Future imperfect: How AI developers imagine the future

This study questions how AI developers consider the potential consequences of their work. It proposes an imagined futures perspective to understand how AI developers imagine the futures associated with AI. It examines qualitatively the case of some AI developers and their work and find that they consider the future consequences of the AI they participate in developing as tangential – i.e., loosely connected to what they do - or integral – i.e., closely associated with what they do - to their work. These imaginations of the future are in tension, prompting some AI developers to work at connecting them as they adjust how they view the future and their work. This study reveals how AI development relies upon distinctive imaginations of the future, illuminates how practitioners engage speculatively with the future, and explains the importance for IT development of developers’ answers to what their work may do in the future

A Dual Methodology to Address Central Challenges in IS Research

This paper makes the case for the application of the dual methodology in the IS field. Leonard-Barton (1988) has initially used this design to investigate innovation processes. A research project devoted to organizational impacts of intranet practices provides an illustration of the appeal of the method in our discipline. The dual methodology combines multiple - retrospective – broad case studies and a single – processual – fine-grained one. Its advantages come from the combination of the two kinds of cases whose strengths and weaknesses mutually compensate. They also derive from synergies between multiple and single cases which are valuable to build a dialog between empirical evidence and literature review. The dual methodology seems especially suitable to address three core challenges of the IS field. First, it provides both broad and deep observations. Second, it helps students to reintroduce ITs and organizations in their investigations. Researchers take in consideration the specificities of technological artifacts under scrutiny while not overlooking central aspects of collective action. Third, rigor and relevance may be balanced. Criteria of rigor may be achieved thanks to the two kinds of cases. Simultaneously, the method requires frequent access to diverse fields. Constant back-and-forth between data collection and analysis and numerous reports to academic as well as managerial audiences prove invaluable to establish rigorous and relevant findings

Folding and unfolding : balancing openness and transparency in open source communities

Open source communities rely on the espoused premise of complete openness and transparency of source code and development process. Yet, openness and transparency at times need to be balanced out with moments of less open and transparent work. Through our detailed study of Linux Kernel development we build a theory that explains that transparency and openness are nuanced and changing qualities that certain developers manage as they use multiple digital technologies and create, in moments of needs, more opaque and closed digital spaces of work. We refer to these spaces as digital folds. Our paper contributes to extant literature: by providing a process theory of how transparency and openness are balanced with opacity and closure in open source communities according to the needs of the development work; by conceptualizing the nature of digital folds and their role in providing quiet spaces of work: and, by articulating how the process of digital folding and unfolding is made far more possible by select elite actors’ navigating the line between the pragmatics of coding and the accepted ideology of openness and transparency

Responding to the (almost) unknown: Social representations and corporate policies of social media

End-user driven technologies, such as social media, have dramatically changed organizations’ innovation processes. In these new contexts, organizational decision makers have to contend with a de facto adoption of new technologies that they have yet to understand fully. In order to contribute to the understanding of these new contexts and their implications for organizations and their decision makers, this paper examines the following question: How do organizations come to comprehend and react to end-user driven technologies? Conceptually based on social representations theory, this paper underscores how organizational decision-makers develop common sense knowledge of end-user driven technologies and how they consequently endorse responses in the form of dedicated policies that reflect this knowledge. This theoretical framework helps us interpret the empirical analysis of 25 corporate social media policies. The paper shows that, in developing their understanding of social media, so far organizational decision-makers have mostly associated them with what was already familiar to them and have devised policies that have reflected this mostly conservative understanding of the new technologies. Implications of this research include a better understanding of the foundation of the duality between mindful and mindless innovations in the context

New Actors and New Media in Technology Discourse: An Investigation of Tech Blogging

Discourse plays an important role in innovation and the diffusion of technology. Various types of actors act as knowledge entrepreneurs to collectively build this discourse. This paper examines the emergence of a new type of actor, tech bloggers, within technology discourse communities. Tech bloggers are authors of web logs focused on developments with new technologies. We examine tech bloggers’ entries collected by a technology news aggregator website, Techmeme. Our analysis demonstrates how tech bloggers through specific discursive practices position themselves as knowledge entrepreneurs within the blogging discourse community and within the wider discourse on technology and innovation. As they attempt to establish claims to legitimacy and influence in this discourse, individual bloggers contribute to the construction of tech bloggers as a collective actor and challenge the positions of established actors. We consider implications for field-level changes and outline areas for further research on technology discourse, new media, and knowledge entrepreneurship

Speaking as one, but not speaking up : dealing with new moral taint in an occupational online community

This paper builds a process theory of how participants in an online community deal with a new identity threat. Based upon the in-depth, interpretive case study of an online community of retail bankers, it develops a grounded theory that reveals that participants in an online community deal with new taint by protecting their occupation's identity but not by attempting to repair its external image. In the investigated community, reactions progressed from rejecting the taint to distancing from it and, finally, resigning to it. Overall, the dynamics of an occupational online community reveal that the objective of protecting the existing identity of its members supersede that of taking a more proactive stance to address the identity threat and attempt to influence new regulations affecting the occupation

Intranets et entreprises : technologie, apprentissages et organisation de la cohérence

Intranets are paradoxically both inescapable and still little known. Following the non deterministic, processual and multi-leveled emergent perspective on the relationships between ICT and organization, this paper presents the first results of 12 case studies of French firms that have implemented intranets. Analyses have shown that the implementation and evolution of intranets correspond to a succession of shared and specific tendencies, to gradual and radical evolutions and to local and general learning processes. This diversity suggests that intranets should not be reduced to mere technology. Their traditional definition of internet standards used in the internal firm network is therefore inadequate. The study of intranets requires to take into account numerous structuration processes which are more linked to the representations of the technology than to the technology itself. This broadened perspective helps to understand the intranets' occasions for organizing as well as a new organizational coherence, thanks to the surpassing of three major tensions : local / central levels, action / communication, deliberate / emergent changes.Les intranets sont aujourd'hui à la fois incontournables et peu connus. Cette communication, qui s'inscrit dans la perspective non déterministe, processuelle et multiniveau de la conception de l'émergence des relations entre TIC et organisations, présente les premiers résultats de 12 études de cas d'entreprises ayant mis en place des intranets. Les analyses réalisées montrent que l'implantation et la structuration des intranets se caractérisent par la possibilité d'articuler des développements spécifiques autour de tendances communes qui donnent lieu, selon les cas, à des évolutions progressives ou radicales et s'appuient sur des apprentissages locaux et globaux. La diversité substantielle des configurations observées indique que la caractérisation organisationnelle des intranets ne se réduit pas à leur simple définition technologique. En fait, l'étude des intranets nécessite la mise en évidence de multiples processus de structuration, davantage liés aux représentations de la technologie qu'à la technologie elle même. C'est dans cette perspective élargie que les occasions d'organisation des intranets peuvent être comprises et la nouvelle cohérence de l'organisation envisagée, par le dépassement de trois tensions majeures : le local / le central, l'action / la communication, l'intentionnel / l'émergent

Building Theory using Methodological Pluralism in Computational Theory Construction

We propose some guidelines to triangulate qualitative data analysis by extending the computational theory construction approach. Our approach addresses the challenge of methodological pluralism, which combines disparate computational techniques, methods, and lexicons (Miranda et al., 2022). Although previous literature has identified the use of mixed methods in information systems (IS) research (Reis et al., 2022), support of complementary inferences and their validation can be improved. Thus, we propose an iterative process to discover frames (Miranda et al., 2022) in qualitative data, such as social media, transcripts, and articles. We will elucidate the following aspects of computational theory construction research with methodological pluralism: a) Method design and fit, b) Data sampling and wrangling strategy, c) Pattern recognition and convergence, d) Theoretical inferences. First, we examine the distinctions in employing a methodologically plural approach with qualitative methods. The methodologically plural approach leverages multiple techniques and methods to build theory and provides a multi-level picture for thorough and richer insights. The method design explores the appropriate methodological approaches and lexicons from literature support that suits the data. We provide some guidelines on how researchers can adapt multiple methods in the subsequent analysis phases. Research with temporal analysis needs to construct a timeline or episodic periods, such as, for specific events in a climate movement (e.g., Lee and Bharati, 2022; Vaast et al., 2017). The episodic periods are important to understand the research context, data nuances, and overall focal phenomenon. The qualitative data is analyzed in an automated and systematic approach, as adapted from previous IS research methodologies, such as natural language processing (NLP). Wrangling and cleaning the data appropriately for each method is an important preprocessing phase and a major challenge. In qualitative data analysis, handling noise reduction involves some automated methods. We plan to illustrate how multiple qualitative analysis techniques, such as NLP, semantic network analysis (SNA), and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), can be leveraged for diachronic analysis in this process. The analyses assist in the discovery of key topics with topic modeling or word to word co-occurrences graphs with SNA. Using an iterative approach, a comprehensive convergence of the categorization needs to be developed during the iterative analysis phases that involve multiple scholars as well as literature support. Researchers can perform model calculations or apply further statistical analysis on their data. The approach includes robustness and validation checks when analyzing new or existing constructs for contextual understanding of patterns within the data. Lastly, theoretical inferences can be discerned from the data analysis phases

Apparatuses of Knowledge Delivery to Patients: The Role of Social Media in Vaccine Controversies

The practice of knowledge delivery to patients has long been performed by healthcare professionals, who were seen as trustable sources of healthcare knowledge. However, healthcare knowledge is now being distributed widely online and in particular on social media, by numerous individuals who are sharing a mixture of scientific/non-scientific information grounded in personal perspectives and experiences. In the shift to healthcare knowledge delivery on social media, traditional practices of knowledge delivery to patients are challenged. This study draws on material-discursive practices, known as apparatuses, to examine two notable material-discursive practices in vaccine administration. This research is expected to make two contributions to the IS literature. First, it aims to identify significant differences in the two knowledge delivery practices and their outcomes. Second, it aims to investigate the ongoing interaction and tension between traditional and new knowledge delivery approaches. We provide preliminary insights and a roadmap for further developing this research