Understanding the BlackBerry : negotiating connectivity in different organizational worlds

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-234).This research challenges the popular conception that BlackBerry use is solely an individual phenomenon. Email is social. People use and experience the potential for wireless email in terms of their occupational identity, daily work practices and organizational context. I collected longitudinal qualitative data from the in-house legal counsel and U.S. mobile sales in a mid-sized footwear and apparel company to understand the process through which people experience wireless email over time. I examined how each group engaged with the BlackBerry from its introduction to over three years of use. My inductive study reveals how initial technological frames inform, but do not determine, emerging patterns of BlackBerry use and how such frames can shift dramatically over time. Further, I trace how individual experience evolves into shared norms that carry significant personal consequences for group members. I unpack how BlackBerry users in the legal team shaped the potential for constant access into a form of social constraint, while BlackBerry users the sales force embraced expanded access to email as enabling increased autonomy and personal time. This work contributes to current research on communication in the digital age by highlighting key dimensions such as anticipated expectations of clients, peers and superiors, as well as the alignment between occupational identity and constant availability, that influence how users take up the potential for ubiquitous email. This research suggests a number of implications for the evolution of work practices, temporal structures, and ramifications of constant connectivity in the modern workplace.by Melissa A. Mazmanian.Ph.D

Emerging Insights on Building Infrastructure for Data-Driven Transparency and Accountability of Organizations

Diverse domains including education, healthcare, and business are attempting to harness IT and data science to govern individual and organizational performance. Largely centered on performance measurement, data-driven accountability tools are used to engineer work processes according to best practices and transfer policy to practice through tying quantitative outcomes to consequential valuation schemes. In this early work, we present preliminary insights from a multi-sited ethnography of ongoing development of infrastructure for data science being developed for purposes of organizational accountability in the healthcare. The aim is to describe key concerns in the design of ‘infrastructure for accountability’ (consisting of the array IT, organizations, organizational relationships, standards, and roles being developed to undergird performance measurement). Some initial considerations for design of infrastructure for accountability include dual functions of the data, communication hierarchy, emergent seams, and bridging installed bases and communities of practice. This research has implications for researchers, designers, and managers of infrastructure for accountability, as well contributing ethnographic empirical insights into social and organizational implications of creating the data-driven world.ye

From interaction to performance with public displays

Abstract Interacting with public displays involves more than what happens between individuals and the system; it also concerns how people experience others around and through those displays. In this paper, we use ''performance'' as an analytical lens for understanding experiences with a public display called rhythIMs and explore how displays shift social interaction through their mediation. By performance, we refer to a situation in which people are on display and orient themselves toward an audience that may be co-located, imagined, or virtual. To understand interaction with public displays, we use two related notions of collectives-audiences and groups-to highlight the ways in which people orient to each other through public displays. Drawing examples from rhythIMs, a public display that shows patterns of instant messaging and physical presence, we demonstrate that there can be multiple, heterogeneous audiences and show how people experience these different types of collectives in various ways. By taking a performance perspective, we are able to understand how audiences that were not physically co-present with participants still influenced participants' interpretations and interactions with rhythIMs. This extension of the traditional notion of audience illuminates the roles audiences can play in a performance

Global chemical effects of the microbiome include new bile-acid conjugations

A mosaic of cross-phylum chemical interactions occurs between all metazoans and their microbiomes. A number of molecular families that are known to be produced by the microbiome have a marked effect on the balance between health and disease. Considering the diversity of the human microbiome (which numbers over 40,000 operational taxonomic units), the effect of the microbiome on the chemistry of an entire animal remains underexplored. Here we use mass spectrometry informatics and data visualization approaches to provide an assessment of the effects of the microbiome on the chemistry of an entire mammal by comparing metabolomics data from germ-free and specific-pathogen-free mice. We found that the microbiota affects the chemistry of all organs. This included the amino acid conjugations of host bile acids that were used to produce phenylalanocholic acid, tyrosocholic acid and leucocholic acid, which have not previously been characterized despite extensive research on bile-acid chemistry. These bile-acid conjugates were also found in humans, and were enriched in patients with inflammatory bowel disease or cystic fibrosis. These compounds agonized the farnesoid X receptor in vitro, and mice gavaged with the compounds showed reduced expression of bile-acid synthesis genes in vivo. Further studies are required to confirm whether these compounds have a physiological role in the host, and whether they contribute to gut diseases that are associated with microbiome dysbiosis

ICT4S 2029: What Will Be The Systems Supporting Sustainability in 15 Years

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to discuss them is rarely given in a research context. Imagine how civilization will have changed in 15 years. What is your vision for systems that will be supporting sustainability in that time Which transformational changes will have occurred in the mean time that allow for these systems Is ICT even the right tool or does it contradict sustainability by making our world ever more complex How can we make systems and our societies more sustainable and resilient by ICT4S This paper presents a compilation of fictional abstracts for inspiration and discussion, and provides means to stimulate discussion on future research and contributes to ICT4S community building

Media as Material: Information Representations as Material Foundations for Organizational Practice

Abstract: Through a confluence of different disciplinary interests and trajectories, questions of the materiality of digital media and information technologies have recently come into relief. There are several different strains of work under this broad umbrella and it is valuable to distinguish between the varied concerns. This paper has two objectives. First we begin by teasing apart and describing five related ways to conceptualize the materiality of digital goods. Our goal in this is to provide a typology for delineating current streams of research and language for analysis. Second, we unpack one of these conceptions in terms of socio-technical systems and organizational practices. Specifically, we analyze the role of digitization and simulation, or the materiality of digital representation, in order to shed light on how social and organizational systems respond to, create practices around, and develop delineating logics about digitally rendered data. An Anecdote One day, in the period when I (Dourish) was working as computer system manager for a university research center, a data tape arrived from the United States. It contained

Dynamic Reconfiguration in Planetary Exploration: A Sociomaterial Ethnography

In taking into account the ways in which material and social realms are constitutively entangled within organizations, it is rhetorically tempting to say that technologies and social structures reconfigure each other. But what does it mean to reconfigure? How does one figure the other and how do we fully embrace a mutually constitutive relationship when examining fluid relations? This paper delves into these questions by exploring how physical, social, material, technological, and organizational arrangements dynamically reconfigure each other in the duration of organizational practice. Using the venue of space exploration, we present three empirical examples from an ethnographic engagement with a NASA mission orbiting an outer planet in the solar system to examine various configurations and sociomaterial relations. In this endeavor, we suggest that theoretical and empirical traction can be gained by focusing attention on the dynamic reconfigurations between social and material realms. In so doing, we call attention to the ways in which current sociomaterial perspectives have difficulty articulating the shifting, figural, asymmetric and dynamic negotiations between people, social structures, information technologies, and representational objects. This paper contributes to current discussions of sociomaterial relations in information systems research by presenting an empirical treatment of entangled and shifting reconfigurations and providing language for engaging with this perspective

The Autonomy Paradox: The Implications of Mobile Email Devices for Knowledge Professionals

Our research examines how knowledge professionals use mobile email devices to get their work done and the implications of such use for their autonomy to control the location, timing, and performance of work. We found that knowledge professionals using mobile email devices to manage their communication were enacting a norm of continual connectivity and accessibility that produced a number of contradictory outcomes. Although individual use of mobile email devices offered these professionals flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions in the short term, it also intensified collective expectations of their availability, escalating their engagement and thus reducing their ability to disconnect from work. Choosing to use their mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime—actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy—the professionals were ending up using it everywhere/all the time, thus diminishing their autonomy in practice. This autonomy paradox reflected professionals’ ongoing navigation of the tension between their interests in personal autonomy on the one hand and their professional commitment to colleagues and clients on the other. We further found that this dynamic has important unintended consequences—reaffirming and challenging workers’ sense of themselves as autonomous and responsible professionals while also collectively shifting the norms of how work is and should be performed in the contemporary workplace.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-0085725