The interdisciplinary nature of the information systems (IS) field has opened it up to various theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and contexts since its inception. While the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) has consistently encouraged “submissions that reflect the wide and interdisciplinary nature of the subject and articles that integrate technological disciplines with social, context, and

Most information systems (IS) research takes for granted that consumers' adoption and the use of mobile payment (MP) applications are motivated by generic factors such as perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Challenging this assumption, we argue that the salient contextual characteristics of MP applications compel a reconsideration and problematization of research on MP adoption and use

The opinions and behaviours of others are recognised as powerful mechanisms for social influence in the digital sphere. The former, often referred to as electronic word of mouth (eWOM), is a thoroughly researched topic in the Information Systems literature. Conversely, the digital display of users' behaviours (e.g., number of past purchases) is less well understood despite the widespread adoption of

Action research (AR) involves one or more researchers and a client organisation. Many guidelines for and reports of the research method have been published. However, the ethical issues associated with AR have been largely neglected. Our review of the AR literature found that ethical dilemmas and their resolution are rarely and inconsistently reported. Stimulated by this neglect and our personal experiences

Virtual teams face the unique challenge of coordinating their knowledge work across time, space, and people. Information technologies, and digital artefacts in particular, are essential to supporting coordination in highly dispersed teams, yet the extant literature is limited in explaining how such teams produce and reproduce digital artefacts for coordination. This paper describes a qualitative case

Digital creativity (DC) stands for employee's generation of useful and fresh ideas through the use of digital technologies, which is one of the prominent consequences of effective digital technology use. Drawing insights from the tripartite view of technology use (ie, technology, individual and task elements) and the social role lens, our study proposes and tests an integrative theoretical framework

In software platform ecosystems, the technological and structural peculiarities vest the platform owner with an extremely powerful position that puts any complementor at the mercy of the platform owner's actions. Paradoxically, it is the self-determination and proactivity of the complementors that determine the ecosystem's success through their surprising outside innovations. This study addresses this

1 INTRODUCTION Digital social innovation (DSI) involves the use of digital technologies in the development and implementation of innovative products, services, processes and business models that seek to improve the well-being and agency of socially disadvantaged groups or address social problems related to marginality, inequality and social exclusion (Qureshi, Pan, & Zheng, 2017; Shalini et al., 2021)

This research examines the socially significant issue of doctors' resistance to healthcare information technology (HIT) from the radical power perspective. It adopts Bourdieu's social practice theory to examine the interaction of HIT with the reproduction of doctors' historically rooted social standing through the doctor-patient-interaction (D-P-I) practice. Findings from our ethnographic enquiry at

The Information Systems Journal (ISJ) receives a large number of submissions that describe the direct or slightly modified application of well-established theoretical perspectives in new contexts. Regrettably, senior editors reject many of these submissions without sending them out for formal review. This editorial explains why this occurs and describes what might instead constitute a sufficient contribution

E-participation platforms create spaces and opportunities for participation and collaboration between governments and citizens. This paper aims to investigate the role of power on formal e-participation platforms and digital spaces that are controlled by the governments. Although those types of platforms have been increasing in numerous countries, they have been criticised as often leading to a lack

The discontinuance of volitional IS (i.e., information systems adopted, used and discontinued at will) has recently attracted remarkable attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, most research to date has been ahistorical. Ignoring the temporal progression can be problematic when the phenomenon under investigation is dynamic and evolving. To balance this, we adopt a stage modelling

This paper investigates the embeddedness of digital entrepreneurship in the entrepreneurs' indigenous value system by examining the influence of ‘Ubuntu’ on digital entrepreneurship activities in the South African context. We do so through an interpretive field study of two innovation clusters in South Africa. Our findings reveal Ubuntu as the basis of a community orientation to digital entrepreneurship

Digital platforms are restructuring how many companies and industries function, including humanitarian organisations that operate in complex environments and serve vulnerable populations. To date, however, there has been limited study of their use in humanitarian and particularly refugee contexts. This paper seeks to address this gap by drawing on the concept of platformisation to study the opportunities

New assistive technology (AT) is at our disposal for improving the everyday life of people in need. Yet, the current way how AT is produced and provisioned is hindering certain marginalised groups in the population, particularly elderly people, to get access to it. To expedite time-to-market, reduce costs, and increase accessibility to otherwise unattainable AT, we explore if do-it-yourself (DIY) could

The development and utilisation of new information and communication technologies presents opportunities and risks, which bring ethical issues to the forefront. Any attempt to minimise the potential negative consequences to individuals, organisations and society resulting from the use of these technologies is challenging. In order to address these challenges, this paper presents an ethics-by-design

Digital identity platforms are widely regarded as important means to improve social protection systems. Yet these platforms have been implicated in the production of a range of unintended outcomes for development beneficiaries. To clarify how digital identity platforms enable the production of one such outcome that we call degenerative, because it causes target systems to deteriorate, we conduct a

Prosocial P2P lending platforms are a novel and powerful example of a digital social innovation (DSI) in which the operating model relies primarily on digital technologies and the overarching focus is on the “social” aspect of the innovation. These platforms establish a virtual connection between low-income individuals and lenders, helping the former access loans at low rates of interest. In realising

Users develop habits in relation to information systems (IS) to reduce the cognitive and behavioural efforts needed for using them. However, when these systems have to be discontinued, users face challenges regarding how to stop relying on their legacy habits. Despite their importance, we know little about how legacy habits shape the way users discontinue a legacy system. Through a comparative case‐study

Professional computing organisations, including the ACM, IEEE and INFORMS published statements supporting Black Lives Matter during the 2020 racial unrest in the United States. While the voices of these professional organisations are echoed from positions of power, the concerns of Black IS professors are silenced. In this opinion piece, we centre on the voices of Black professors who seek to thrive

Initial research on using crowdsourcing as a collaborative method for helping individuals identify phishing messages has shown promising results. However, the vast majority of crowdsourcing research has focussed on crowdsourced system components broadly and understanding individuals' motivation in contributing to crowdsourced systems. Little research has examined the features of crowdsourced systems

Regulations, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), establish standards to protect patients' medical records from security breaches. Insiders' prosocial misbehaviour within healthcare organisations can cause significant damage to relevant stakeholders. Such behaviour without malicious intention needs to be better understood and carefully managed from the perspective

Globally, millions of individuals are victims of sex trafficking and are compelled to perform sexual acts through force, fraud, or coercion. Law enforcement agencies, non‐profit organisations, and social entrepreneurs increasingly are using information technology as a resource to locate, identify, and rescue victims and find, arrest, and convict traffickers. In this qualitative case study, we partnered

Financial technology (fintech) is seen as possessing significant potential to provide the poor access to financial services and help them escape the clutches of poverty. Surprisingly, Information Systems (IS) research has engaged little with fintech's promise of fostering financial inclusion for the poor. In the spirit of ‘making a better world with ICTs’, conducting ‘responsible IS research for a

In globally distributed environments, gaps exist between an organisational‐level decision to migrate IT‐enabled tasks and the actual execution of strategy since a high‐level consensus does not always specify the precise sequencing and pacing of task migration in detail. This absence of operational‐level detailing can trigger status‐led enactments of power. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a distributed

Losing the ability to communicate inhibits social contact, creates feelings of frustration and isolation and complicates personal comfort and medical care. Progressive diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS) can cause severe motor disabilities that make communication through traditional means difficult, slow, and exhausting, even with the support of augmentative

Over the last two decades, agile software development (ASD) has garnered much attention in both research and practice. Several ASD methods and techniques have been developed and studied. In particular, researchers have provided several theoretical perspectives on ASD and contributed rich insights to the ASD practice. Still, despite calls for a more unified theoretical understanding of ASD, a theoretical

The need for inter‐organisational information systems projects, which are complex undertakings often riddled with poorly understood power struggles and conflicts that hinder project success, has increased in previous decades. Through the lenses of systemic and episodic power, together with an organisational conflict model, this longitudinal, qualitative case study explores the dynamics of power and

Conceptual models capture knowledge about domains of reality. Therefore, conceptual models and their modelling constructs should be based on theories about the world—that is, they should be grounded in ontology. Identity is fundamental to ontology and conceptual modelling because it addresses the very existence of objects and conceptual systems in general. Classification involves grouping objects that

Western worldviews dominate the information systems (IS) literature, accepted and taken for granted as the natural way of doing things. While diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity has been studied in the IS field, there is scant research on the experiences of Indigenous information technology (IT) professionals. This study uses narrative inquiry to provide temporal, contextualised accounts of

Researchers and developers constantly seek novel ways to create engaging applications that are able to retain their users over the long term, make them desire to spend time using the application or go back to using it after a break. With this aim, video games can be an insightful source of inspiration, as they are specifically designed to maximise playing time, increase players' intentions of playing

Establishing IT governance arrangements is a deeply political process, where relationships of power play a crucial role. While the importance of power relationships is widely acknowledged in IS literature, specific mechanisms whereby the consequences of power relationships affect IT governance arrangements are still under‐researched. This study investigates the way power relationships are inscribed

This article responds to increasing discourses on digital social innovation (DSI) from the perspectives of women entrepreneurs. Using the individual differences theory of gender and information technology (IDTGIT), this research explores how digital technology is used by women entrepreneurs to create opportunities in response to the challenges associated with individual identity, individual influences

Digital platforms hold a central position in today's world economy and are said to offer a great potential for the economies and societies in the global South. Yet, to date, the scholarly literature on digital platforms has largely concentrated on business while their developmental implications remain understudied. In part, this is because digital platforms are a challenging research object due to

Issues of power are often neglected in information systems (IS) studies and under‐theorised in IS research. Systems development methods (SDMs) are commonly used in the IT industry to coordinate the activities between developers and clients. The role of power in the relationship between clients and systems developers remains an important topic of research in information systems development (ISD). Yet

Digital social innovation is important for addressing various social needs, especially from those who are economically disadvantaged. For instance, open source software (OSS) is developed by mass collaboration on digital communities to provide software users free alternatives to commercial products. OSS is particularly valuable to meet the needs of numerous disadvantaged users for whom proprietary

Reward-based crowdfunding platforms – in which campaigns exchange rewards for financial backing to develop a product or service – are one of the fastest-growing segments of the crowdfunding industry. We use an extension of social exchange theory (SET) called the resource theory of social exchange (RTSE) to examine resource exchanges through rewards on Kickstarter. A resource exchange occurs when a

This opinion paper addresses and contributes to the discourse on whether there is a central artifact that captures the essence of the information systems (IS) discipline. It argues that the IS discipline can, and should be, faithfully captured by an IS artifact. We offer a theoretical conception of the IS artifact by drawing upon General Systems Theory (GST). Key concepts of GST are distilled as meta-principles

Most contemporary studies on information security focus on largely static phenomena in examining security‐related behaviours. We take a more dynamic, situational and interactionist approach that proposes that security‐related behaviours result from an interaction between the person and the perception of a threatening situation. We derive and define situational information security awareness based on

Despite concerns raised by practitioners, the potential downside of the information security demands imposed by organizations on their employees has received limited scholarly attention. Our research focuses on information security fatigue (hereafter security fatigue), which is defined as a socio-emotional state experienced by an individual who is tired of and disillusioned with security policies and

Every year, the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) receives hundreds of papers for review and potential publication. When a new submission is received, we pay careful attention to the positioning and motivation, and on a related note, to the contribution of the submitted paper. The positioning and motivation of the paper strongly determine how the contribution emerges in the latter half of the paper

This study investigates the observed behavioural outcomes when users experience negative disconfirmation with consumerised IT artefacts with the aim to identify the generative mechanisms of these outcomes. We analyse blogposts, authored and published by tablet users, where they narrate their experience with an IT artefact. We employ grounded theory method techniques, and through the lens of critical

Digital social innovation (DSI)—the novel use of digital technology to address societal challenges—plays a critical role in our collective pursuit of sustainable development. In this practitioner paper, we present an in‐depth DSI case study where the grassroots communities in a remote county leveraged e‐commerce to leapfrog out of poverty, becoming successful entrepreneurs with online businesses that

Recent years have seen an explosion in social media in our everyday lives, and a corresponding increase in social media research in IS. As social media researchers, we are intrigued by the problem of virtuality and context in social media research, and how we might apply reflexive research principles to such settings. In social media, the absence of a setting's real physical boundaries (to a large

In this study, we investigate the nature of the influence of organisational information technology (IT) on innovation. To examine this relationship, we leverage a fundamental construct: harmonious IT affordance (HITA). HITA is defined as the degree of coalignment between three salient organisational IT affordances, each of which allows an organisation to carry out its most fundamental functions using

IT outsourcing (ITO) remains a popular business practice, but many buyers and suppliers of IT services are caught in a vicious relationship spiral of low trust, bad collaboration and mediocre performance. This paper describes a novel process understanding of how vicious cycles work and suggests a new method for how they can be reversed into virtuous cycles. Based on the action research and complementary

While common wisdom suggests that big data facilitates better decisions, we posit that it may not always be the case, as big data aspects can also afford and motivate knowledge hiding. To examine this possibility, we integrate adaptive cost theory with the resource‐based view of the firm. This integration suggests that the effect of big data characteristics (i.e., data variety, volume, and velocity)

In this article, we aim to sensitise the information systems community about the dispossession of choice that the extended reliance on Internet technology creates for individuals. The overemphasis of digital inclusion as a solution to the digital divide problem frames Internet use as desirable in a progressive society but labels non‐use as problematic or a deficiency that needs to be remedied. This

When reading a submitted article, I am often struck by the apparent omniscience of the authors with regard to the context where they undertake their research. However, the origins of this omniscience are seldom explained: researchers insouciantly describe what they did and how they did it, yet ignore their own preparation for the research and the process that they followed to acquire relevant knowledge

To realize their strategic goals and maintain a competitive advantage in the digital era, organizations must periodically renew their digital platforms and infrastructures. However, knowledge about such technology renewal is scattered across diverse research streams, so insights into the process are both limited and fragmented. In this article, we consolidate insights from previous research to conceptualize

One of today's grand societal challenges is to replace the current ‘take‐make‐waste’ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has

Information technology (IT) has changed dramatically over the last several decades. Although, in its early days IT has been mostly used as a tool for conducting business or running complex governmental and organisational operations, it has shifted to also become a productivity and hedonic tool for individual users (Matt, Trenz, Cheung, & Turel, 2019). Readers can reflect on how many technologies surround

The study explores how online health communities produce social value by uniting individuals under a common purpose, to advance healthcare in post‐conflict states. We selected MedicineAfrica – a digital platform known for creating social value by providing medical education in regions with under‐resourced healthcare systems – and drew on multiple data collection methods. We found that it is through

Software process tailoring (SPT) is a team‐based and learning‐intensive activity that addresses the particular dynamic characteristics of a development project. Because SPT critically influences how projects are conducted, its performance should be investigated. However, the extant literature lacks empirical evidence on how the underlying effects of SPT performance and its team‐supportive factors operate

Massively multiplayer online role‐playing game (MMORPG) addiction presents a serious issue worldwide and has attracted increasing attention from academic and other public communities. This article addresses this critical issue and fills research gaps by proposing and testing a research model of MMORPG addiction. Building on the conceptual foundation of the hedonic management model of addiction and

While remote work allows organisations to offer their employees flexibility and harness global talent and markets for business growth, inability to rely on physical interactions between employees imposes challenges specific to operations in highly virtual work environments. Among these characteristic issues are challenges associated with organisational socialisation and organisational culture. Accordingly

The notion of business ecosystems is gaining prominence among academics and practitioners. Scholars advise that business ecosystems are inherently fluid, unbounded and amorphous and thus that their boundaries can shift. Practitioners further suggest that business ecosystems are characterised by inter‐network – as opposed to inter‐firm – competition, and, moreover, that they are mainly driven by technological

Given its personal and ubiquitous nature, the smartwatch can easily become infused into individuals’ daily lives, social roles, and relationships. This type of intertwinement of an information technology (IT) in the daily lives of individuals creates an IT identity. To understand this phenomenon in the personal IT context, this research draws from the IT identity and valence frameworks to examine how

In this research, we investigate whether quantified‐self (QS) technologies, based on wearable technologies, enable individuals' empowerment or lead to their disempowerment. To understand better the potential paradoxical effects of QS technologies, we adopt a critical approach by mobilising the panopticon metaphor from Foucault's original writings and more precisely, his four core concepts, namely power

This research focuses on information technology (IT) project managers' growth mindset concerning IT project management (PM) ability and investigates how such a mindset can promote escalation of commitment to a troubled IT project. Specifically, we suggest that the growth mindset of IT PM ability promotes prospective achievement motivation and can lead IT project managers to escalate their commitment