Seeking Legitimation for an Information System: A Preliminary Process Model

This research throws light on to the role of social issues in developing a successful information system. In a case study of a community health organization, we describe how IT management carried out an integrated set of actions over a two-year period to obtain legitimation for an Intranet system from its eventual stakeholders. We suggest that, in general, a failure to obtain such legitimation may be a factor in systems failure. We use Structuration Theory and Activity Theory to develop a Legitimation Activity Model, which we present as a generalised set of activities that may be applied to other settings when legitimation is sought for an information system

EXPLORING THE LEGITIMATION SEEKING ACTIVITIES IN AN INFORMATION SYSTEM PROJECT

Introducing new Information Systems (IS) to organizations often brings changes to the status quo and IS managers need to gain acceptance and support from stakeholders. Legitimation is an abstraction of formal and informal approval of stakeholders toward organizational activities. Our research motivation is to demonstrate that a process-based understanding of legitimation-seeking activities is important for understanding how IS are legitimated in organizations, and to suggest that the area of legitimation presents a potentially valuable framework for IS research by drawing together previous studies concerning problems such as acceptance and resistance, user involvement and participation. We investigate the legitimation seeking process in an IS project at a large Chinese organization, employing a qualitative approach and a case study method. Findings from our case study show that achieving legitimation is important in successfully developing and implementing IS. This paper suggests that activities for gaining, maintaining and repairing legitimation should be considered and carried out in an integrated way, and a new Integrated Legitimation Activity Model (ILAM) is proposed. The paper also discusses the two different legitimation seeking approaches (conformity and manipulation) adopted by the project team, and analyses factors that influenced the project team’s choice of these approaches. Limitations and directions for further research are discussed

The legitimation-seeking process in information systems development

We investigate the importance of legitimation-seeking in IS development by describing two related projects in the Central Hospital, Bangkok. In the second project, begun immediately after the first, there were major improvements in legitimation-seeking activities and the implemented IS was a success, providing strong evidence that stakeholders perceived a direct link between legitimation failure and project failure. Our results provide insights into legitimation-seeking failure and the multiple legitimation strategies used to achieve pragmatic, moral and cognitive types of legitimacy. We generalize our results to an integrated framework of the legitimation process as well as a preliminary model of IS legitimation-seeking failure involving the mum and deaf effects. We suggest that this framework may be generalized to settings which share similar empirical circumstances

A Qualitative Approach to Investigating the Behavioral Definitions of the Four Paradigm Theory of Information Systems Development

Hirschheim, Klein and Lyytinen introduced the four-paradigm theory of information systems development (ISD) as a significant attempt to systematise developer assumptions. The theory perspective is that developers hold key assumptions that may be grouped together and classified into paradigms, and that these paradigms influence their ISD behaviour. The aims of the research described here are theory exploration and explanation in case studies concerning the ISD process in three public National Health Service (NHS) institutions in the north of England. We focus on the behavioral rather than the cognitive (assumptions) aspect of the theory. Our conclusions are, firstly, that qualitative theory explanation is desirable because we need to test theory in practice to show its applicability to wider settings. A rigorous qualitative, interpretive method, paying attention to openness and validity, can satisfactorily undertake such theory explanation; such research can help our IS community to gain wider credibility, authority and acceptance. Secondly, with regard to the four-paradigm theory, its predictions were largely met, as the paradigms were capable of classifying developer behaviour and developers had a dominant paradigm, namely functionalism. We found the theory to be very relevant to the investigation of current IS issues, and we introduce the concept of developer paradigmatic inconsistency

Keeping Chance in Its Place: The Socio-Legal Regulation of Gambling

In the winter of 2010, driving through a blizzard to a research interview outside of Ottawa, one of the co-editors of this special issue—Kate Bedford—slid and spun off the road in her rental car. The interviewee—an 80-year-old man who organized a small weekly bingo game—helped dig her out. Sitting in the community centre with him afterwards, thawing, there was ample opportunity for Bedford to reflect on the diverse meanings attached to gambling and the complex ways in which it is regulated. The interviewee talked about ‘use of proceeds’ forms and validating expenses payments for volunteers, describing a gambling landscape that seemed a long way from dominant law and policy conversations. While commentators on the global financial crisis were drawing repeated analogies to casinos and poker, the less glamourous world of small-town bingo seemed to have slipped from view. This special issue is, in part, an effort to bring it back. In 2013, inspired by research in Ontario, Bedford began work on a large, international research grant into gambling regulation. Rather than focusing on relatively well-researched forms of gambling, such as casinos, the project centred bingo as a distinctively under-studied gambling sector. The second co-editor, Donal Casey, joined the initiative in 2015, believing that online gambling could provide a crucial new lens for his research into European Union (“EU”) law and regulation. As part of the research project, Bedford, Casey, and others convened a conference at the University of Kent in 2016 on socio-legal approaches to gambling, where scholars from nine countries and a number of disciplines presented their research. The seven papers that we have collected in this special issue are drawn from that conference, including one from our third co-editor, Alexandra Flynn. In this Introduction to the collection, we lay out what these papers offer to the field of gambling research and beyond. To begin, we identify the scholarly approaches to gambling upon which we wish to build (Part I). Then, we specify three contributions we seek to make through our socio-legal endeavors. First, this collection seeks to foreground the diverse, vernacular forms and places of play that are sometimes overlooked in gambling scholarship (Part II). Second, the papers take a distinctive pluralist approach that recognizes the multi-layered character of gambling regulation (Part III). Third, and finally, the interdisciplinary and methodologically-diverse nature of this special issue allows the papers, alongside the contributions in the Voices and Perspectives section, to speak to a wide range of debates within and outside academia (Part IV)

Evaluating the computer-assisted HIV/AIDS education intervention implemented in schools in Uganda

Over 29 years into the epidemic, fighting HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), the virus that causes AIDS (Acquired, Immune, Deficiency, Syndrome) continues to be a global concern. School-based computer-assisted HIV/AIDS interventions can provide innovative ways of preventing HIV among young people from diverse backgrounds in Africa. However, questions of technological, social and organisational readiness cannot be overlooked. This is because of: (1) being health interventions implemented in educational centres; (2) limited technological facilities and skills; (3) the prevailing norms that associate young people's sex education with sex experimentation. Despite these concerns, there are significantly few studies evaluating school-based computer-assisted HIV/AIDS interventions in developing countries. In addition, the commonly used health promotion theories have limited application in HIV prevention. These theories tend to lack sufficient attention to contextual mediators that influence implementation and impacts of HIV interventions.This research addresses some of these gaps by evaluating the implementation and the impacts of a computer-assisted HIV/AIDS intervention, known as the World Starts With Me (WSWM), which is implemented in schools in Uganda. To overcome some of the criticisms voiced above, this research employed mixed quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct three investigations. Investigation 1 is a quantitative controlled before-after intervention study that assessed the level of significance of the impacts of the WSWM intervention on in-school young people. Investigation 2 is a qualitative cross-case analysis study that explored in-depth why the WSWM intervention implementation was completed in one school but abandoned in another. Investigation 3 is a qualitative study that assessed in-depth the impacts and the computer-mediated benefits of the WSWM intervention on out-of-school young people. Overall, this research involved 584 quantitative questionnaires answered by 292 participants, 53 interviewees and 2 focus group discussions comprising of 50 participants.Findings indicate that: (1) the intervention significantly improved the in-school young people's HIV/AIDS knowledge, attitudes self-efficacy, sex abstinence and fidelity, but had no significant impact on condom use. (2) Implementation factors include technological facilities, perceived usefulness, confidence and skills, cultural-religious compatibility, management support, match with routine workflow, and institutional climate, all of which were more favourable in the school that completed the intervention than in the school that abandoned it. (3) The intervention had positive impacts on the out-of-school young people's sexual behaviours, HIV/AIDS knowledge and perception of vulnerability, attitudes and self-efficacy. (4) Contextual mediators such as familial mediators, relationship characteristics, peer influence, gender-biased social norms, economic constraints and religious beliefs influence young people's uptake of HIV preventive measures. (5) Computer-mediated benefits of the intervention include privacy and confidentiality of the otherwise sensitive information, unlimited geographical accessibility, source of the otherwise denied sexuality and HIV/AIDS information, and interactivity and social support.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceCommonwealth Scholarship CommissionGBUnited Kingdo

\u27Unfreezing-Changing-Refreezing\u27 of Actors\u27 Commitment: The Transition from Escalation to De-Escalation of Commitment to Information Technology Projects

Escalation is a common and costly problem among IT projects. Although the potential of de-escalation of commitment to failing courses of action has been much heralded, many such efforts may result in failure due to constituencies biasing facts in the direction of previously accepted beliefs, and therefore, prevent an organization from de-escalating. Here, we adopt Lewin’s change framework to examine the commitment transformation during the transition from escalation to de-escalation of an eprocurement project in a local government organization in UK. Our findings suggest that the entire process of ‘unfreezing-changing-refreezing’ was enacted through the deployment of behaviour disconfirmation, psychological safety creation, and development, alignment and integration of new attitudes and behaviours. The research and practical implications of these findings are explored

Keeping Chance in Its Place: The Socio-Legal Regulation of Gambling

In the winter of 2010, driving through a blizzard to a research interview outside of Ottawa, one of the co-editors of this special issue—Kate Bedford—slid and spun off the road in her rental car. The interviewee—an 80-year-old man who organized a small weekly bingo game—helped dig her out. Sitting in the community centre with him afterwards, thawing, there was ample opportunity for Bedford to reflect on the diverse meanings attached to gambling and the complex ways in which it is regulated. The interviewee talked about ‘use of proceeds’ forms and validating expenses payments for volunteers, describing a gambling landscape that seemed a long way from dominant law and policy conversations. While commentators on the global financial crisis were drawing repeated analogies to casinos and poker, the less glamourous world of small-town bingo seemed to have slipped from view. This special issue is, in part, an effort to bring it back. In 2013, inspired by research in Ontario, Bedford began work on a large, international research grant into gambling regulation. Rather than focusing on relatively well-researched forms of gambling, such as casinos, the project centred bingo as a distinctively under-studied gambling sector. The second co-editor, Donal Casey, joined the initiative in 2015, believing that online gambling could provide a crucial new lens for his research into European Union (“EU”) law and regulation. As part of the research project, Bedford, Casey, and others convened a conference at the University of Kent in 2016 on socio-legal approaches to gambling, where scholars from nine countries and a number of disciplines presented their research. The seven papers that we have collected in this special issue are drawn from that conference, including one from our third co-editor, Alexandra Flynn. In this Introduction to the collection, we lay out what these papers offer to the field of gambling research and beyond. To begin, we identify the scholarly approaches to gambling upon which we wish to build (Part I). Then, we specify three contributions we seek to make through our socio-legal endeavors. First, this collection seeks to foreground the diverse, vernacular forms and places of play that are sometimes overlooked in gambling scholarship (Part II). Second, the papers take a distinctive pluralist approach that recognizes the multi-layered character of gambling regulation (Part III). Third, and finally, the interdisciplinary and methodologically-diverse nature of this special issue allows the papers, alongside the contributions in the Voices and Perspectives section, to speak to a wide range of debates within and outside academia (Part IV)

Escalation and De-Escalation of Commitment to Information Systems Projects: Insights from a Project Evaluation Model

10.1016/j.ejor.2005.07.009European Journal of Operational Research17331139-1160EJOR