The role of technology in helping citizens to address environmental problems is an important area of investigation. It is on this context that sustainable energy technologies emerge as critical in mitigating climate change issues. While prior research has mainly focused on investigating the antecedents of adoption and use, this study offers a new perspective by exploring the impact of social dimensions-status and sense of belonging-on technology use behavior. Also, it further examines how the technology use impacts a set of humanistic outcomes, reinforcing the need of holistic studies on both antecedents and outcomes of technologies, especially on the human-centered ones. To achieve this, we adopt a mixed-methods approach with developmental purpose to build the research model. Data from four European countries is used to validate the model, revealing that prestige significantly influences technology use, which in turn strongly affects well-being and comfort. These effects are even stronger among users with strong pro-environmental profile, suggesting that promoting other eco-friendly actions can enhance perceptions of the technology's benefits. Finally, a cross-country analysis is performed confirming the robustness of these results, offering a comprehensive perspective on sustainable technology use.
Older workers tend to engage less in innovative IT use, but they are not the homogenous group portrayed in prior cohort studies. This study examines the heterogeneity in older workers' innovative IT use that arises from diverse developmental trajectories in the aging process. Drawing on the Awareness of Age-Related Change (AARC) framework and survey data from older workers, we show that awareness of age-related gains (e.g. gains in accumulated knowledge) and awareness of age-related losses (e.g. losses in cognitive functioning) shape innovative IT use through the mediating role of challenging job crafting. The results also indicate that the awareness of age-related gains exerts a stronger influence than the awareness of age-related losses. By integrating the AARC framework with research on IS slack resources, we further demonstrate that IS slack time and slack technology moderate the indirect effect of awareness of age-related gains and losses on innovative IT use. This study contributes to research on aging at work by demonstrating how age-related self-perceptions and supportive technological work environments jointly shape innovative IT use. Practically, it suggests that organizations should prioritize leveraging older workers' perceived gains rather than mitigating perceived losses, while also providing sufficient slack resources to foster innovative IT use.
New generations of emerging technologies have challenged our understanding of the role of technology in society. Digital platforms shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) influence our everyday decisions and societal structures, making emerging technologies ever more political in nature. This has challenged information systems (IS) researchers to seek new approaches that enable more rigorous study of contemporary IS phenomena that are increasingly political. This paper presents a novel research approach called critical-political discourse studies (CPDS), which combines critical discourse studies and political discourse analysis to improve the rigour of studying political IS discourses. The approach is validated in an empirical analysis, which studies AI ethics discourse in the EU AI Act through the lens of John Rawls's principles of justice. The potential of CPDS for IS research is analysed from perspectives of novelty and usefulness. The analyses demonstrate how CPDS increases transparency, coherence, and rigour of the study of political IS discourses, which brings a valuable contribution to the accumulation of knowledge on contemporary ISs and their socio-technical dimensions.
Gamified digital learning environments can instigate social comparison and contribute to learners' experiences of technostress. While prior research demonstrates how social comparison can shape individuals' coping behaviours in stressful situations, the confluent effect of social comparison and coping with technology-induced demands as hindrance technostressors has not been empirically investigated. We postulate that gamified digital learning can trigger positive or negative social comparison, influencing learners' coping with hindrance technostressors and their overall satisfaction. Our findings from a survey of 1,070 university learners demonstrate that, contrary to prior assumptions in the literature, negative social comparison-usually associated with negative outcomes-mitigates the negative effects of hindrance technostressors on learner satisfaction; this mitigation occurs by moderating both the indirect effect of hindrance technostressors through adaptive coping and their dFirect effect on learner satisfaction. This study is the first to theorise coping with hindrance technostressors in gamified platforms by showing the significance of social comparison in shaping the effects of these stressors both directly and indirectly through coping.
As consumers increasingly adopt privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to protect personal information, firms face growing challenges in preserving consumer data integrity and the reliability of downstream analytics. By intervening at the point of data collection, end-user PETs introduce systematic distortions that reshape the data environment on which business analytics depend, yet their implications remain insufficiently understood. To address this gap, this study develops two complementary conceptual frameworks. The Data Integrity Framework characterizes how different end-user PETs generate missing values and measurement errors across attributes, entities, and relationships, offering a structured lens for conceptualizing privacy-induced data distortions. Building on this foundation, the Analytics Adaptation Framework provides guidance on how firms can assess and adapt their data analytics in response to these data distortions. To demonstrate their applicability, an illustrative simulation case study in product recommendation shows how key characteristics of end-user PET adoption-adoption rate and pattern, protection mechanism and intensity-systematically shape analytics outcomes. Together, the study advances IS research on data management by linking consumer privacy protection to data integrity and analytics adaptation, highlighting how consumer-driven privacy technologies fundamentally alter firms' data and analytical environments.
Unlike traditional digital artefacts, AI companions simulate social presence, adapt to user input and engage in emotionally responsive interaction. Consumers are increasingly forming emotionally meaningful relationships with these AI companions, such as Replika. In this paper, we examine how these relational qualities contribute to psychological ownership and investigate the role of perceived affordances in this process. Drawing on affordance theory and psychological ownership, we argue that ownership emerges not from design features alone but from users' perceptions of what the system enables. We adopt a sequential mixed-methods design, starting with a computational analysis of 119,831 Replika reviews to identify affordance perceptions related to ownership. A follow-up pilot study empirically maps perceived affordances to core ownership mechanisms. Two controlled experiments then test how manipulated design features influence psychological ownership, mediated by user perceptions and ownership mechanisms. Our findings show that design features affect ownership only indirectly through perceptual pathways. We also identify perceived intelligence as a complementary mechanism contributing to psychological ownership in the AI companion context. This study advances context-specific theorising on psychological ownership of AI companions, extends affordance theory to relational technologies and offers practical and ethical guidance for designing AI companions that promote responsible emotional engagement.
Today's Global Virtual Teams (GVTs) are characterised by frequent changes in membership throughout their lifecycle. We adopt the lens of "configuration" to explore how leadership is "reconfigured" and the role of technology in this, when members come and go unexpectedly. We surveyed 16 GVTs involving 204 students, of whom 28 were unexpectedly switched between different GVTs. Our analysis suggests that changing membership triggers a reconfiguration in leadership, impacting who the leader is (structure), how they lead (styles), and what they do (practices). It also reveals that technology exacerbates discontinuities, disrupting cohesion, while also creating new continuities that help to maintain cohesion. We make two contributions to the Information Systems (IS) discipline: First, through our use of the "configuration" lens, we advance IS literature by revealing a dynamic understanding of leadership observed in GVTs with changing membership. Second, we contribute to organisational discontinuity theory, (a) revealing a novel interplay of continuities and discontinuities; and (b) explaining how continuities and discontinuities contribute to leadership reconfiguration. These contributions are important given the increasingly dynamic nature of virtual and hybrid teamwork.
The production and consumption of fake news vary significantly across countries, yet research has not comprehensively examined country-level supply- and demand-side factors, limiting our ability to understand the mechanisms driving this phenomenon. Using situational crime-prevention theory as the foundation, in this study we conceptualize the factors influencing fake news propagation. Specifically, we theorize the role of local mobile content and services as a supply-side factor that offers situational technological opportunities for producing and disseminating fake news. On the demand side, we theorize citizens' subjective well-being and happiness as a factor that reduces a nation's fake news propensity. Additionally, we assess how the quality of legal guardianship within a nation moderates the influence of supply-side factors on fake news propensity. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, we first tested our theoretical model using a unique dataset compiled from seven independent cross-country sources covering 65 countries. To complement this analysis and obtain a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon, we conducted qualitative interviews with eight senior policy and civil society experts engaged in managing fake news at the national, regional, and international levels. These interviews not only corroborated the quantitative findings but also revealed boundary conditions that refine our theorized model. Our results provide a nuanced understanding of the interplay between supply-side and demand-side factors in curbing fake news production and dissemination, and offer practical insights for institutional bodies focused on crime prevention and policymakers tasked with designing ways to address the scourge of fake news including misinformation.
Incumbent firms in traditional industries are increasingly launching digital platforms to leverage opportunities offered by digital technologies and facilitate the delivery of new services. To succeed in inter-platform competition, incumbents must develop a new platform ecosystem deployment (PED) capability, which will enable them to manage the dynamism of platform ecosystems while sustaining their legacy businesses. Despite several prominent cases of platform failure, the development of capabilities among incumbents for deploying platform ecosystems remains largely underexplored. Adopting a microfoundations lens, this study analyses three cases of incumbents in the enterprise Internet of Things domain. We find that two key mechanisms-routines and heuristics-constitute the core of the PED capability across its dimensions of platformisation, ecosystem cohesion, and value co-creation. Our findings reveal that, rather than replacing routines, heuristics moderate routines within the identified dimensions by accelerating, decelerating, or bypassing specific organisational actions. Acceleration enables firms to respond to platform dynamism and limited information, whereas deceleration enhances quality and ecosystem experiences. We theorise that incumbents adaptively combine routines and heuristics to configure and enact a PED capability, which enables them not only to catch up, but also to stay ahead of the curve in inter-platform competition.
The Metaverse shows significant potential to support collaboration by enabling immersive virtual environments for collective work and learning. However, its effectiveness is often limited by a lack of user trust and engagement . By contextualizing and extending the interactionist theory of place attachment, this study theorizes spatial familiarity as a core feature of Metaverse, examining its mechanisms for fostering perceptions of virtual environments as reliable and engaging places for collaboration. With this end in view, this research followed a sequential mixed-methods approach, with the qualitative method first developing the context-specific research model by identifying key factors that enable Metaverse-based collaboration, and then the quantitative method validating the model. The results together indicate that the spatial familiarity of Metaverse enables individuals to engage in virtual environments for collaboration both directly and mediated by trust. Importantly, the efficacy of spatial familiarity is particularly pronounced when a person perceives a high level of avatar human-likeness but diminishes when her self-regulation is high. By uncovering the theoretical mechanisms through which spatial stimuli contribute to trust-building in collaborative Metaverse contexts, this study also offers practical implications for designing and managing virtual environments for collaborative purposes.
In recent years, many firms, especially those in information technology (IT)-related industries, are increasingly hosting open source software (OSS) projects to garner external contributions from unaffiliated developers. This study is a pioneering investigation into the impact of external contributions to firm-hosted OSS projects on firm value as well as the moderating effects. Using a panel dataset of 536 publicly listed firms hosting OSS projects on GitHub, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach to address potential endogeneity issues. Our findings show that external contributions to firm-hosted OSS increase firm value, measured by Tobin's q. Moreover, this beneficial effect is strengthened when firms and their external contributors operate in more distinct technological domains, or when there is increased comment activity within the firm-hosted OSS projects. Our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how firms can strategically leverage external contributions to enhance market-based firm value and provides valuable managerial insights for both the broader OSS community and firms navigating this domain.
Although research emphasizes strategy and technology concerns in organizational digitalization, we have limited understanding of how digital initiatives interrelate these concerns over time. Against this backdrop, we conducted a clinical inquiry into the Connected Restroom Initiative at Georgia-Pacific with its trajectory through four stages: idea-focused initiation, technology-focused experimentation, customer-focused commercialization, and process-focused consolidation. Empirically, we offer a detailed account of how the initiative iteratively orchestrated strategy moves of competitive positioning, resource reconfiguration, and organizational renewal together with architecture moves of event sensing, trace analysis, and platform co-creation within and across its stages. Conceptually, we draw on these insights and extant literature to develop a grounded model of how the initiative dynamically interrelated strategy and architecture moves as a structured, incremental response to the dynamic business landscapes in which it unfolded. We conclude with a discussion of implications for theory, practice, and clinical IS research.
Incivility, defined as disrespectful or hostile online communication that stops short of overt cyberaggression, is a common phenomenon on Social Networking Sites (SNSs). Prior research has largely attributed this phenomenon to static technological affordances (e.g. anonymity) and user characteristics such as personality traits and demographics. Yet, the role of transient emotional states as dynamic, situational antecedents of incivility remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce the concept of dynamic incivility and investigate how momentary experiences of malicious envy, a hostile, social comparison-driven emotion, relates to incivility on SNSs. Using a 14-week repeated-measures diary design, we uncover a robust within-person effect: individuals are more likely to engage in incivility during weeks when they experience heightened malicious envy. We also identify two contextual moderators: social media literacy (as a person-level buffer) and exposure to others' incivility (as a situational amplifier). Our findings move beyond trait-based models of online deviance to demonstrate that incivility fluctuates with emotional states, varies by context, and is amenable to targeted intervention. We conclude by outlining practical implications for designing user-facing tools and educational strategies to curb the issue of incivility on SNSs.
