Digital financial services (DFS) are reshaping how individuals manage money by embedding real-time tracking, personalised nudges, and frictionless transactions into everyday life. However, research remains largely focused on adoption and current-oriented practices such as short‑term usage and immediate convenience, offering limited insight into how DFS can foster users’ future financial lives and financial well-being, especially for young people who are digitally adept but financially precarious. Financial well‑being, understood as a sense of security and freedom in meeting present and future financial needs, includes both hedonic, and eudaimonic, toward meaningful goals. It is particularly challenging in youth-focused DFS. Drawing on activity theory, we conceptualise financial well-being as an evolving, practice-based activity rather than a static outcome state and investigate how DFS can be effectively leveraged to cultivate young users’ financial well-being. We conducted a qualitative case study of Enrich, a youth-focused DFS offered by a Taiwanese commercial bank. It repositioned from transactional convenience towards future-oriented tools that support financial responses and practices. We propose a pendulum-like framework of activity systems that captures young users’ oscillation between hedonic and eudaimonic orientations in DFS‑mediated practices and helps DFS researchers and designers link usage to longer-term youth financial well-being.
Digital innovation is typically discussed in terms of inclusion, efficiency, and value creation. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) reveal a less visible dimension of digital innovation: their benefits can accrue to a relatively small number of actors, while their environmental and social costs extend beyond those who participate in, or benefit from, the technology. Using NFTs as a revealing case, we examine the tension between digital value creation and socio-environmental cost externalisation. Drawing on the Anthropocene and, in particular, the Capitalocene as a productive interpretive lens, we examine how digital artifacts, often perceived as intangible, are embedded in economic, infrastructural, and institutional arrangements through which benefits, responsibilities, and socio-environmental consequences are unevenly distributed. We argue that this tension adds an important dimension to digital inequality because participation and exposure need not coincide. We therefore call on Information Systems scholars to examine not only who accesses, participates in, and captures value from digital innovation, but also who bears responsibility and who is exposed to its (unintended) consequences. We outline avenues for doing so through multidimensional approaches to digital inequality, climate justice, socio-environmental externalities, and critical futures thinking.
This interpretive study examines how members of virtual teams experience Virtual Team (VT) effectiveness as a socio-technical accomplishment shaped by people, collaboration technologies, and enacted practices. Drawing on 37 semi-structured interviews with Australian IT professionals and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three digitally mediated practice domains: temporal structuring (Focus Time), social presence (Workplace Banter), and visibility/control (Monitoring). Participants’ accounts suggest each domain can enable or inhibit effectiveness depending on calibration. Focus practices support deep work when protected by shared norms and legitimate signalling; lightweight social presence sustains cohesion and psychological safety when optional and inclusive; and visibility practices support accountability when transparent and outcome-oriented but become counterproductive when experienced as surveillance. Our central contribution is a socio-technical calibration account of VT effectiveness, developed through three specific theoretical contributions concerning calibration, digitally mediated practice domains, and enabling/inhibiting boundary conditions. We show that perceived effectiveness arises not from temporal structuring, social presence, or visibility/control in isolation, but from the ongoing adjustment of these digitally mediated practices in relation to one another. This account explains why similar collaboration technologies can enable effectiveness in some teams while inhibiting it in others. We extend VT scholarship by specifying how platform features and local norms jointly shape attention, cohesion, and trust, and we offer design guidance for focus-friendly, socially connective, and trust-preserving digital work arrangements.
In the last decade and a half, social media (SM) tools have had their presence felt in the workplace, across industries and levels of decision-making. Despite research interest, the value of using public SM (PSM) such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for work-related purposes remains a matter of academic debate, even leading to such tools getting banned in workplaces. We utilize a sample of middle and senior managers engaged in knowledge work in India, to examine how the use of PSM tools in the workplace can enable the crucial capabilities of sensing and seizing that are indispensable in the current fast-paced business environment. Further, we examine the role played by managerial social capital in helping managers develop these capabilities because of social media use. We use a hypothetico-deductive survey-based approach using a sample of 208 managers to examine the relationships between PSM use, managerial social capital, and managerial capabilities of sensing and seizing. The findings of this paper contribute to the emerging literature on business value of social media and help advance the extant scholarly understanding of the value added by PSM use at the managerial level, while also having important implications for practitioners. Possible avenues for future research are also discussed.
