Frantz Rowe

Nantes Université | UNIV Nantes · Institut d'Economie et de Management de Nantes (IAE)

This literature review is the first to summarize past research on e-commerce transformations and outline a research agenda to understand them. By bringing together concepts from institutional and organizational transformation theories, we develop a conceptual framework to analyze e-commerce transformations and their dynamics. We review 91 papers on...

Gaining and sustaining a competitive advantage in a VUCA context characterized by Volatile environments; Uncertain outcomes; Complex operational networks; and Ambiguous decisions has made digital transformation key to effective business management. Dynamic capabilities provide a conceptual foundation that sheds light on digital transformation as a...

What if reality is fundamentally consisting in events and processes, rather than things? All actions are situated within processes, influenced by a broader set of preceding and concomitant flows of digital information and other actions. This paper offers a process philosophy perspective that sees things as merely constellations of processes. Decisi...

In this paper, we revisit the issue of collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct literature reviews and discuss if this should be done and how it could be done. We also call for further reflection on the epistemic values at risk when using certain types of AI tools based on machine learning or generative AI at different stages of t...

Les géants du capitalisme numérique exploitent des pratiques de big data reposant sur la datafication de nos comportements, sur l’accès permanent à ces données et sur leur traitement par apprentissage automatique. Nous nous enfermons dans ces pratiques et les plateformes associées sans en être pleinement conscients. Cet article propose une théorie...

Although some scholars raise alarm about societal harm emerging from Big Data practices, critical social theory (CST) Information Systems research on the structures and dynamics driving Big Data practices is rare. In this research commentary, we interrogate how tech firms use social practices and platform design to strategically manipulate individu...

Autonomous driving systems (ADS) operate in an environment that is inherently complex. As these systems may execute a task without the permission of a human agent, they raise major safety and responsibility issues. To identify the relevant issues for information systems, we conducted a critical and scoping review of the literature from many discipl...

Using a sample of 848 workers in France, this article aims to explain problematic smartphone dependency, a behavior considered to have negative consequences for sufferers in the context of work. It examines whether and how addictive pleasure at work is related to problematic smartphone dependency (PSD). The authors propose a model with the original...

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistin- guishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts...

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts f...

Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts f...

As banks face heightened levels of regulatory challenges, many of them, especially those in developing countries, are struggling to maintain their reputations. This paper addresses the following questions: How do commercial banks in developing countries like Lebanon respond to institutional pressures for compliance concerning anti-money laundering...

The forthcoming JAIS special issue on “Envisioning Digital Transformation” is predicated on the assumption that theoretical diversity would be a good thing for the IS field. But making sense of theoretical diversity requires either a common frame of reference or crystal clarity about concept definitions and the phenomena to which they point. In thi...

New COVID-19 variants, either of higher viral load such as delta or higher contagiousness like omicron, can lead to higher airborne transmission than historical strains. This paper highlights their implications for health policies, based on a clear analytical understanding and modeling of the airborne contamination paths, of the dose following expo...

How can and should the IS field best contribute to the Social Welfare Computing research agenda, which seeks to assess unintended consequences and propose better solutions related to the potential harms of digital business practices? In this discussion paper, we take Amazon.com, Inc. as an instance of a giant digital company and examine it structur...

The UN COP26 2021 conference on climate change offers the chance for world leaders to take action and make urgent and meaningful commitments to reducing emissions and limit global temperatures to 1.5 • C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Whilst the political aspects and subsequent ramifications of these fundamental and critical decisions cannot...

Dominant American online platforms like Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant have become Life Control Interfaces (LCIs) , which facilitate consumers’ online interactions and influence what consumers do and do not see and buy. These platforms operate outside of EU regulation, and create significant costs for traditional European firms in a wide range of...

In the current context of scientific information overload, we propose a method combining bibliometrics and grounded theory to conduct literature reviews that have a descriptive, understanding or explanatory purpose. This overall inductive combined method, which we name BIBGT (BIB = Bibliometrics; GT = Grounded Theory) provides a powerful instrument...

New COVID-19 variants, either of higher viral load such as delta or higher contagiousness like omicron, can lead to higher airborne transmission than historical strains. This paper highlights their implications for health policies, based on a clear analytical understanding and modeling of the airborne contamination paths, of the dose following expo...

If agency is the core capacity to act and autonomy is the capacity to act in an uncoerced manner, then free will is the condition of possibility in which agency and autonomy may occur. Greater philosophical clarity concerning free will – and determinism – can benefit a critical view of digital determinism, represented by the move toward dystopian f...

Innovation projects rely increasingly on digital objects as a means of developing and sharing knowledge within an organisation. The maturation of a digital object is important because only those objects that mature lead to actual products. There is, however, a catch 22. For objects to mature, they have to be shared; conversely, only mature objects...

La dépendance problématique au smartphone considère la dépendance comme un comportement qui a des conséquences négatives et sévères pour l'individu qui en souffre. Cherchant à expliquer cette dépendance dans la population des actifs en France, population très peu étudiée dans la littérature sur l'addiction au smartphone, cette recherche conçoit cet...

This chapter represents Markus and Rowe’s (MIS Quarterly, 42(4), 1255–1280, 2018) causal structure framework of ideal-typical positions on three dimensions: Causal Ontology, Causal Trajectory, and Causal Autonomy. The focus of the Causal Ontology dimension is: Does the theorist conceive of causality as existing in the human mind or in reality? The...

We study youth materialism as an antecedent of problematic smartphone dependency among adolescents. Based on Uses and Gratifications theory and the I-PACE framework, we consider process- and social-oriented smartphones as mediators in the relationship between youth materialism and problematic smartphone dependency. Using data from 463 French late a...

Using a core idea of critical social theory, alienation, we interrogate the failure in the design and adoption of a Stop-COVID app in France. We analyse the political and scientific discourse, to develop an understanding of the conditions giving rise to this failure in this unprecedented moment. We argue that the digital-first solutionist approach...

Using a core idea of critical social theory, alienation, we interrogate the failure in design and adoption of a Stop-COVID app in France. We analyse the political and scientific discourse, to develop an understanding of the conditions giving rise to this failure in this unprecedented moment. We argue that the digital first solutionist approach take...

Although agile software development approaches have become increasingly prevalent, many organizations, have found they were not able to achieve a more frequent release cadence, largely due to different departmental functions operating in silos. In an effort to remove these silos, companies have moved towards DevOps. As digitalization continues, com...

Agile can be seen as an accelerator to develop software, yet it suffers from bottlenecks between development and operations. DevOps can overcome bottlenecks between agile development teams and operations, notably by providing continuous integration, delivery and deployment, thus improving end-to-end processes between development and operations func...

L'intelligence artificielle, IA, représente un potentiel qui pousse les entreprises à l'injecter dans leurs processus. Toutefois, cette technologie perturbe les organisations en redéfinissant la collaboration homme-machine et en bouleversant le mode de travail. Nous posons dans cette étude la question suivante : Comment se déroule le processus d'ad...

Contact tracing apps are presented as a solution, if not the solution, to curb pandemics in the Covid-19 crisis. In France, despite heated public institutional debate on privacy related issues, the app was presented by government as an essential benefit for protecting health and lives, thus avoiding both politicians and citizens to feel morally res...

This paper argues that the ubiquitous digital networks in which we are increasingly becoming immersed present a threat to our ability to exercise free will. Using process philosophy, and expanding upon understandings of causal autonomy, the paper outlines a thematic analysis of diary studies and interviews gathered in a project exploring the nature...

With the digital revolution and rapid socio-technical changes, such as the advent of DevOps teams with both development (Dev) and operations (Ops) personnel from the project start, information systems (IS) staff may have difficulties adapting, but also see new opportunities for professional mobility. Through Career Anchors theory, this embedded cas...

Agile development methods and DevOps require adaptation during implementation to meet the needs of a constantly changing software development environment. The emergence of knowledge-sharing practices for large-scale DevOps has not been the subject of much research. Our in-depth case study, comprising 106 interviews at a large multinational company...

Digitalizing interorganizational relationships (IORs) concerns B2B partners adopting and using Interorganizational Information Systems (IOSs). The decision to digitalize IORs involves choices about (1) whether or not to digitalize information flows, and (2) which technology to use. We explore whether these two choices are made sequentially or if th...

While Agile can be seen as an accelerator to develop software, it suffers from bottlenecks between development and operations. DevOps overcome agile bottlenecks providing better, quicker and safer deliveries through continuous delivery and deployment, improving end-to-end processes. However, literature on DevOps mechanisms and impacts is still scar...

Agile development approaches have become the norm for almost all software development now. While agile approaches can deliver more frequent releases of working software, it quickly became apparent in many organisations that they were not able to leverage these frequent releases due to the disconnect between the development and operations functions,...

Whatever answer one gives to the question "Is information technology changing the world?," the answer contains reasoning about causality. Causal reasoning is central to IS theorizing. This paper focuses on the concept of causal structure, defined by Markus and Robey (1988) as a theorist's assumptions about causal influences in IS phenomena, and pro...

Configurations identification through Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis method: Contribution of PLM technology to the respect of development time Invented by the sociologist Charles Ragin in the 80 to identify the configurations explaining a phenomenon, the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method has been used in management sciences...

Le commerce électronique par Internet représente une source de transformation importante et risquée pour les organisations. Pour comprendre ce phénomène, nous avons pratiqué une revue de la littérature publiée en sciences de gestion de 1992 à 2016. A partir d’un cadre conceptuel établi à priori, nous y caractérisons conjointement les investissement...

Whatever answer one gives to the question "Is information technology changing the world?" the answer contains reasoning about causality. Causal reasoning is central to IS theorizing. This paper focuses on the concept of causal structure, defined by Markus and Robey (1988) as a theorist's assumptions about causal influences in IS phenomena, and prop...

This study evaluates the cost and carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions of different supply chain configurations to determine when suppliers should move to a greener resource-sharing scheme. We build an analytical model based on a case study of a retailer that has developed a resource-sharing initiative introducing collaborative consolidation centres...

Inventée par le sociologue Charles Ragin dans les années 80 pour identifier les configurations expliquant un phénomène, la méthode Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) est utilisée en sciences de gestion depuis le milieu des années 2000. La recherche en management des systèmes d'information semble faire exception, avec quelques rares articles par...

This paper investigates the relationship between Information Systems (IS) integration and the use of cybersecurity countermeasures using an adapted exposure to risk perspective which considers both the probability of a risk through vulnerability points theory and the impact of the risk if it occurs. Based on an econometric analysis of a survey samp...

While IT can be seen as leveraging dynamic capabilities, it can also be considered as a core organizational capability for exploitation, and thus as a dimension of socio-technical inertia. This paper investigates the latter. When the environment becomes uncertain or when organizations engage in an organizational transformation, inertia or the prope...

Literature reviews (LRs) are recognized for their increasing impact in the information systems literature. Methodologists have drawn attention to the question of how we can leverage the value of LRs to preserve and generate knowledge. The panelists who participated in the discussion of “Standalone Literature Reviews in IS Research: What Can Be Lear...

This paper explores the dynamics between key dissenters and governing agency in the reframing of strategic intent during IT implementation. This topic has not been addressed in the context of Information Systems driven Organizational Transformation (ISOT). Through a longitudinal case study of a telecommunication operator, this paper contributes to...

Researchers and practitioners present entreprise integration to a Supply Chain as a lever for organizational performance. Yet if integration is generating performance, this cannot be done without the acceptance of new constraints due to integrated information systems implementation. We discuss the evaluation of the information systems that support...

S. Alter's Work System Method is used in advancing the understanding and analyses of service innovation Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) from a business systems viewpoint. We propose to use this framework to distinguish what usually characterizes IT-enabled BPO service innovations, and which implications could be drawn for the underlying IS's des...

Les Systèmes d’Information (SI) sont au cœur de la transformation organisationnelle. Ce chapitre propose une réflexion sur la nature et l’évolution de la transformation en questionnant le schéma de Venkatraman (1994) qui repose sur l’intégration interne, la reconception des processus d’affaires, la reconception des réseaux d’affaires et la redéfini...

The ability of organizations to stabilize or to evolve their organizational routines that are structured by an enterprise system is a persistent issue. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework that helps to analyze how enterprise systems can be designed from a control of processes viewpoint and can contribute to routines evolution or to t...

Software vendors offer a portfolio of applications that can be integrated with each other to form product lifecycle management systems (PLMS). Such systems are implemented to create an integrated product information environment. Product information can take the form of relational data, electronic documents, or both. However, implemented PLMS do not...

Le product lifecycle management (PLM) est l’une de ces grandes vagues de réorientation stratégique des processus organisationnels permise par l’évolution des technologies de l’information et de la communication (telle que le customer relationship management (CRM) ou le supply-chain management (SCM)). L’objectif du PLM est la constitution d’un envir...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of Cross-Functional Awareness (CFA) and to question how firm size influences the impact of ERP implementation strategies on CFA. Specifically, the paper questions whether size moderates the capability of the firm to achieve CFA. Design/methodology/approach – The authors developed and em...

Researchers in Information Systems Security (ISS) have recommended the use of fear appeals in order to foster user adoption. However, research in the fields of ethics, management and consumer sales confirm that not only is the use of coercive methods less efficient but it can also cause resistance phenomena. The purpose of our research was to deter...

Innovation is not an option for firms these days, especially those operating in an international context. It is essential for competing, indeed surviving, in today’s rapidly changing and increasingly digital world. We believe that in order to understand how innovation in a digital world can be managed, supported and promoted, we must view it in an...

Since very ancient times, not only philosophers but also savvy religious and political leaders have recognized that knowledge is critical to economy and society. The first universities in Europe were built on this assumption. But while the diffusion of knowledge was supposed to bring people to wisdom in a supposedly stable world, what may well have...

Although much research is devoted to high-reliability contexts, relatively few works focus on the reliability of more conventional processes in industry or services. In these more traditional situations of performance improvement, the criterion of reliability is often coupled with that of productivity. This chapter describes the contribution of pro...

With the emergence of new technologies, companies can organize their electronic data exchanges by implementing hybrid interorganizational information systems (IOS). This paper presents a new analytical framework by considering IOS as the product of interconnections between the parts of IS developed by connected firms to support a given interorganiz...

Cet article analyse le développement d’une chaîne logistique collaborative mise en place par Carrefour sous la forme des Centres de Consolidation et de Collaboration (CCC). Les résultats montrent l’importance des propriétés du Système d’Information (SI) pour y parvenir. Ces propriétés sont 1) l’interopérabilité non requise avec les SI internes, 2)...

Information Technology is often viewed as imposing too much standardization and limiting flexibility in New Product Development (NPD). This paper aims at understanding how the use of Product Lifecycle Management Technology (PLM) contributes to knowledge sharing in an international NPD environment. The research is based on a longitudinal case study...

Experts and business pundits forecasted drastic changes in Vietnam’s fledgling e-commerce when the Southeast Asian country became an official member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2007. Over the past few years, as part of the Reform – called Doi moi – some Vietnamese enterprises have adopted e-commerce and already benefitted from it...

Twenty years after the promise of Information Systems enabling Organizational Transformation (IS-enabled OT), what have we learned? This paper reviews the literature in order to better understand this phenomenon. As specialists in IS, strategy and organizational studies, we analyze the discourse on OT found in the strategy, organizational theory an...

This paper, based on a cross-sectional empirical study of information system (IS) architectures within 143 small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in France, reports findings on how SMEs architect to achieve IS integration and interoperability. This research provides an empirically derived taxonomy of enterprise architectural variants of the types often...

L'objectif de ce papier est de vérifier s'il existe une relation entre l'intégration des SI en interne et en externe. L'analyse se base sur la littérature liant intégration interne et externe et notamment sur le schéma proposé par Venkatraman présentant les phases d'évolution de l'entreprise. A partir de l'enquête COI-TIC, des indicateurs synthétiq...

This paper reports a study that challenges the widely-held assumption that security and functionality are a tradeoff relationship. Based on a survey sample of more than 9000 French firms, the study finds that higher degrees of system functionality entail higher degrees of security. Rather than sharing a tradeoff relation in which more security inve...

This paper is about knowledge sharing and maturation in new product development (NPD). We show how knowledge items mature as they are shared in expanding circles of trust until the items are exhausted and transformed to new knowledge items to serve new activities. Our conceptual framework integrates knowledge sharing, circles of trust and knowledge...

Does Enterprise Systems (ES) integration pay off? Research on IS integration has been an enduring quest for the IS discipline. Is it really worth it? Research has often responded to the question positively. It is useful to explore which conditions ES is likely to yield value. Research has also shown that less imitable factors such as the quality of...

This research in progress aims at investigating the role that information system (IS) and information quality (IQ) can play for the transformation of a Supply Chain. A case study was conducted to identify the supply chain evolution of a major French retailer that initiated consolidation centres for shared deliveries between several small suppliers...