Displaced but not replaced: the impact of e-learning on academic identities in higher education.

Challenges facing universities are leading many to implement institutional strategies to incorporate e-learning rather than leaving its adoption up to enthusiastic individuals. Although there is growing understanding about the impact of e-learning on the student experience, there is less understanding of academics’ perceptions of e-learning and its impact on their identities. This paper explores the changing nature of academic identities revealed through case study research into the implementation of e-learning at one UK university. By providing insight into the lived experiences of academics in a university in which technology is not only transforming access to knowledge but also influencing the balance of power between academic and student in knowledge production and use, it is suggested that academics may experience a jolt to their ‘trajectory of self’ when engaging with e-learning. The potential for e-learning to prompt loss of teacher presence and displacement as knowledge expert may appear to undermine the ontological security of their academic identity

Managing to lead in private enterprise in China: Work values, demography and the development of trust

Previous work on trust has focused on employee trust in management. However, issues of how leaders develop trust in their followers in leader-member exchange (LMX) are under-explored. Based on theories of leader-member exchange, attribution and industrial convergence, this study investigates how the work values of leaders influence the development of their trust in followers and how this is moderated by demographic factors. A survey of 219 leaders was conducted in privately owned enterprises in China. The findings suggest that the work value of centralization is negatively related to leader trust in follower predictability. Group orientation and formalization are positively related to the development of trust in follower good faith. Moreover, age and level of formal education are found to moderate significantly the relationships between leader work values and development of their trust in followers within the context of China. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

The adoption and use of collaboration information technologies: International comparisons

Information technology (IT) applications to support group decision processes have been of considerable interest over the years. With the emergence of virtual team arrangements and the advent of emerging information and networking technologies, an increasing amount of attention is now being aimed at understanding collaboration among group members, as they make decisions to accomplish tasks. Effective and efficient collaboration is critical from a decision quality and decision timeliness standpoint. Commonly known as collaborative information technologies (CITs), many technology solutions have the capability to enhance collaboration and facilitate group decisions in task accomplishment by enabling better communication, sharing of information, ideas, expertise and evaluating alternatives, irrespective of time and distance barriers. Many studies have investigated such individual CIT solutions in different regional settings. However, despite the fact that no single medium can support collaboration in different types of tasks, there is a scarcity of research investigating the adoption and use of mutiple CIT options across regions. This paper builds upon innovation diffusion theory and tests a research model to validate five antecedents of collective adoption and use of seven CITs in the US, Australia, and Hong Kong. Sub-sample analyses of data collected from 344 organizations in these three regions suggest that not only do adoption and use patterns of some CIT solutions vary across regions but so do the antecedents that explain their proliferation. Implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers

Research in Information Systems: A Study of Diversity and Inter-Disciplinary Discourse in the AIS Basket Journals between 1995 and 2011

The paper investigates how Information Systems (IS) has emerged as the product of interdisciplinary discourses. The research aim in this study is to better understand diversity in IS research, and the extent to which the diversity of discourse expanded and contracted from 1995 to 2011. Methodologically, we apply a combined citations/co-citations analysis based on the eight Association for Information Systems (AIS) basket journals and the 22 subject-field classification framework provided by the Association of Business Schools (ABS). Our findings suggest that IS is in a state of continuous interaction and competition with other disciplines. General Management was reduced from a dominant position as a reference discipline in IS at the expense of a growing variety of other discourses including Business Strategy, Marketing, and Ethics and Governance among others. Over time, IS as a field moved from the periphery to a central position during its discursive formation. This supports the notion of IS as a fluid discipline dynamically embracing a diverse range of adjacent reference disciplines, whilst keeping a degree of continuing interaction with them. Understanding where IS is currently at allows us to better understand and propose fruitful avenues for its development in both academia and practice