Gerald C. Kane

Boston College | BC · Information Systems

This manuscript describes our experiences writing a future-oriented, next-generation theory. We provide advice for other theory authors and for reviewers of theory papers. Our advice relates to theorizing challenges as well as the practical and logistical challenges associated with publishing a theory paper. We conclude by calling attention to area...

Machine learning tools are increasingly infiltrating everyday work life with implications for workers. By looking at machine learning tools as part of a sociotechnical system, we explore how machine learning tools enforce oppression of workers. We theorize, normatively, that with reorganizing processes in place, oppressive characteristics could be...

In this business bestseller, how companies can adapt in an era of continuous disruption: a guide to responding to such acute crises as COVID-19. Gold Medalist in Business Disruption/Reinvention. When COVID-19 hit, businesses had to respond almost instantaneously—shifting employees to remote work, repairing broken supply chains, keeping pace with dr...

Widespread use of machine learning (ML) systems could result in an oppressive future of ubiquitous monitoring and behavior control that, for dialogic purposes, we call "Informania." This dystopian future results from ML systems' inherent design based on training data rather than built with code. To avoid this oppressive future, we develop the conce...

Why an organization's response to digital disruption should focus on people and processes and not necessarily on technology. Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guid...

Advice on how companies can succeed in the new digital business environment. The most important skills a leader needs to succeed in a digital environment are not technical in nature but managerial—strategic vision, forward-looking perspective, change-oriented mindset. A company's digital transformation does not involve abandoning widget-making for...

Companies increasingly rely on open collaboration communities to create knowledge and organize work. Open collaboration communities are unique in that every consumer of the content created by the community is also a potential contributor. We show that consumption and contribution in open collaboration communities positively reinforce each other, bu...

The 15-year history of collaboration on Wikipedia offers insight into how peer production communities create knowledge. In this research, we combine disparate content and collaboration approaches through a social network analysis approach known as an affiliation network. It captures both how knowledge is transferred in a peer production network and...

We argue and find that negative ties are not always liabilities to workplace performance. Instead, negative ties can be beneficial depending on how socially distant they are from the person (i.e., whether they are direct or indirect negative ties), and how those ties are embedded with other ties. Results from a field study at a large life sciences...

Despite enterprise social software platforms’ (ESSPs) widespread diffusion in recent years, the impact of such systems on employee performance is not clear. This study explores the link between ESSP use and its potential performance impacts. Our findings show that ESSP use influences employee performance in two ways: through improved task performan...

This article provides a platform-independent framework for considering the effects of social media on enterprises. The framework comprises the two fundamental capabilities of social media: establishing social networks and accessing digital content; and the two impacts these capabilities have on organizations-employee performance and user behavior....

In the few short years of its existence, the Internet has fundamentally changed society in numerous ways. One key technology behind this transformation is the World Wide Web. Originally, the Web primarily allowed static viewing of content. Now, an important shift is taking place as the original Web (“version 1.0”) is evolving to support new ways of...

Online coproduction communities often face a challenge of whether to change or retain the knowledge they have created. Disparate and often conflicting theoretical models have been used to explain how these communities respond to this tension. We conducted a case study of how one online coproduction community—the nine-year history of the Wikipedia a...

A recent survey by MIT SMR and Deloitte shows that companies are starting to derive real value from social business - with the payoff concentrated most strongly in companies that have reached a certain level of sophistication in relation to their social business initiatives. The higher a respondent rated his or her company on a "social business mat...

Online coproduction communities often face a challenge of whether to change or retain the knowledge they have created. Disparate and often conflicting theoretical models have been used to explain how these communities respond to this tension. We conducted a case study of how one online coproduction community—the nine-year history of the Wikipedia a...

The use of social media creates the opportunity to turn organization-wide knowledge sharing in the workplace from an intermittent, centralized knowledge management process to a continuous online knowledge conversation of strangers, unexpected interpretations and re-uses, and dynamic emergence. We theorize four affordances of social media representi...

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation and widespread adoption of a new class of information technologies, commonly known as social media. Researchers often rely on social network analysis (SNA) in attempting to understand these technologies, often without considering how the novel capabilities of social media platforms might affect...

While considerable research investigates collaboration in online production communities, particularly how and why people join these communities, little research considers the dynamics of the collaborative behavior. This paper explores one such dynamic, the relationship between viewing and contributing. Building on established theories of community...

Social media provides new capabilities for engaging in symbolic action through digital content and network structure. Most social media research assumes that people engage in similar symbolic actions regardless of their developmental maturity. Developmental psychology, however, argues that people are capable of different symbolic engagement and exh...

Using 16,068 articles in Wikipedia's Medicine Wikiproject, we study the relationship between collaboration and quality. We assess whether certain collaborative patterns are associated with information quality in terms of self-evaluated quality and article viewership. We find that the number of contributors has a curvilinear relationship to informat...

This study investigates the peer effects of worker productivity among knowledge workers who interact through digital communication channels. We draw on social and developmental network research to examine the performance of 248 knowledge workers and their 1,027 email contacts. The average performance of contacts in a digital communication network r...

This paper argues that social media combines the codification and collaboration features of earlier generations of knowledge management systems. This combination potentially changes the way knowledge is created, potentially requiring new theories and methods for understanding these processes. We forward the specialized social network method of two-...

Virtually all of the extensive previous research investigating the effect of information systems proficiency on performance has been conducted at the individual level. Little research has investigated the relationship between IS proficiency and performance at the group level. In this paper, we argue that IS proficiency at the group level may be mor...

Firms increasingly turn to online communities to create valuable information. These communities are empowered by new information technology-enabled collaborative tools, tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networks. Collaboration on these platforms is characterized by considerable membership turnover, which could have significant effects on colla...

The information systems (IS) literature has focused considerable research on IS resistance, particularly in the health-care industry. Most of this attention has focused on the impact of IS resistance on systems' initial implementation, but little research has investigated whether and how post-adoption resistance affects performance. We focus on a p...

User-generated content is increasingly created through the collaborative efforts of multiple individuals. In this article, we argue that the value of collaborative user-generated content is a function both of the direct efforts of its contributors and its embeddedness in the content-contributor network that creates it. An analysis of Wikipedia's Me...

In this article, the author presents the results of a two-phase, multimethod study of wiki-based collaboration in an attempt to better understand how peer-produced collaboration is done well in wiki environments. Phase 1 involves an in-depth case study of the collaborative processes surrounding the development of the Wikipedia article on the 2007 V...

The acquisition and use of personal information by large corporations continues to be a leading issue in the age of virtual communication and collaboration. This research reviews and analyzes the privacy policies of large US companies to evaluate the substance and quality of their stated information practices. Six factors are identified that indica...

Privacy concerns and practices, especially those dealing with the acquisition and use of consumer personal information by corporations, are at the forefront of business and social issues associated with the information age. This research examines the privacy policies of large U.S. companies to assess the substance and quality of their stated inform...

Before the Internet, organizations had far more time to monitor and respond to community activity, but that luxury is long gone, leaving them in dire need of a coherent outreach strategy, fresh skills, and adaptive tactics. Drawing on the authors' study of more than two dozen firms, this article describes the changes wrought by social media in part...

This paper studies the collaboration process on Wikipedia to determine whether particular collaborative processes are associated witharti cle quality. Employing a sample of 300 articles on medical and health-related topics, this paper examines the impact of t he article’s position within the two-mode affiliation network ofa rticles and editorso n a...

Privacy concerns and practices, especially those dealing with the acquisition and use of consumer personal information by corporations, are at the forefront of business and social issues associated with the information age. This research examines the privacy policies of large U.S. companies to assess the substance and quality of their stated inform...

This paper argues that Web 2.0 tools, specifically wikis, have begun to influence business and knowledge sharing practices in many organizations. Information Systems researchers have spent considerable time exploring the impact and implications of these tools in organizations, but those same researchers have not spent sufficient time considering wh...

Although considerable research has investigated perspective making and perspective taking processes in existing communities of practice, little research has explored how these processes are manifest in fluid online collectives. Fluid collectives do not share common emotional bonds, shared languages, mental models, or clearly defined boundaries that...

This paper argues that Web 2.0 tools, specifically wikis, have begun to influence business and knowledge sharing practices in many organizations. Information Systems researchers have spent considerable time exploring the impact and implications of these tools in organizations, but those same researchers have not spent sufficient time considering wh...

Information systems (IS) researchers have typically examined the user-system relationship as an isolated dyad between a single, independent user and an individual, freestanding information system. We argue that this conceptualization does not adequately represent most organizations today, in which multiple users interact with multiple information s...

Privacy concerns and practices, especially those dealing with the acquisition and use of consumer personal information, are at the forefront of global business and social issues associated with the information age. Our research examined the privacy policies of the Fortune 500 to assess the substance and content of their stated information practices...

Corporate information privacy policies are receiving increased attention in the information privacy debate. Prior studies used Web surveys to analyze the content of online information privacy policies and to assess whether or not the policies comply with a standard known as the Fair Information Practices. One assumption of these studies is that the...

This study investigates the effects of information technology (IT) on exploration and exploitation in organizational learning (OL). We use qualitative evidence from previously published case studies of a single organization to extend an earlier computational model of organizational learning (March 1991) by introducing IT-enabled learning mechanisms...

Recent information systems research has challenged the tendency of researchers to focus upon single information systems (Vertegaal 2003) and upon individuals simply as users of those systems (Lamb and Kling 2003). Responding to these critiques, this paper forwards a new paradigm through which to study knowledge management - the multimodal knowledge...

Using computational modeling of organizational learning, March (1991) differentiated between two learning mechanisms - exploration and exploitation. Exploitation refers to the mechanism by which individuals modify their beliefs to that of the organizational code, thereby diffusing organizational knowledge. Exploration refers to the modification of...