Resistance to Mandatory Technology Use-The Case of EMR in the United States Healthcare Industry

Organizations implement information systems (IS) to enable the capture, storage, and analysis of large datasets and inform decision-making. In the United States, government agencies are deploying IS-centric plans to remedy cost and quality issues in healthcare by aggregating and analyzing data on worker performance, patient outcomes, and administrative processes. Federal agencies hope that data-driven approaches will improve administrative decisions and the treatment of patients. A review of existing IS research suggests, however, that the goals of technological interventions often prove difficult to attain. One reason is that technologies do not always suit the context of use, so workers resist. When resistance is locally severe (i.e., many workers in the same organization resist), the organization can customize or replace the technology to satisfy its workers and generate desired outcomes. But when the technology and its uses are mandated, such as in healthcare, organizations have little flexibility in adoption and implementation decisions, and workers have few opportunities to act on their frustration via their use of the technology. How, then, might workers respond when traditional forms of resistance cannot escalate and derail implementation? I investigate this question through a qualitative study of healthcare workers’ responses to the electronic medical records (EMR) program. Under this program, organizations must adopt federally-certified EMR and comply with standards for use, or face financial penalties for noncompliance. Preliminary evidence suggests that when opportunities for localized resistance to change are limited, workers leverage political and social structures-such as professional organizations-to resist changes to their work. Continued study in contexts where technology use is mandated is essential for the development of theories that go beyond localized resistance and provide a comprehensive view resistance. Practically, a comprehensive understanding of resistance can inform policy and technology design, implementation, management, and evaluation in healthcare and elsewhere

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

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Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109618/1/bij12394.pd

Managing without Authority: Records Managers in Interorganizational Contexts

Information professionals are taking on new roles in modern organizations. Specifically, these professionals are tasked with gaining coworkers’ compliance with information communication and management policies. However, they often lack the formal authority of traditional managers. We report on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of records managers, focusing on the interpersonal skills they use to achieve compliance.ye

A little antagonism might be nice: Investigation in information science

Academic research often claims to investigate phenomena, but we conventionally insist that such investigations take place with the consent of those being studied. In this blue sky paper, we suggest that information science researchers should consider the contexts in which it might be beneficial to violate this norm and pursue what we describe as antago-nistic investigation. In relation to illegal and socially harmful activities such as platform manipulation, fraud and the spread of propaganda, we argue that researchers should go against the wishes of those they're studying and possibly, in the process, violate privacy norms, challenge illegal activities and call for accountability as a result of research. While these investigative activities are not conventional in information science research, they draw on core strengths of the field and position researchers to produce impactful work on relevant and pressing topics.Ope

Bridging the ICT4D Design-Actuality Gap: “Human ATMs” and the Provision of Financial Services for “Humble People”

Most challenges in ICT for development (ICT4D) projects can be related to differences in perceptions of systems developers and their actual users. Such design-actuality gaps exist both because designers take an uninformed stance towards the user context, and also because problems that ICT4D projects address are nested in systems whose interplay is nearly impossible to predict. Although gaps are inevitable, users are not passive recipients whose only choices are to accept shortfalls in design or reject ICT4D technologies. Rather, users may act to remedy shortfalls through system work-arounds. In this paper we investigate the design use gap in the Brazilian correspondent banking model, an ICT4D project in which local small businesspeople interact with social, financial, government, and technical systems to provide financial services mostly for poor populations. Our findings suggest that correspondents’ acts to alter the financial and social systems proved sufficient to permit success of the project. Our results point to the importance of taking into account user actions and the separate roles of individual systems when designing ICT4D projects and theorizing their performance

Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development, Version 2.1 [Pre-print]

This document aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally. Scholarly research can be idealised as an inspirational process for advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind. However, current research practices often struggle with a range of tensions, in part due to the fact that this collective (or “commons”) ideal conflicts with the competitive system in which most scholars work, and in part because much of the infrastructure of the scholarly world is becoming largely digital. What is broadly termed as Open Scholarship is an attempt to realign modern research practices with this ideal. We do not propose a definition of Open Scholarship, but recognise that it is a holistic term that encompasses many disciplines, practices, and principles, sometimes also referred to as Open Science or Open Research. We choose the term Open Scholarship to be more inclusive of these other terms. When we refer to science in this document, we do so historically and use it as shorthand for more general scholarship. The purpose of this document is to provide a concise analysis of where the global Open Scholarship movement currently stands: what the common threads and strengths are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a global community to recognise and address the top strategic priorities. This document was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development and work in the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open contribution working group. Our hope is that this document will serve as a foundational resource for continuing discussions and initiatives about implementing effective strategies to help streamline the integration of Open Scholarship practices into a modern, digital research culture. Through this, we hope to extend the reach and impact of Open Scholarship into a global context, making sure that it is truly open for all. We also hope that this document will evolve as the conversations around Open Scholarship progress, and help to provide useful insight for both global co-ordination and local action. We believe this is a step forward in making Open Scholarship the norm. Ultimately, we expect the impact of widespread adoption of Open Scholarship to be diverse. We expect novel research practices to accelerate the pace of innovation, and therefore stimulate critical industries around the world. We could also expect to see an increase in public trust of science and scholarship, as transparency becomes more normative. As such, we expect interest in Open Scholarship to increase at multiple levels, due to its inherent influence on society and global economics

Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development

This document aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally.Scholarly research can be idealised as an inspirational process for advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind. However, current research practices often struggle with a range of tensions, in part due to the fact that this collective (or “commons”) ideal conflicts with the competitive system in which most scholars work, and in part because much of the infrastructure of the scholarly world is becoming largely digital. What is broadly termed as Open Scholarship is an attempt to realign modern research practices with this ideal. We do not propose a definition of Open Scholarship, but recognise that it is a holistic term that encompasses many disciplines, practices, and principles, sometimes also referred to as Open Science or Open Research. We choose the term Open Scholarship to be more inclusive of these other terms. When we refer to science in this document, we do so historically and use it as shorthand for more general scholarship.The purpose of this document is to provide a concise analysis of where the global Open Scholarship movement currently stands: what the common threads and strengths are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a global community to recognise and address the top strategic priorities. This document was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development and work in the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open contribution working group.Our hope is that this document will serve as a foundational resource for continuing discussions and initiatives about implementing effective strategies to help streamline the integration of Open Scholarship practices into a modern, digital research culture. Through this, we hope to extend the reach and impact of Open Scholarship into a global context, making sure that it is truly open for all. We also hope that this document will evolve as the conversations around Open Scholarship progress, and help to provide useful insight for both global co-ordination and local action. We believe this is a step forward in making Open Scholarship the norm.Ultimately, we expect the impact of widespread adoption of Open Scholarship to be diverse. We expect novel research practices to accelerate the pace of innovation, and therefore stimulate critical industries around the world. We could also expect to see an increase in public trust of science and scholarship, as transparency becomes more normative. As such, we expect interest in Open Scholarship to increase at multiple levels, due to its inherent influence on society and global economics

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. The effort to increase data sharing in the sciences is one part of a broader “data revolution” that has prompted discussion about a paradigm shift in scientific research. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process