Response to “Ideational Influence, Connectedness, and Venue Representation: Making an Assessment of Scholarly Capital”

I respond to Cueller, Takeda, Vidgen & Truex (2016), who proposes three measures of scholarly output: “1) the extent to which other scholars take up the scholar’s work (ideational influence), 2) who the scholar works with (connectedness), and 3) how well the scholar publishes in venues in the scholar’s field (venue representation)” (p. 3). These are not novel and valid measures of research output. Ideational influence is operationalized as counting citations, which improve current practice but is not novel. Connectedness assesses position in a co-authorship network and rewards the cronies of central players without assessing their output. Venue representation involves counting papers in a different basket, which commits an ecological fallacy. Connectedness and venue representation are based on a common misinterpretation of network centrality measures. Adopting either of these measures in practice would distract from actual impact and so be negative for our field

Group Maintenance Behaviors in the Decision-Making Styles of Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

Businesses, universities, and other organizations are increasingly reliant on self-organizing, distributed teams which are enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, inherent geographical, organizational, and social limitations of ICTs challenge the relationships necessary for groups to make effective decisions. Understanding how group maintenance plays out within the context of different styles of decision making may provide insight into social tactics undertaken in such teams. Group maintenance is defined as discretionary, relation-building behavior that enables group members to trust and cooperate with one another more easily [1]. Decision style refers to the extent to which group decision making involves a broad contribution from group members other than leaders. It may range from the most autocratic style where a decision is made by one or a few individuals, to truly collaborative where every member has the opportunity to affect the decision. This study examines group maintenance within decision-making behaviors of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams as examples of distributed teams. Most FLOSS software is developed by such teams that are both dynamic and self-organizing, comprised of professionals, users, and other volunteers working in a loosely coupled manner [2-4]. These teams are nearly entirely virtual in that developers contribute from around the world, meet face-to-face infrequently (if at all), and coordinate their activities primarily through computer-mediated communications (CMC) [6, 7]

Market-Enabling Internet Agents

The growth of the Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly exciting feature of Internet commerce is the ability to automate the search for price or other product information across multiple suppliers by using an “agent” to retrieve the relevant information. The use of such agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers’ search costs. We argue that such agents effectively transform a diverse set of offerings into an economically efficient market and that their use should therefore be analyzed in these terms. In this paper, we present a simple model of the competitive effects of agents used to support purchasing. The model suggests that agents can be successful for diversified goods but resisted for commodities and near- commodities. We illustrate our model by analyzing the situation of current electronic commerce ventures on the Internet

Whither Journals?

In this presentation, I talk about the role of journals and how that role is changing with the increased use of web-based database for searching for articles. This presentation was made in Twenty Ninth International Conference on Information Systems, Paris 2008, as part of a panel on Open Access Publishing and the Future of Information Systems Research. The panel description is available in ICIS 2008 Proceedings at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2008/126/ and the other presentations are available through the following: http://sprouts.aisnet.org/8-35

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work in a Virtual Organization

The Virtual Factory is an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry in the region around Lake Constance, on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The network was developed through a collaborative action research project started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen2. Project leadership (the core partners) came from entrepreneurs and senior managers from companies in the region and four researchers from the Institute

Rejoinder to Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing

This is a commentary as part of the debate on Open Access