iSchools and Social Identity ??? A Social Network Analysis

We analyze the publication co-authorship network of an iSchool faculty community using ???Social Identity Theory??? as the theoretical lens. Initially, we discuss the need for a theoretical framework to analyze and interpret social network data. Then, we find out the patterns in the levels of interaction happening within the faculty community at an inter-group level. We grouped faculty members into different clusters according to several parameters such as their educational backgrounds, affiliations with research centers/labs, and h-indices. We based our analysis on this classification and we try to understand the relationship among social identity, group affiliation and academic collaborations. We conclude with the remarks that one could avoid idiosyncratic ways of interpreting social network data by using a proven theoretical lens like ???Social Identity Theory??

From Method Fragments to Knowledge Units : Towards a Fine-Granular Approach

We argue that a failure to consider real-world artifacts which are involved in day-to-day ‘Information Systems Development’ activities as a key reason which renders approaches like method engineering inadequate to practice. We aim to reduce the abstraction and granularity of “method fragments” by re-envisioning them as ‘knowledge units’. By doing so, we hope to strike the right balance between the ‘fluid’ and the ‘institutional’ domains of knowledge that can be translated into practice with relative ease. We consider real-world ‘project templates’ used in information systems development as exemplars of ‘best practices’ accumulated from the past and develop a platform called ReKon, which consists of ‘fine-grain project template chunks’. We map these ‘knowledge units’ against broad project phases and tasks that potential users can combine as needed. These knowledge units are extracted from more than 1,200 real-world project templates made available for this research project by four leading IT consulting organizations. The paper briefly describes the theoretical foundations of the platform (Method Engineering and SECI Framework), followed by the process used for chunking and codification of the templates, and discusses results of formative evaluation of the ReKon platform. We discuss future directions for ReKon platform that require extending Nonaka and Takeuchi’s combination quadrant within the SECI model

Crowd-based accountability: examining how social media commentary reconfigures organizational accountability

Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations' sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era

Dealing with uncertainties in platform services

Thesis: S.M. in Management Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2015.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 32-34).Platform services - services that are provided to organizations through online platforms - are increasingly being adopted and used within firms. The novelty of these services is generating uncertainties for both providers and customers. As these uncertainties and their consequences are not well understood in the existing literature, our research focused on articulating the nature of these uncertainties and explicating how they are being managed by providers of platform services. We conducted an 18-month field study of a platform service in the enterprise cloud computing industry, and found uncertainties associated with a number of concerns over the platform's privacy, security, flexibility, capacity, responsiveness, and innovativeness, and about the trustworthiness and credibility of the platform provider. We identified five mechanisms that the platform provider employs to manage these concerns - architecting boundaries, enforcing safeguards, segmenting customers, producing trust rhetoric, and articulating trust indicators. The first three mechanisms can be seen to constitute platform work - the work of designing, safeguarding, and keeping the system up and running so as to ensure the reliability of the platform, while the latter two mechanisms constitute trust work - the work of producing and disseminating a trust rhetoric so as to assure customers and prospects of the accountability of the platform provider. We found that both platform and trust work entail practices of materialization that normalize the uncertainties by downplaying certain concerns (privacy, capacity, responsiveness, credibility), while emphasizing others (security, flexibility, innovativeness, trustworthiness). Our findings highlight the enactment of uncertainty management, showing how reliability (of the platform) and accountability (of the platform provider) are performed in an ongoing manner, with important implications for the delivery of platform services to firms.by Arvind Karunakaran.S.M. in Management Researc

In Cloud we Trust? Normalization of Uncertainties in Platform Services

Platform services — services that are provided to organizations through online platforms — are generating significant uncertainties for both the platform-provider and customer organizations, but how these uncertainties are managed and with what governance consequences are not well understood. I conducted an 18-month field study of a platform service in the enterprise cloud computing industry to examine these questions. I describe the dimensions of uncertainties associated with the platform and the platform-provider. I then identify four mechanisms that the platform-provider enacts — controlling through code, performing algorithmic governance, producing trust rhetoric, and establishing trust indicators — to manage the uncertainties. The first two mechanisms constitute platform work, while the latter two, trust work. Together, platform and trust work reconfigure the “arena of uncertainty” through a process of normalization. This study shows how platform-provider firms normalize the dimensions of uncertainties to their advantage, producing significant consequences for platform governance

Examining cross-professional coordination in the wake of technological and institutional change

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This research examines the structures, processes, and mechanisms that facilitate cross-professional coordination during periods of technological and institutional change. My study draws on a 24-month ethnographic study, combined with historical data and quantitative analysis, of 911 emergency management organizations in the United States. In Chapter 2, I focus on the mechanisms to facilitate cross-professional coordination in conditions that are marked by protracted jurisdictional conflicts. My findings articulate the importance of truce structures - an ensemble of truce roles and organizational forms - that are intended to address protracted jurisdictional conflicts among symmetrical professions such as police officers and firefighters. I further find that the coevolution of truce roles and organizational forms resulted in the emergence of a specific truce profession - in this case, that of 911 Public Safety Telecommunicators. The truce profession serves to triage, direct, and channel contested tasks among the conflicting professions without bringing those professions into direct contact with each during the initial stages of coordination when the "definition of the situation" is getting worked out. In Chapter 3, I turn to examining how the truce professionals navigate what I call status-authority asymmetry in order to effectively coordinate with the focal professionals. Conducting within-shift comparisons of coordination encounters between 911 dispatchers and police officers, I identify that the bounded publicization tactic performed via the open radio channel allows dispatchers to generate peer knowledge about individual non-compliance. Through this process, dispatchers navigate the status-authority asymmetry and orchestrate effective cross-professional coordination. My focus in Chapter 4 shifts to examining how truce professionals respond to the public's increased digital scrutiny, and consider the consequences for organizational accountability. My findings suggest that the public's increased use of mobile phones and social media to monitor and report on organizations and their workers can, under some conditions, end up worsening accountability. I unpack the processes that generate this paradox of public accountability, showing how these processes reshape the work of truce professionals and produce a vicious cycle of coordination that worsens organizational accountability. I end with a concluding chapter that discusses the implications of my dissertation for research on cross-professional coordination, accountability, and technological change.by Arvind Karunakaran.Ph. D

Barriers to Collaborative Information Seeking in Organizations

ABSTRACT There has been a growing interest within the information sciences and HCI communities to understand the role of collaboration in facilitating information seeking. This focus had led to the emergence of the research area of collaborative information seeking (CIS). Although researchers are starting to identify various activities and mechanisms that underlie CIS, we know very little about the barriers to CIS. In this study, we used Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to gather data from 307 participants to understand the barriers to CIS in organizations. Through our data analysis, we identified a variety of barriers that hinder CIS. These barriers fell under four broad categoriesorganizational, technical, individual, and team. These barriers also had a strong temporal component which we highlight in the discussion. From these findings, we discuss some design implications for information retrieval systems

Anchored Inferential Learning:Platform-Specific Uncertainty, Venture Capital Investments by the Platform Owner, and the Impact on Complementors

Platform owners increasingly make corporate venture capital investments in complementors (e.g., app developers) to stimulate value creation, a practice we refer to as platform venture capital (PVC). Interested in the implications of PVC for other complementors, we investigate how PVC investments affect their product introduction and withdrawal decisions. Given that complementors confront platform-specific uncertainty concerning the strategic directions of the platform, which is asymmetrically set by the platform owner, we theorize that complementors leverage PVC investments as devices for anchored inferential learning. That is, because PVC investments are costly, visible, and consequential, complementors will infer them as credible indicators of the platform’s future focus. Consequently, we predict that complementors will seek out, and stick around, product categories of PVC investees. We further anticipate that these inclinations are weaker for complementors with greater platform ecosystem experience that place more emphasis on knowledge acquired via experiential learning, and stronger for complementors that center their business exclusively on the platform and therefore rely strongly on PVC to navigate platform-specific uncertainty. We provide quantitative evidence from the context of the Salesforce platform. Moreover, we draw on qualitative data from this context to unpack why complementors interpret PVC investments as a credible signal concerning the strategic direction of the platform. We highlight that complementors consider PVC as a form of middle-ground platform governance, where the platform owner is perceived as being committed to stimulating value creation in the platform ecosystem, while also inducing complementors to commit their efforts to the platform ecosystem.</p