Analyzing the PVCs Documents: A Multimodal Rate-based Approach to Understand Community’s Goals and Values

A significant amount of modern professional communication takes place in the so-called Virtual Communities of Practice or Professional Virtual Communities (PVCs): social systems of individuals who use Information Technologies to mediate their relationships and facilitate knowledge exchange and generation. In current research we analyze one of the biggest Russian IT-PVCs, Habrahabr.ru. The community’s official goal is connecting the IT-specialists; communication takes form of users articles and comments; users can rate the articles, the comments and the other users themselves. Using the number of SNA instruments, community’s metadata, linguistics statistics and discourse analysis we show the structure of the community, main topics within the professional field, and find the core ideas and values which “paste together” the communities members

Right, No Matter Why: AI Fact-checking and AI Authority in Health-related Inquiry Settings

Previous research on expert advice-taking shows that humans exhibit two contradictory behaviors: on the one hand, people tend to overvalue their own opinions undervaluing the expert opinion, and on the other, people often defer to other people's advice even if the advice itself is rather obviously wrong. In our study, we conduct an exploratory evaluation of users' AI-advice accepting behavior when evaluating the truthfulness of a health-related statement in different "advice quality" settings. We find that even feedback that is confined to just stating that "the AI thinks that the statement is false/true" results in more than half of people moving their statement veracity assessment towards the AI suggestion. The different types of advice given influence the acceptance rates, but the sheer effect of getting a suggestion is often bigger than the suggestion-type effect

Bounding Uncertainty:The Uses of Analogical Abduction in Entrepreneurship

Conceptualizing entrepreneurship as problem-solving has shed light on how problems are solved through entrepreneurial ventures. This approach presupposes that problems objectively exist, an assumption that is valid for the world of Knightian risk, in which categorization is possible. In the current study, we adopt the ontological stance of Knightian uncertainty, in which a priori categories cannot be assumed, and therefore problems do not objectively exist. We posit that in the world of Knightian uncertainty entrepreneurs who perceive certain situations as unsatisfactory but remediable engage in problematization which yields problem statements. These problem statements are operationalized to form the basis of entrepreneurial action aimed at remedying dissatisfaction. We submit that to problematize, entrepreneurs engage in analogical abduction, which allows them to develop problem statements by treating target domains replete with Knightian uncertainty as if they were similar to familiar source domains. Such conjectures are selected based on the likeness of relevant attributes between the source and target domains, aid entrepreneurs in bounding uncertainty, and guide entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurs adopt positive feedback of entrepreneurial action as a rule to guide future action under similar circumstances, while negative feedback leads them to recalibrate problem statements and modify further action. We illustrate this process using the empirical vignette of Starbucks

Losing Touch:An embodiment perspective on coordination in robotic surgery

Because new technologies allow new performances, mediations, representations, and information flows, they are often associated with changes in how coordination is achieved. Current coordination research emphasizes its situated and emergent nature, but seldom accounts for the role of embodied action. Building on a 25-month field study of the da Vinci robot, an endoscopic system for minimally invasive surgery, we bring to the fore the role of the body in how coordination was reconfigured in response to a change in technological mediation. Using the robot, surgeons experienced both an augmentation and a reduction of what they can do with their bodies in terms of haptic, visual, and auditory perception and manipulative dexterity. These bodily augmentations and reductions affected joint task performance and led to coordinative adaptations (e.g., spatial relocating, redistributing tasks, accommodating novel perceptual dependencies, and mounting novel responses) that, over time, resulted in reconfiguration of roles, including expanded occupational knowledge, emergence of new specializations, and shifts in status and boundaries. By emphasizing the importance of the body in coordination, this paper suggests that an embodiment perspective is important for explaining how and why coordination evolves following the introduction of a new technology

Hiring Algorithms: An Ethnography of Fairness in Practice

While increasing attention in society is given to the role of AI in affording and threatening ethical values, such as fairness, little is known about how ethical values and AI are played out in organizations. Building on an ethnographic in-depth study of a large multinational company that recently implemented AI to enable a fair recruitment process, we show that AI brings to the fore the role of fairness in decision-making in several ways. We reveal that the development and use of AI does not necessarily improve nor degrade ethical values, but instead shapes what comes to be understood as ethical in the first place. We extend the conversations on AI by showing that it may not be enough to focus on changes in work practices, occupational boundaries, and power relations, but that research should take into account the role of AI in shaping what we consider ethical

“No user is an island” Onlookers, affordances, and the impact of mobile devices on work practices

This paper addresses the question of how the use of mobile devices impacts work practices, based on an ethnographic study of the use of iPod Touch devices in operating rooms. Building on the concept of affordances in its recent conceptualization as “multifaceted relational structures”, we analyze the interplay between different affordances of iPods seen from the perspective of the user (who is interacting with the device), and from the perspective of the onlooker (who is interacting with the user, but not directly with the device itself). The analyses reveal that while the use of the device clearly had a function in supporting individual work practices, it negatively influenced the implicit coordination required for the interactive work practices. By including the onlookers’ perspective, we provide a more complete picture of how affordances are shaped and enacted within the social context of multiple relations and how this enactment further impacts work practices