Susan V. Scott

London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Management

As “the digital” becomes pervasive within organizations and industries, it is increasingly evident that how we live, work, connect, coordinate, and govern are being significantly changed by digitalization. Many of these digital transformations are highly visible and dramatic, involving a purposeful repositioning and restructuring of organizations a...

Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear...

Scholarship on digital transformation has centered on how waves of digitalization have moved through industries, producing strategic changes within and across firms and enabling new forms of value creation. In this paper, we argue that different but no less important processes of digital transformation are generated by the undertow produced by thes...

As conditions of crisis disrupt established practices, existing ways of doing things are interrupted and called into question. The suspension of routine sociomaterial enactments produces openings for liminal innovation, a process entailing iterative experimentation and implementation that explores novel or alternative materializations of establishe...

As blockchain platforms are becoming increasingly noticeable in financial services and beyond, questions arise regarding their suitability to compete with or replace existing payment systems and marketplaces and redesign the financial infrastructures of the future. Prominent among these concerns are issues around governance and control in distribut...

We examine the impact on bank performance of the adoption of SWIFT, a network-based technological infrastructure and set of standards for worldwide interbank telecommunication. We construct a new longitudinal dataset of 6848 banks in 29 countries in Europe and the Americas with the full history of adoption since SWIFT’s initial operations in 1977....

In what follows, we present the outcome of an imagined dialogue with Tim Ingold on possible future directions for an anthropologically-sensitive approach to studying Information Systems (IS) and Organization Studies (OS). The aim is to try to convey some of the strangeness and freshness that we have found in his thought, with a view to stimulating...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2016, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2016. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: doing process...

Our research focuses on digital publishing, and in particular on how books are discovered online. Historically, the discoverability of paper books has been related to their physical presence and materialization through paper, binding, cover art, weight, and size. Digital books are not physically present in the same way. They are materialized differ...

Our intent in this commentary is to support the turn to materiality in organizational research, and contribute to it by considering some differences in our approach from that proposed by Hardy and Thomas. Drawing on agential realism – which theorizes the entanglement of matter and meaning – we explore the relation between discourse and materiality...

This special issue acknowledges important innovations in the world of service and within this domain we are particularly interested in exploring the rise and influence of web-based crowd-sourcing and algorithmic rating and ranking mechanisms. We suggest that a useful way to make sense of these digital service innovations and their novel implication...

Our intent in this commentary is to support the turn to materiality in organizational research, and contribute to it by considering some differences in our approach from that proposed by Hardy and Thomas. Drawing on agential realism – which theorizes the entanglement of matter and meaning – we explore the relation between discourse and materiality...

Information systems researchers have shown an increasing interest in the notion of sociomateriality. In this paper, we continue this exploration by focusing specifically on entanglement: the inseparability of meaning and matter. Our particular approach is differentiated by its grounding in a relational and performative ontology, and its use of agen...

Our research focuses on the fast-changing landscape of contemporary social media where user-generated content is increasingly being used to evaluate a wide range of products and services. The move to online valuations is raising important questions about how valuations change when they are produced online by consumers and what outcomes they generat...

This book traces the history and development of a mutual organization in the financial sector called SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Over the last forty years, SWIFT has served the financial services sector as proprietary communications platform, provider of products and services, standards developer, and con...

Building on recent developments in mixed methods, we discuss the methodological implications of critical realism and explore how these can guide dynamic mixed-methods research design in information systems. Specifically, we examine the core ontological assumptions of CR in order to gain some perspective on key epistemological issues such as causati...

Drawing on a field study of the travel site TripAdvisor, the authors explore how online reviewing, rating, and ranking mechanisms are overshadowing traditional configurations of knowledge in the hospitality sector by redistributing resources, shifting practices and habitats, and redefining what counts, who counts, and how. The authors suggest that...

This chapter considers the question of commensuration - the process of comparison according to a common metric - and how it is accomplished on online social media websites. When commensurability is produced through the distributed reviews and ratings of thousands of user-generated postings, and transformed through filtering and weighting algorithms...

Research in this article traces the origins of a not-for-profit financial institution called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). SWIFT is a core part of the financial services infrastructure and is widely regarded as the most secure trusted third party network in the world, serving 200 countries with over 8000 u...

This research explores the role of information systems in risk management during a twenty year period when new governance arrangements led to enterprise-wide change in the UK energy markets. We present a longitudinal case study documenting the role of “A-Trade” transaction and risk management software in the adaptation of energy organizations to co...

Expanding use of Web 2.0 technologies has generated complex information dynamics that are propelling organizations in unexpected directions, redrawing boundaries and shifting relationships. Using research on user-generated content, we examine online rating and ranking mechanisms and analyze how their performance reconfigures relations of accountabi...

The complexity of contemporary finance translates into what we call the problem of “description”: the problem of constructing robust, flexible, portable, and mutually compatible depictions of complex, multisided, and often ambiguous financial objects (products, trades, marketplaces). This problem is characteristically exacerbated in back-office ope...

Despite the call for pluralism in IS research there is a lack of multi-method research published in information systems journals. While many researchers might find the idea of using multiple methods attractive, there are barriers that prevent them from employing this approach in practice. In this paper we try to address key philosophical concerns t...

How does a major financial network innovation influence firm performance? Despite much speculation we have little hard quantitative evidence about the impact of technology diffusion in financial services. In this paper we use the entire adoption history for SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication - standards provider...

Expanding use of Web 2.0 technologies has generated complex information dynamics that are propelling organizations in unexpected directions, redrawing boundaries and shifting relationships. As online user-generated content gains momentum, we focus on an analysis of its consequences for relations of accountability. Our specific focus is on the use o...

Can we identify the key characteristics of techno-innovation in the era of deregulated financial services? This is an important question particularly now when many are laying the blame for the emergence of a ‘credit crunch’ in 2008 on ill-managed innovations that fuelled growth in contemporary financial services (see Tett 2009). This chapter draws...

We begin by juxtaposing the pervasive presence of technology in organizational work with its absence from the organization studies literature. Our analysis of four leading journals in the field confirms that over 95% of the articles published in top management research outlets do not take into account the role of technology in organizational life....

Organizations rely extensively upon a myriad of images and pictorial representations such as budgets, schedules, reports, graphs, and organizational charts to name but a few. Visual images play an integral role in the process of organizing. This volume argues that images in organizations are ‘performative’, meaning that they can be seen as performa...

Government, major ICT companies and educational institutions in the UK currently claim that ICT skills training offers inclusion into the new economy. We focus on a private-public training initiative and its impact on the socially excluded, specifically lone women parents. Narrative data from four UK educational sites participating in this computer...

Grid technologies are widely regarded as important innovations for drawing together distributed knowledge workers into virtual communities. After reviewing the developments in e-science, we examine the emergence of e-social science and the potential impact on scientific discovery. Grids are currently in a key developmental phase during which the fi...

The notion of best practice is a foundational concept for vendors of Enterprise Resource Planning systems who use it to support a claim to provide tried and tested, ‘best of breed’ process models. This study illustrates how a best practice ERP system was actually created. The product resulted from a socio-political process involving negotiations am...

Bringing transactions to an end constitutes a crucial stage of market activity: the detachment between the counterparties engaged in a trade must be guaranteed. In financial markets, this operation relies on organisational technologies, such as clearinghouses, that can reach a high degree of sophistication. In this paper, we use financial clearingh...

Globalizing knowledge economies foster conditions that intensify the role and value of organizational reputation risk. In an enterprise-focused era, reputation is a key strategic construct that can act as a boundary object linking communities within and between organizations. Yet approaches to its management tend to be reactive and remain under the...

In this paper we describe a period of strategic crisis (1997–2000) at the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) precipitated by the loss of a key benchmark product from their manual trading environment to an electronic trading platform (DTB/Eurex). Using Bower and Christensen's (1995a) notion of disruptive technology,...

This paper develops a temporal perspective to examine information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption and processes of globalization. The foundations of our theoretical approach explicitly draw upon three intersecting planes of temporality implicit in structuration; namely reversibility, irreversibility and institutionalization. We furthe...

The phrase best practice has entered into common parlance in contemporary business discourse, yet recent research has shown that the construction of industry standards and their inscription into software packages is not straightforward. Organizations increasingly find they are bound to accept project outcomes that have emerged as a consequence of n...

Higher education is a sector entering an era of IT-enabled modernization in which it may have to cope with an influx of unfamiliar corporate concepts and practices. This paper analyzes one of the first Enterprise Resource Planning implementation projects within the academic administration of an Ivy League university. We contribute to existing quali...

Our paper provides insights into the evolving temporal features of global work by examining the transformation of traditional futures markets facilitated by e - trading . This study allows us to examine the temporal features of leaders' strategic response to processes of globalization as well as changes in traders' work. We highlight the connection...

This paper focuses on IT-enabled credit risk modernisation in commercial retail banking. The empirical material is based upon a longitudinal case study conducted during 1993–1996 using an interpretive approach. It documents the introduction of a leading-edge computer-based decision support system into middle market corporate lending processes in a...

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of case study based research exploring the shift from traditional 'open-outcry' to electronic trading in the major futures Markets in London and Chicago. We outline the emergence of electronic trading in these Markets, with the aim of examining the influences that will shape the operation and interaction b...

The widespread use of innovative approaches to studying information systems in their organizational contexts is increasing our knowledge of the diverse, complex world-building activities of the various actors and stakeholders associated with the system. Unfortunately, in so doing, it is also demonstrating the inadequate nature of many of our theore...

This paper describes case study based research on the use of innovative computer-based decision support systems introduced into corporate lending processes in a major UK bank. It describes how the new technology was implicated in shifting boundaries: within the sector as a whole and in specific organizational de-layering; between local/global dimen...

Our paper provides insights into the evolving temporal features of global work by examining the transformation of traditional futures markets facilitated by e- trading . This study allows us to examine the temporal features of leaders' strategic response to processes of globalization as well as changes in traders' work. We highlight the connections...

Today's global financial markets are regarded by many as one of the most visible manifestations of late modernity. Financial markets are expected to be readily available 24 hours a day for trading and to supply a flux of information in the form of prices. However, this image disregards the underlying complexity of the financial markets and their pa...

Early stage papers are work in the course of development. They are reports of research in progress or the preliminary essays in the analysis of recently completed research. We publish them in an effort to make work available to other researchers at an early stage; so that they can both apply the concepts being developed to their own research and te...