This study examined how platform ecosystem governance mechanisms, as enacted through human intermediaries, influenced the formation and institutionalization of new practices among smallholder farmers in an ICT4D context. We conceptualize platform ecosystems as socio-technical systems comprising platform owners, complementors, intermediaries, and end-users whose interactions shape governance through digital and physical interactions. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, we investigated eKutir, a platform-based social enterprise in India that employed local micro-entrepreneurs to mediate interactions between farmers and a digital platform. A quasi-experimental difference-in-differences analysis showed that after one year, farmers in intervention villages (n = 120) experienced an increase (β = 0.32, p = 0.014) in confidence using digital agricultural technologies, relative to control groups (n = 120), signaling the early institutionalization of new practices. Qualitative data from interviews (n = 12) and focus groups (n = 83) enabled the development of a six-phase process model tracing governance mechanisms that shaped the emergence and institutionalization of new practices: (i) forming digital and physical connections, (ii) gaining legitimacy, (iii) establishing inter-field resource dependencies, (iv) distributing power, (v) standardizing practices, and (vi) sustaining changes in practices. Micro-entrepreneurs played a central role in enacting platform governance on the ground by translating rules, facilitating connectivity, and enabling access. This study contributes to literature on platform governance by showing how governance influenced practices through intermediaries and their digital and physical interactions. It also extends ICT4D research by theorizing how development platform ecosystems embed durable change, shifting focus from adoption outcomes alone to the process of change among marginalized communities. Practical insights for sustainable development and policy are discussed.
The ubiquitous productivity software for information-sharing and collaboration activities has been designed mainly for a sighted organisational environment. This ingrained assumption inevitably leads to normative and habitual information sharing and collaborative practices that accentuate the ‘visual’ nature of information, consequently excluding blind professionals from workplace participation. By acknowledging the interconnectedness between exclusion and inclusion as socially embedded processes and considering the entanglement between visual information representations and visual information practices, this study examines how blind and sighted professionals use digital tools to overcome the challenges of working in a predominantly visual information context. We examine email messages, office documents and PowerPoint slides as they are commonly used information objects in organisations. Our multilevel analysis pays attention to the enabling and constraining roles of representational materialities of information and scrutinises the individual actions of blind professionals, their dyadic interactions with sighted colleagues and the emerging collective actions with other sighted individuals. Drawing on our analysis, we develop a workplace inclusion framework that articulates carefully orchestrated collaborative processes between sighted and blind professionals to overcome constraints imposed by visuals. These processes reveal how ambiguity, imperfection and complexity in information representations trigger the reframing of visuals and deliberate actions of disconfirmation, enquiry and remaking of habitual ways of working with information, thereby evolving collaborative information practices, namely de-visualising, re-visualising, and co-visualising, that shape workplace inclusion.
There is an abundance of research that focuses on individual emotional responses to technology use. However, there is little account and conceptualization of the social context and its interplay at the individual level. The aim of this theory and review paper is to address this gap by developing a Social-Individual Theory of User Emotion (SITUE). By investigating these interplays, we produce implications to enhance user experience and technology use efficacy. Through this framework we discovered that reflexive monitoring is a central concept in enabling and constraining user emotion production-we reframe this as reflexive appraisal. We explore the implications of this and related concepts through formal pathway models.
We sought to capture the emotions human staff experience as sociomateriality unfolds in hybrid front-of-house restaurant teams. To this end, engaging Weiss and Cropanzano's affective events theory (AET) and Pickering's mangle of practice as our theoretical framework, we undertook a multi-site, multi-city, multi-method study combining visual and qualitative techniques in Indian full-service, dine-in, family restaurants with human and robot waiters. Our data included 146 photographs, 24 in-depth and photoelicitation interviews and field observations, which were analysed through grounded visual pattern techniques and thematic logocentric techniques. Our findings uncovered human staff's emotional ambivalence (i.e., simultaneous contradictory emotions including excitement, happiness, fear, annoyance, irritation, relief, protectiveness and pride) as they navigated sociomaterial entanglement. Notwithstanding their emotional ambivalence, human staff's intentionality aided their accommodation and tuning response to their robot co-workers' resistance arising from limited mechanical and digital materialities. In so doing, human staff ensured flawless customer service and effective goal delivery. Our theoretical contribution shows how sociomaterial entanglement, as an affective event, triggers human staff's emotional ambivalence which impacts their emotional practices and reflects sub-cognitive, affectively-located, subjective experiences. By focusing on emotions, our study addresses a long-standing and much-recognized gap in the sociomateriality literature. Further, by capturing customers' sociomaterial entanglement and emotional ambivalence, albeit through human staff's narratives, we add a new actor to the sociomateriality literature, while also adding visual methods to the sociomateriality methods repertoire. Besides, our study operates as a microstructure which advances the AET macrostructure.
This paper examines the evolution of India's National Health Information Architecture (NHIA) from 2005 to 2024 through a longitudinal case study of four phases of reform. Drawing on complexity science and information infrastructure research, it asks three questions: how earlier systems shaped later reform, when change relied on top-down engineering rather than more gradual cultivation, and what unintended effects followed and were, or were not, recognised and addressed.The analysis shows that major national initiatives sought to modernise and integrate health information systems through technological interventions yet often added new layers to older arrangements instead. As a result, fragmentation frequently persisted and, in some respects, expanded despite efforts at integration. Centralised platforms improved visibility and enabled national scale, but they also often reduced local flexibility. Because new systems were added to existing workflows rather than replacing them, parallel systems and reporting burdens persisted. By contrast, some digital arrangements introduced during the COVID-19 period proved more effective because they addressed immediate operational needs and linked systems through lighter forms of coordination. These gains were real, but often fragile and difficult to sustain beyond the crisis.The paper argues that NHIA reform is better understood as the governance of an evolving infrastructure than as a sequence of a historical technical replacements.
This article investigates the introduction of AI in a patent law firm. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 42 patent attorneys and specialist professional staff in the firm, we examine how patent attorneys perceived AI and responded through identity work. While extant literature suggests that professionals' appropriate technologies in ways that an old identity (who they were) is revised through identity work (who they could be), with technology as a core identity marker, our findings present an alternative picture. We identified three interrelated identity dimensions (individual, organization, and profession) that shaped how patent attorneys responded during the implementation of a new AI tool by: contesting the changing perceptions of autonomy, compromising in the effort to integrate AI with existing processes and practices, and connecting with clients in novel ways as they reshaped established ways of thinking and working. Our analysis highlights how the specific characteristics of AI (automation and/or augmentation) generated a fragmented professional identity instead of evolving into a revised, collective identity. This article contributes to the literature on IS and identity by highlighting the complex and fragmented nature of identity change in the face of AI implementation. The study is unique, as it captures the transitional moment when a groundbreaking technology is first implemented in a professional service firm.
Sharing data to enable artificial intelligence (AI) development creates unique tensions in contemporary data governance: balancing model robustness and bias reduction with strict requirements to protect privacy and personal rights, defining conditions for responsible data reuse, and reconciling control over data with desires for open data. In healthcare and nursing, these tensions are particularly pronounced, and existing governance arrangements often prove insufficient to resolve them. However, we still know little about how data-sharing initiatives actually navigate these tensions in practice, and how their governance activities form into overarching orientations, or stances, toward data governance. This study examines four forerunner initiatives that sought to establish data repositories to share data for future AI development. A comparative case analysis reveals twelve concrete data governance practices-situated activities through which stakeholders addressed the specific challenges of sharing data. Patterns across cases revealed that these practices formed three overarching stances toward data governance. We present a progressive, integrative, and protective stance toward data governance, each highlighting specific practices of reconciliation and leading to a variety of outcomes for future AI development. Our findings highlight the importance of aligning normative, organizational, and technical practices and suggest that data governance for sharing data to enable AI development is far from uniform. Instead, it encompasses diverse and situated practices through which responsibility, control, and openness are continually negotiated.
Third-party transaction platforms have significantly reshaped complementor-consumer power dynamics. Based on a multiple-case study, we examined how being a rule-maker and an economic participant simultaneously, platform owners can design governance rules to affect complementorconsumer normative and utilitarian power dynamics, in contrast to those offline. Platform owners unevenly exercise power over complementors and consumers, undermining complementors' power position vis-a`-vis consumers. In addition, platform governance rules further tilt complementor-consumer power dynamics to consumers. The findings contribute to both platform governance studies and the stakeholder theory by providing a theoretical framework to conceptualize complementor-stakeholder power dynamics under a governance where a stakeholder assumes both regulatory and economic roles.
Beyond the established need for digital skills and a digital mindset, the role of workers on the ground in enabling digital transformation (DT) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we recast DT as worker-centred practice adaptation with the case of auction sales of fine art and antiques shifting from mainly copresent to hybrid events during the COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to a drastic acceleration of auction houses' DT. With a longitudinal, sociomaterial study based on ethnographic fieldwork and video analysis, we show how auctioneers adapted their established practices in radically new and changing material configurations, to coordinate and order bids, to display the source of bids, and to pursue bidders. We show how hybrid copresence is created through new sociomaterial entanglements, reducing asymmetries between remote and copresent participants and bringing them together in a shared virtual environment encouraging participation and bidding. We theorise the empirical findings with three patterns of practice adaptation—imposing, transposing, and changing practices—correlated to the degree to which workers find partial or equivalent resources, or altogether different resources compared to previous material configurations. We integrate these patterns in a dynamic model of workers' clusters of practices over time, providing a more fine-grained understanding of imbrication, the process through which material and social agencies interact and become interlocked into a durable structure. These finding shed new light on how the capabilities of new technologies are gradually enacted through practice adaptation and clusters of practices, ultimately supporting profound organisational restructuring like DT.
Advanced data analytics technology has experienced an explosion of interest as firms seek to increase profits, operational efficiency, and employee engagement through evidence-based management. However, empirical evidence of the impact of this technology on organizational outcomes remains mixed, which assertions of benefits closely matched by concerns about potential adverse outcomes. In this study, we explore the adoption of a popular application of analytics technology - a people analytics system - at Everest, a leadership development consulting firm. By juxtaposing idealized and realized facets of the organizational practices mediated by the system, we highlight the emergence of situational ironies, in which the pursuit of transparency, accountability, and predictability is inverted as organizational members respond to the material agency of the system's functionality. Building upon this analysis, we propose a theoretical model in which idealized and realized practices become ironically misaligned through the tuning of human and material agencies in a system's use. Our findings and the resulting model highlight the role that organizational members' emotions play in the manifestation of situational irony. Blending multiple reference theories, this novel perspective contributes to our understanding of felt experience of situational irony in IS adoption and use, the interplay of material and human agencies, and the experience of people analytics technologies in organizations.
As work becomes increasingly digitally mediated, questions arise about how workers remain visible to one another. Prior research has highlighted two main forms of visibility in digital work: behavioral visibility, based on digital traces of activity, and communicative visibility, based on the observability of asynchronous exchanges. However, the growing pervasiveness of avatars as visual and synchronous representations in digital work introduces novel and underexplored dimensions of visibility. In this review, we conceptualize expressive visibility, which is enabled by avatars and characterized by agentic, multimodal self-presentation. It encompasses five dimensions: (1) presence, (2) non-verbal communication, (3) cuing for objects, (4) movement, and (5) identity. We show that expressive visibility in this context emerges only under specific and often fragile conditions, shaped by alternative modalities, individual control, contextual fidelity, and immersiveness. These contingencies reveal the dual nature of avatars: while they can enable visibility where it might otherwise be absent, they can also constrain it by allowing users to withhold or obscure certain facets of themselves. By distinguishing expressive visibility from other established forms of visibility, this study extends our understanding of how avatars mediate visibility in digital work. It also highlights practical implications and directions for future research, particularly in emerging, avatar-centric contexts such as the Metaverse and human-AI collaboration.
AI introduces competing demands in organizations, creating pressures to balance efficiency and standardization with contextual responsiveness and ethical judgment. Tensions between these competing demands become particularly salient when some areas of organizations push for automation while others for augmentation, as two distinct paradigms of AI implementation. Drawing on a nested case study of a European airline, we follow three AI implementations to explore how higher order properties of the institutional environment shape how actors configure trust and distrust in AI systems in response to two coexisting institutional logics: instrumental-analytic and contextual-normative. We show how these two logics stimulate different trust-distrust configurations, which in turn guide how AI is implemented and adopted within organizations. We identify two reconciliation practices that help organizational actors manage inherent tensions between these competing institutional pressures: mindful evaluation and proactive safeguarding. The research reveals how AI implementation and adoption reflect conflicts between dominant institutional logics and contributes with a novel perspective on the role of institutional logics and trust in projects of AI implementation.
Emerging technologies are often celebrated for their transformative potential long before they are put to the tests of usage and adoption. Promises to radically disrupt existing institutional arrangements in pursuit of a better world play an important role in this process, but how such promises emerge and shape new technological fields, is underexplored. This study examines the relationship between technological affordances and institutional work in the emergence of new technological fields, drawing on data from 371 ventures promising blockchain solutions to tackle grand societal challenges. Findings reveal the emergence of the “blockchain for good” field around a utopian vision of a fair, responsible, efficient, and platformed world governed by blockchain. Such vision is constructed in the transient space between present and future, through affordance-driven institutional work. Three institutional work practices -problematization, prospection, and reification- construct the field in the transient space between future promises and their actualization. Through these practices, ventures mobilize blockchain's prospective affordances to span boundaries across market, state, and community logics, showcasing future visions as present realities. By theorizing prospective technological affordances and their conditions of enactability, the study highlights how prospective affordances drive institutional work, shaping the early emergence of new technological fields even before a technology is market-ready or widely adopted.
The public sector faces increasing pressure to drive digital innovation to meet modern societies' demands. Existing literature calls for systematic approaches to digital innovation in the public sector and a better understanding thereof. However, the public sector still struggles to foster digital innovation and often fails to promote explorative initiatives as a basis for innovation. In this paper, using a case study of a German consortium project, we investigate how public-private partnerships can promote digital innovation in the public sector. We do so by adopting the resourcing perspective and building on recent conceptual work on network resourcing. Our findings reveal that the unique characteristics of digital innovation, as opposed to traditional forms of innovation, influence how public-private partnerships can effectively drive digital innovation. We identify decentralized, cross-sector digital innovation clusters as a critical factor for the emergence of digital innovation in public-private partnerships and theorize dissemination practices as an extension to network resourcing in cases of distributed innovation agency within networks of public-private partnerships.
How a community scales yet retains its fundamental character is a perennial puzzle - doubly so for a decentralized technology-mediated community. Based on our longitudinal case study of Ethereum, we argue that scaling can be done via a set of co-constitutive change processes called prefigurative enrolling. Our historical assessment of this case was assisted by structural topic modeling (STM) of blogs, crypto media, and news outlets. This revealed three phases in prefigurative enrolling. The first was around roadmaps for community imaginaries, shock events (a major hack), and reactive technology and governance adjustments. The second involved distributed experimentation, staking as anting-in, and anticipation of security and regulatory requirements in platform protocols. The third was the emotional reframing of field issues (such as sustainability), building a new tech-mediated community language and philosophy, and elaborating roles and interdependencies. These phases allowed for the democratic community logic to be gradually combined with a more market one in a blended configuration of responsible crypto finance. This paper contributes to work on technology community scaling, institutional co-constitution, and structural topic modeling.
This paper examines how social media platforms - as a new form of media organization - challenge the principles of a democratic public sphere, a key pillar of liberal-democratic societies. To do so, we draw on the institutional logics perspective, which allows connecting societal-level institutional orders with the ways in which organizations, sometimes strategically, use and thereby potentially redefine these orders. Based on comprehensive secondary data, we analyze YouTube as an exemplary case of how the logics of the market, the corporation, and the community are selectively appropriated and strategically subverted by large, centralized and commercially oriented social media platforms. YouTube rhetorically deploys market logic narratives of meritocratic competition and equal opportunity, yet operationally creates algorithmic hierarchies that favor established creators and concentrate market power. Similarly, the platform invokes the community logic by promoting democratic participation and collective expression while its algorithmic architecture amplifies polarizing content and fragments public discourse. The corporate logic manifests through bureaucratic governance structures that extend organizational control to users without reciprocal accountability mechanisms. Examining the Fediverse as an organizational alternative based on decentralized architectures and distributed governance, we argue that these mechanisms reflect strategic choices rather than technological inevitability. Highlighting the power of social media platforms to manipulate and undermine institutional logics, we discuss how contestation around their governance also entails contestation around the interinstitutional system structuring societies because of their important role in shaping the public sphere.
With the ever-growing incidence of data breaches and the inability of regulation to keep pace with technological advances, organizations must seek to address privacy beyond the minimum regulatory requirements, including wider societal and political responsibilities. These privacyspecific responsibilities are often enacted through activities in the non-market environment, i. e., the social, political, and legal interactions organizations have with key stakeholders that indirectly affect profitability. Such non-market privacy activities have the potential to enhance privacy effectiveness and yield reputational benefits. However, there is a dearth of research exploring how organizations' privacy-related actions in the non-market environment influence consumer perceptions and behavior. This research integrates power responsibility equilibrium (PRE) theory to explore how the levels of control and justice signaled by an organization's nonmarket privacy activities impact consumer outcomes (trust, privacy concern, and purchase/ continuance intentions). These hypotheses are explored quantitatively using two experimental vignette studies (Experiment 1, n = 396; Experiment 2, n = 503). Findings provide strong empirical support for the role of perceived control and justice in shaping consumer responses to organizational privacy behaviors and highlight opportunities to enhance the consumer trust. Our results also challenge the adequacy of current risk-based approaches to privacy protection and suggest a trust-based approach may be more effective. This research contributes to both the information systems and the non-market strategy literatures by extending the application of PRE Theory to the domain of non-market privacy activities and offering empirical support of its relevance to consumer-firm relationships.
Technical debt (TD) highlights the consequences of suboptimal design decisions made during Information Systems (IS) development. Despite reducing IS quality, if taken strategically and managed proactively, TD enables firms to gain a competitive advantage in the short-term. However, if taken without strategic intent and left unresolved, TD can lead to significant costs in the long-term. Previous studies mainly examine TD accumulation at the organizational level and its latent costs to the organization. However, considering the crucial role of individuals in IS development, further research is needed to provide us with a theoretical understanding of TD that is accumulated because of unnecessary shortcuts taken by software professionals without any strategic intent. To explore this costly concern, we interviewed 25 software professionals across industry domains and from all three global regions. Using accountability theory as a lens, we conducted thematic analysis and qualitative comparative analysis to uncover the participants' perceptions of responsibilities and accountability issues associated with the accumulation and management of TD. Our analysis shows that software professionals' perception of TD accountability is influenced by 1) the extent to which prospective and retrospective accountability mechanisms are established in organizations and the way they are followed (i.e., bureaucratically vs. democratically) and 2) the extent to which collective culture emphasizes the importance of ensuring software quality and promotes compliance with quality rules. Thus, we propose TD accountability as a crucial coordination and consensus building mechanism for promoting a quality culture in development teams and facilitating appropriate accumulation and management of TD in organizations. In addition to contributing to IS literature, we provide insights for organizations to coordinate the accumulation and management of TD.
Digital innovations (DIs) affect individuals, organisations, industries, and economies. However, the extant literature lacks an understanding of how DIs emerge and how they shape their environment in the very early, pre-emerging phase of a technology, where the technology can influence many industries. To understand the pre-emerging phase, we employ stage-based modelling by analysing rich qualitative data in the context of self-sovereign identity (SSI) technology. Our results identify the interoperability (i.e., the ability of multiple systems to interact with each other) requirement of DIs as a shaping factor of their emergence. Further, we propose a stage model that explains the emergence of SSI-facilitated DIs and an SSI innovation-fostering environment. The model consists of three qualitatively different stages with stage-specific salient questions, mechanisms, and outcomes. This work primarily contributes to the DI literature in the SSI context and has policy and practical implications for regulators and other practitioners.
