Visualizing Institutional Logics in Sociomaterial Practices

This paper aims to deepen our understanding of how sociomaterial practices influence and are influenced by competing institutional logics, by combining a sociomaterial lens with the institutional logics perspective. We present findings from an interpretive, longitudinal case study of the emergency surgical ward of a Nordic University Hospital. By focusing our analysis on how affordances and agency emerge through the implementation, use and development of digital and physical visualization boards, we show how these artifacts constitute an integral part of the operational staff’s sensemaking of a new institutional logic. We make two contributions. Firstly, we show how the way visualization artifacts shape individual focus of attention can facilitate integration of a new institutional logic in operational practices. Secondly, we show how the perceived affordances of a technology are created from the experience of using several different technologies and how the rejection of one technology simultaneously can constitute another

Social Media in Practice: How Configurations of Affordances Change Business Practices

This paper aims to explain how configurations of affordances of social media and mobile technologies change and shape business practices. The study draws upon the concept of affordances and the more recent perspectives around it that emphasises the practice lens. The concept of affordances has been used to explain the entanglement of the social and the material. However, the recent theoretical works around the concept suggest that the study of affordances should go beyond the affordances of a particular technology in a specific situated context. In this regard, this paper focuses on the configurations of affordances based on a framework proposed by Lindberg and Lyytinen (2013). The findings based on ethnographic and netographic observations, in this stage of the research, suggest that the ‘organisation domain’ plays an important role in how the ‘infrastructure domain’ puts into practice as the community of businesses shape their social media practices

Modular Change in Platform Ecosystems and Routine Mirroring in Organizations

Organizational routines involve modular digital technologies that are part of larger platform ecosystems that often transcend organizational boundaries. Change in organizational routines is thus interwoven with innovation and associated change in digital platforms. To get at this “embedded” routine change, we use the concept of modular operators to conceptualize how changes to digital technologies in platform ecosystems are mirrored in changes in the organizational routines in which these technologies are implicated. We distinguish between enabling and constraining impacts and develop a set of propositions to move towards a theory of “routine mirroring.” We use the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as a base example

The Perceived Impact of the Agile Development and Project Management Method Scrum on Process Transparency in Information Systems Development

This paper contributes to research on information systems development (ISD) with a case study that demonstrates the positive impact of the agile development and project management method Scrum on process transparency in ISD projects. It is part of a project for which we developed a framework comprising of the six concepts productivity, quality, team leadership, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and process transparency for investigating the impact of Scrum. It provides operationalizations of the latter concept through five identified indicators. Despite the fact that the case unit had challenges, the indicators identified the areas where it managed to exploit the potential of Scrum with regard to increasing process transparency. The research results are related to earlier findings concerning the other concepts. They are discussed both with regard to the existing Scrum literature as well as to complex adaptive systems (CAS) - a foundation for ISD and agile development

Reconfiguring Early Childhood Education and Care

Part 1: IS/IT Implementation and AppropriationInternational audienceExisting studies of IT within early childhood education and care settings are scant, and those that do exist traditionally utilise a Cartesian worldview where humans and IT are separate self-sufficient entities with properties. In this worldview, change is attributed to either the technological or the human entity, leading to limited, either techno-centric or human-centred accounts of IT implementation and use. We reframe the activities in an early childhood organisation as a process of appropriation, and utilise a sociomaterial theory of technology appropriation alternative to the Cartesian worldview. We contribute a rich account of the changes that occur to the practices, the educators, and the technology itself during the appropriation process and demonstrate the theory’s usefulness as an analytical tool for providing a deeper understanding of how early childhood educators appropriate a new technology into their practices in a sociomaterial, non-dualistic way

Social Media, Institutional Innovation and Affordances: The Case of Free Lunch for Children in China

This paper presents an interpretivist case study of an NGO innovation in China based on the Chinese twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo. We investigate the performativity of social media in generating innovative sociomaterial practices of an NGO campaign, embedded in a context where civil society is under-developed and politically restricted. We propose a situated perspective of technological affordances, and through the collective action model, explicitly take into account the enactment of, and potential changes to, institutional arrangements. Such an approach moves beyond the individual level of analysis both in ICT affordance studies and the institutional entrepreneurship, and considers technological affordances as relational to human agency as well as institutional constraints and opportunities. The paper generates theoretical and practical implications in understanding the role of social media in social transformation

Social media enabled interactions in healthcare: Towards a taxonomy

Healthcare users and providers increasingly utilize social media to interact with one another. For a future understanding of when and how these interactions supplement or replace offline doctor-patient interactions, it is essential to understand who interacts, about what, and how these interactions can be categorized in a taxonomy. We draw on affordance theory and employ a mixed-methods approach to study social media interactions among healthcare users and providers. We first engage in qualitative content analysis, which is followed by cluster analysis. We identify five archetypal interactions and categorize these in a taxonomy that adds to current literature on how social media is utilized in the healthcare context. We also provide a clear and systematic overview of the interactions in different social media categories that can stimulate future research regarding doctor-patient interactions. Furthermore, we identify a new and distinct type of social media enabled interaction in healthcare, namely lifestyle support, focusing on prevention

Persistent Paradoxes in Pluralistic Organizations: A Case Study of Continued Use of Shadow-IT in a French Hospital

In times when employees increasingly use private IS in their workplaces, organizations need to bring into balance use of authorized with non-authorized systems. We entered the field with the aim to understand how this is possible but ended up seeing a paradox: Doctors in a French hospital continued to use WhatsApp and other technologies to share sensitive patient data and management let them proceed despite the fact that this practice violated the law and numerous organizational policies. Using grounded theory methodology, we increasingly understood that the underlying problem was one where over-arching institutional logics informed agency of different groups within the organization whose pragmatic decisions to go about their work let the paradox that we saw persist. We thus build theory around why paradoxes persist in organizations and contribute to research on paradoxes and institutional logics, respectively

Bridging the Distance: The Agencement of Complex Affordances on Social Media Platforms

This research focuses on the actualization of technological affordances in complex technological environments, such as social media, where in addition to human and material agents, algorithmic agents also proliferate. Unlike material agents, algorithmic agents can act in the absence of proximal instigation by human agents, and can influence the actions of other agents distanced in space and time. By borrowing from actor-network theory, this paper foregrounds the role of algorithmic agents in the actualization of complex affordances by advertisers on a social media platform. It is illustrated that a complex affordance is actualized through an agencement, that is, a collective enactment of heterogeneous agencies. Through such an enactment, human agents are able to act at a distance too. This research highlights that in addition to material features of the user-interface, the underlying algorithms of a complex technology also partake in the actualization of affordances

Enacting Accountability in IS Research after the Sociomaterial Turn(ing)

Sociomateriality represents an emergent philosophical stance that instantiates an ontological turn towards relationality and materiality in information systems (IS) research. As an emergent perspective or way of seeing, sociomateriality has significant implications for researchers and the practices they employ. If we accept that the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions we enact in our research shape the realities we perceive and create, questions around researchers’ accountability for the realities they produce need to be addressed. The sociomaterial turn(ing) in IS challenges our deeply held assumptions about what constitutes reality. What are these challenges, and how are they being addressed in sociomaterial research? And what implications for accountability in IS research more generally does a turn towards relationality and materiality hold? The objectives of this editorial are: (1) to sensitize IS researchers, irrespective of their ontological and epistemological persuasions, to the field’s turn(ing) toward relationality and materiality; (2) to provide insight into the practices of data generation, analysis, and presentation through which this turn(ing) is being enacted in sociomaterial theorizing; and (3) to contemplate the implications of this turn(ing) for the accountability of IS research more generally