Self-Serve Internet Technology and Social Embeddedness: Balancing Rationalization and Relationships

Much of the research on the impacts of electronic communication networks such as the Internet presents as competing substitutes personal, embedded relationships and computer-mediated, armís-length relationships between exchange partners. More recent research highlights the complementarity of these two kinds of relationships (e.g., Kraut et al. 1999). However, this research has not explored what following a strategy of complementarity means in situ. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming. Using ethnographic data to explore the consequences of implementing a self-service technology in an environment in which social relationships and social capital are regarded as a key to success, the research presented here highlights the tensions inherent in a business model that seeks to integrate rationalization and relationships

The Avatar as Sociomaterial Entanglement: A Performative Perspective on Identity, Agency and World-Making in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are utterly contrived and artificial simulations of the actual world. As such, they offer exciting new opportunities to question taken-for-granted, supposedly naturally-occurring binaries such as subject/objects, human/non-human, and reality/fantasy and to explore computer-mediated work and play in ways that do not rely on a priori boundaries between people and technology, online and off-line identities, and actual and virtual reality. Focusing on the avatar as a sociomaterial assemblage constituted of the embodied user and his/her virtual embodiment, this research explores how virtual worlds users construct agency, identity and reality in situated practice by making agential cuts. Whereas prior research on virtual worlds has tended to frame the distinctions between the avatar and the user, between human and material agency, and between reality and fantasy in more essentialist terms, theorizing these boundaries as given and fixed, this research employs a performative lens. It identifies a number of discursive and material practices virtual world users rely on to construct identity, agency and worlds

Evolving the Modular Layered Architecture in Digital Innovation: The Case of the Car’s Instrument Cluster

Digital innovation entails the combining of digital and physical components to produce novel products. The materiality of digital artifacts, particularly the separation between their material and immaterial features, which is expressed through a layered architecture, lays the foundation for the generative potential of digital innovation. Gaining an understanding of the work involved in creating such a layered architecture and tracing the shifts in the material sub-stratum as physical products are digitalized provides insight into the organizational implications of digital innovation. To this end, we study the digitalization of the automobile by focusing on the evolution of a car manufacturer’s instrument cluster or Driver Information Module (DIM) from 2005 onwards. Based on laddering interviews with 20 people involved in the development of three increasingly digitized DIMs, this paper traces the progressive dissociation between the material and non-material aspects of digitalized artifacts and the organizational implications of evolving a modular layered architecture

Electronic Commerce: The Impact of the Internet on Sales Practices in the Car Industry

E-commerce and Internet technologies are fundamentally changing the way companies do business. While much attention is paid to the profitability among the dot-coms and the viability of the new business models, there is much less focus on the impact of the Internet on the work practices of actual workers. As companies are developing new business models, existing work processes have to be adapted to the new environment in which communication is mediated by e-mail and the Internet. This new environment is marked by ubiquitous information access, asynchronous information exchange, and written communication. Depending on the extant information asymmetry and the degree and nature of the contact that workers need with their colleagues, customers, and trading partners, these attributes present both opportunities and challenges. In sales, for instance, a work context characterized by high equivocality, the increasing reliance on lean media like e-mail presents considerable challenges for sales people whose ability to “read” customers is curtailed. In this paper, we report on a two part study that investigates (1) the impact of Internet technologies on the work practices of car sales associates and (2) the antecedents of Internet technology use and sales performance among car sales associates engaged in Internet sales. In the first part of the study, we interviewed car sales associates engaged in Internet sales and, based on their description of the changes in their work lives, we developed a model to predict the use of Internet technology for car sales and sales performance. Since the online sales environment offers sales associates less information about their customers, our central hypothesis is that the initial assumptions with which sales associates enter into a sales encounter playa very significant role in predicting the outcome of the Internet-mediated sales encounter. We test this and other hypotheses using data collected via a national survey of 155 randomly selected sales associates

The Avatar-Self Relationship: Enacting Presence in Second Life

Avatars are technological artifacts that provide communicators a body in virtual spaces. It is through this affordance of embodiment that people, places and things are made concrete, tangible, and present. Presence consists of two interrelated phenomena: (i) telepresence: the sense of being there, and (ii) social presence: the sense of being together with others. In the context of virtual worlds, telepresence or the degree of immersion and engagement in the computer-mediated space is achieved through communicators’ interaction with their avatar, and social presence through their interaction with others as an avatar. Building on this typology, we develop a multidimensional conceptual framework of the avatar-self relationship, that is, the interaction between a communicator and his/her virtual (re)presentation. Relying on data collected via photo-diary interviews from residents of Second Life, a virtual world, we then identify and empirically describe various enactments of the avatar-self relationship. Our results highlight that Second Life residents enacted multiple avatar-self relationships and cycled through them in quick succession, suggesting that these avatar-self relationships might be shaped and activated strategically in order to achieve the desired educational, commercial or therapeutic outcomes

Compatibility promotion for standard development within shared platforms:A rising tide does not lift all boats

Selective promotion entails the exploitation of resources offered by individual complementors to improve a proprietary platform’s competitive position. However, as governance decisions to endorse a particular complementor are made unilaterally, such promotion is less suitable for shared platforms that are ultimately owned and managed by an ecosystem of heterogeneous, autonomous complementors. We explore compatibility promotion, which involves screening a shared stock of infrastructural resources and making a choice as to which complementor to promote in light of the capabilities the platform seeks to develop. Based on a longitudinal study of a shared platform that evolved around a new technology standard in the Swedish road haulage industry, we explicate how elevating one complementor over others unsettled the governance of the platform and denied the promoted complementors the opportunity to generate the kind of value that their elevated status implicitly promised. This made the platform better off at the expense of the promoted complementor. Our surprising insight lets us theorize why compatibility promotion in shared platforms renders outcomes opposite to those of selective promotion in proprietary platforms.</p

Enacting Accountability in IS Research after the Sociomaterial Turn(ing)

Sociomateriality represents an emergent philosophical stance that instantiates an ontological turn towards relationality and materiality in information systems (IS) research. As an emergent perspective or way of seeing, sociomateriality has significant implications for researchers and the practices they employ. If we accept that the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions we enact in our research shape the realities we perceive and create, questions around researchers’ accountability for the realities they produce need to be addressed. The sociomaterial turn(ing) in IS challenges our deeply held assumptions about what constitutes reality. What are these challenges, and how are they being addressed in sociomaterial research? And what implications for accountability in IS research more generally does a turn towards relationality and materiality hold? The objectives of this editorial are: (1) to sensitize IS researchers, irrespective of their ontological and epistemological persuasions, to the field’s turn(ing) toward relationality and materiality; (2) to provide insight into the practices of data generation, analysis, and presentation through which this turn(ing) is being enacted in sociomaterial theorizing; and (3) to contemplate the implications of this turn(ing) for the accountability of IS research more generally

Internet-Enabled Co-Production: Partnering or Competing with Customers?

The Internet is democratizing commerce by turning economic models that were based on a strict separation between providers and consumers into models where this distinction is increasingly blurred. This implies significant opportunities and challenges for organizations, particularly with respect to the role that their customers play in the generation of economic value. Are customers partners or competitors? While firms typically strive to implement business models that leverage the customers as a resource (i.e., customer co-production), models in which customers are competitors (i.e., peer production) are frequently met with attempts to co-opt these customers (i.e., hybrid co-production). The purpose of this panel, presented at the 2006 International Conference on Information Systems, is to explore the range of Internet-enabled co-production models (i.e., customer and hybrid co-production) and the opportunities and challenges that they present for firms