes of implementing network technologies and e-businesses, as well as literature on process approaches. The methodological approach makes use of the case study strategy (Yin 2003) as research strategy, a multiple-case embedded design, as research design strategy, and three sources of evidence: (1) a survey distributed to all Saudi Arabian banks, (2) semi-structured interviews, and (3) archival records of e-banking transactions. The main fieldwork is longitudinal and takes place during three rounds: SeptemberOctober 2003, December 2003-March 2004, and December 2005-January 2006.The thesis investigates the emergence and evolution of e-banking at six Saudi Arabian banks: Samba Financial Group (Samba), AlRajhi Bank (AlRajhi), Saudi Investment Bank (Saib), Saudi Hollandi Bank (Hollandi), National Commercial Bank (AlAhli), and Riyad Bank (Riyad). This is followed by an investigation of the emergence and evolution of electronic securities trading systems at the Saudi Capital Market (i. e., Tadawul), providing an external view of the emergence and evolution of ebanking in Saudi Arabia.The analysis of the empirical material implements the theoretical propositions strategy via utilisation of the "sociotechnical constituencies" approach (Molina 1990; 1993) and its associated analytical tools of the "diamond of alignment" (Molina 1995), "alignment web" (Molina 2003) and "dynamic strategy mapping" (DSM) (Molina 2005). The aim is not only to use the approach to reveal how banks build their e-banking capabilities and create new value strategies, but also to test critically the applicability of the "sociotechnical constituencies" approach and its associated analytical tools for understanding e-banking value creation and capability-building strategies.The overall result of the investigation conducted by this thesis suggests that the Saudi Arabian ebanking' constituency-building process shows distinctive processes of sociotechnical alignment by each one of the specific Saudi banks' e-banking constituencies in the study. In addition, the use of Molina's "alignment web" to assess the state of each of the specific e-banking constituency-building processes helps identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses in these processes of sociotechnical alignment. The distinctiveness of development by each sociotechnical constituency is also highlighted by the application of the Molina's "dynamic strategy mapping" (DSM), showing that each constituency has its own combination of strategic ingredients.Although this thesis demonstrates strengths in the areas of logic replication, narrative writing, and validating procedure, in future studies it would be interesting to enhance its theoretical background, chronological structure, and quantitative assessment. This thesis contributes to providing a rich insight into the emergence and evolution of e-banking in Saudi Arabia, particularly at six of eleven Saudi banks as well as the technological systems of the Saudi Capital Market. Such contribution may be used to inform the future alignment strategy pursued by each the Saudi Arabian e-banking constituencies

The new Nowhere Land? : a research and practice agenda for the “Always on Culture"

Purpose: Rapid developments in the field of information communication technology (ICT) mean that e-working has become increasingly common and prolonged – the “always-onculture” potential to enhance work-life balance via increased flexibility in terms of time and location, as well as posing the risk of being ‘always on’ has been identified with potentially serious implications for the health and performance of employees. We identify a research agenda and review current organizational practice. Approach: We discuss current technological developments as well as prevalent research frameworks and terminology in the domain of work-life balance and beyond to evaluate their fitness for purpose. We also report findings from a survey of 374 employees working within UK businesses about current organisational practice. Findings: Over half of the organisations sampled do not have clear guidance regarding worklife balance and supporting employees with regards to ICT enabled working. Key challenges are the sheer volume of email traffic, lack of training and infrastructure and an absence of appropriate support. Practical implications: Organisations need to develop clear policies regarding the psychosocial aspects of technology use and provide evidence-based guidance to managers and employees. Social implications: Managers and individuals require support to engage with technology in a healthy and sustainable way

Pluralizing urban futures : A multicriteria mapping analysis of online taxis in Indonesia

The exploration of urban future storylines of transformative change is subject to socio-political processes rather than a mere, objective envisioning of the desirable city. Approaches in urban imagination and planning processes should thus consider plural perspectives across a range of actors and stakeholders beyond the usual suspects of experts and professionals.This paper mobilizes the case of the emergence of online taxis in Indonesia to embrace a more inclusive approach to the assessment of urban mobility futures by employing multi-criteria mapping (MCM) analysis and combining it with an open dialog on future storylines. We answer the question of what insights can be derived from diversifying future storylines in the online taxi industry in Indonesia? From applying a more inclusive approach in constructing future imaginaries we derive four insights: 1) criteria to appraise the future are never purely technological; 2) there is a difference in perceptions of time horizons among actors when imagining futures; 3) perceptions of time horizons are shaped by actor backgrounds and social interactions; and 4) the MCM method contributed to helping individuals to focus and explore their future storylines

Trust in social machines: the challenges

The World Wide Web has ushered in a new generation of applications constructively linking people and computers to create what have been called ‘social machines.’ The ‘components’ of these machines are people and technologies. It has long been recognised that for people to participate in social machines, they have to trust the processes. However, the notions of trust often used tend to be imported from agent-based computing, and may be too formal, objective and selective to describe human trust accurately. This paper applies a theory of human trust to social machines research, and sets out some of the challenges to system designers

Engaging Users to Co-Create - Implications for Service Systems Design by Evaluating an Engagement Platform

Far-reaching digitalization affords significantly more opportunities for engaging actors and mobilizing resources in service systems. By leveraging these capabilities, digitally enabled service systems can facilitate user-generated services. Traditional service engineering approaches provide for such service systems. This paper presents and discusses the evaluation of a field-based design science research project for designing an engagement platform that facilitates the co-creation of user-generated services. This study reports contributions to the design knowledge of such an engagement platform and their consequences for engagement activities. Based on the evaluation, we propose design propositions for such an engagement platform from a sociotechnical perspective

When Socialization Goes Wrong: Understanding the We-Intention to Participate in Collective Trolling in Virtual Communities

Although collective trolling poses a growing threat to both individuals and virtual community owners, the information systems (IS) literature lacks a rich theorization of this phenomenon. To address the research gaps, we introduce the concept of we-intention to capture the collective nature of collective trolling in virtual communities. We also integrate the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) and situational action theory to invoke the sociotechnical perspective in theorizing collective trolling in virtual communities. The objective of this study is to use the sociotechnical perspective to understand the we-intention to participate in collective trolling in virtual communities. We test our proposed model using data gathered from 377 Reddit users. Our moderated mediation analysis elaborates how technical elements (i.e., anonymity of self and anonymity of others) influence the we-intention to participate in collective trolling via individual-based social elements (i.e., perceived online disinhibition and social identity), with an environment-based social element (i.e., the absence of capable guardianship) as a boundary condition. We contribute to research by explaining collective trolling in virtual communities from the group-referent intentional action perspective and sociotechnical perspective. We also offer practical insights into ways to combat collective trolling in virtual communities