Special Section Introduction—Information, Technology, and the Changing Nature of Work
Abstract
The information systems field started with the expectation that information and technology will significantly shape the nature of work. The topic provides ample scope for significant scholarly inquiry. Work content, process, and organization are now different from what they were in the 1960s and 1970s, which provided a foundation for theories and understanding. Although investigations about the changing nature of work have been made for years, this special section recognizes that the time of reckoning has come again. There is a growing need for deeper understanding of information, technology, and work. The specific contributions of this special section are at the heart of new frontiers of research in information, technology, and work. We observe a continued need to study their relationships, and to separate short-term and long-term effects. We expect continued surprises and conclude that patience is required to achieve increased understanding in this important domain.
... Digital work research has highlighted significant implications for organisations and individual workers, such as increasing work complexity, transformation of structures and processes, spatial and temporal independence, and flattening organisational hierarchies (Davison and Ou, 2017;Forman et al., 2014;Grønsund and Aanestad, 2020;Morton et al., 2020). As we dedicate a substantial portion of our time to our jobs, our sense of self and identities are intricately intertwined with our work (Pratt et al., 2006). ...
The advent of ‘digital’ ways of working and organising is unequivocally transforming the very fabric of work, leading to an increasingly uncertain, unsettled, and fluid environment. Research has traditionally anchored worker identity in fixed and place-bound concepts. However, in the digital workplace, where work is more akin to a performance, unfolding over time, and processual in nature, our understanding of work and theories of worker identity are called into question. In this paper, we ask the question: how is digital worker identity performed in such fluid and unsettled work settings? To explain digital worker identity performance, we investigate digital nomadism as an extremely fluid and unsettled case of digital work. We study digital nomads, high-skilled professionals who use digital technologies to work remotely and lead a nomadic lifestyle, in a multi-sited ethnographic field study. Based on a process-relational perspective, we are theorising how the identity of digital nomads, their “becoming,” is performed as an ongoing process along lines of identity performance. This is an intermediate “product of theorising,” in accord with the aim of the special issue, but provides a foundation for a novel process-relational theory of identity performance in unsettled digital work.
... This article analyzes how the implementation and use of digital technologies relate to changes in work conduct, organization, and management in the petroleum industry. Introducing new technology and digital solutions changes work tasks and processes, and digitalization therefore has consequences for the content, execution, and organization of work (Forman et al. 2014;Tilson et al. 2010). However, studies show that it can be challenging to assess and predict what work process adaptations follow from new technology and systems (Cresswell and Sheikh 2013). ...
This article analyses how implementation and use of digital technologies involve changes in work content, organization, and management in the petroleum industry. This is important, given that the industry is in a phase with mature technology and heavy pressure on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, at the same time as older systems and work processes prevail. The article draws on data acquired through interviews in a number of companies, organizations and specialist teams. The results show that far-reaching digitalization will mean radical changes to the way employees and managers work. The level of success in using digital technologies can be related to the ability to alter the content and form of work and expertise requirements, while retaining trust in technology and coping with uncertainty. A key conclusion is that clarifications related to work processes, roles, and responsibilities between the various actors in the supply chain are the most significant obstacles to successful technology adoption.
... In addition, examining the moderating role of perceived workload also addresses calls for research to capture the intertwined relationships between technology use behaviours and work systems (e.g., Forman et al., 2014;Orlikowski & Scott, 2008;Wang et al., 2020). Though technology use behaviours are embedded in work, research on social media use and research on organisations have different theoretical foci, resulting in emphasising either technological factors (e.g., social media use) or organisational factors (e.g., work design) in predicting the influences of technology use (Orlikowski & Barley, 2001;Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). ...
Past research has predominantly regarded (private) socialization-oriented social media (SoSM) use at work as a counterproductive behavior and has thus focused more on its dark side. However, given the prevalence of social media in today’s work life and the various affordances this technology can have, social media might have important bright sides. In this research, drawing on the affordance perspective, we propose that the day-to-day use of SoSM at work is positively associated with perceptions of social connectedness, which is further positively associated with life satisfaction and task performance. We examined our hypotheses using an experience sampling study of 134 full-time employees in China across 10 consecutive workdays. The results of multilevel modeling showed that, as expected, daily SoSM use at work related positively with employees’ perceptions of social connectedness, which in turn predicted their daily life satisfaction and daily task performance. We also found that the relationship between daily SoSM use at work and perceived social connectedness was stronger for employees with higher, rather than lower, perceived workloads. We suggest this moderating effect occurs because social media is an efficient medium, providing greater affordances, through which busy workers can meet their belongingness needs. Overall, our study sheds light on the previously less-studied positive effects of social media use at work.
... This article analyzes how implementation and use of digital technologies relate to changes in work conduct, organization, and management in the petroleum industry. Introducing new technology and digital solutions changes work tasks and processes, and digitalization therefore has consequences for the content, execution, and organization of work (Forman et al. 2014;Tilson 2010). However, studies show that it can be challenging to assess and predict what work-process adaptations follow from new technology and systems (Cresswell and Sheikh 2013). ...
This article analyses how implementation and use of digital technologies involve changes in work content, organization, and management in the petroleum industry. This is important, given that the industry is in a phase with mature technology and heavy pressure on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, at the same time as older systems and work processes prevail. The article draws on data acquired through interviews in a number of companies, organizations and specialist teams. The results show that far-reaching digitalization will mean radical changes to the way employees and managers work. The level of success in using digital technologies can be related to the ability to alter the content and form of work and expertise requirements, while retaining trust in technology and coping with uncertainty. A key conclusion is that clarifications related to work processes, roles, and responsibilities between the various actors in the supply chain are the most significant obstacles to successful technology adoption.
Problem definition: Algorithm-enabled decision support has an increasingly important role in supporting the day-to-day operations of healthcare organizations. Yet, fully realizing the value of algorithmic decision support lies critically in the opportunity to re-engineer the related processes and redefine roles in ways that make organizations more effective. We study how and when algorithm-enabled process innovation (AEPI) creates value in light of dynamic operational environments (i.e., workload) and behavioral responses to algorithmic predictions (i.e., algorithmic accuracy). Our context is an AEPI effort around a rule-based decision-support algorithm for early detection of sepsis—a costly condition that is the leading cause of death for hospitalized patients. We collaborated with a large U.S.-based hospital system and examined whether AEPI developed for sepsis care (sepsis AEPI) impacts patient mortality and when this impact is stronger or weaker. Methodology/results: We utilize a rich set of clinical and nonclinical data in empirically examining the impact of sepsis AEPI on patient mortality. We leverage the staggered implementation of sepsis AEPI across hospital units and conduct our estimation on a carefully matched sample. The matching utilizes data on patient vitals and the logic behind the algorithm to create a robust comparison group consisting of patient visits for which sepsis AEPI would have triggered an alert if it had been in place. Our empirical analysis shows that sepsis AEPI reduces the likelihood of death from sepsis (45% relative reduction in mortality risk due to sepsis). A higher-than-usual workload and an increase in the average number of inaccurate alert experience at a hospital unit (e.g., an oncology unit, which provides care for cancer patients), in general, reduces the effectiveness of AEPI. We also identify diminishing mortality benefits over prolonged periods of adoption; evaluation of the moderators over time helps explain this diminishing impact. Managerial implications: Our findings suggest that streamlining sepsis-care processes through a predictive algorithm (i.e., algorithm-based monitoring of real-time patient data and providing predictions, streamlined communication channels for coordinating care for a patient with sepsis prediction, and a more standardized process for sepsis diagnosis and treatment) can reduce the loss of life from sepsis. For the 3,739 sepsis patients in our study period, AEPI’s benefits would translate to 181 lives saved. We show that such value, however, is sensitive to operational and behavioral factors as the algorithm becomes a routine part of the day-to-day operations of the hospital.
Funding: Financial support from University Hospitals is gratefully acknowledged.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1226 .
Big data and algorithmic decision-making have been touted as game-changing developments in management research, but they have their limitations. Qualitative approaches should not be cast aside in the age of digitalisation, since they facilitate understanding of quantitative data and the questioning of assumptions and conclusions that may otherwise lead to faulty implications being drawn, and - crucially - inaccurate strategies, decisions and actions. This handbook comprises three parts: Part I highlights many of the issues associated with 'unthinking digitalisation', particularly concerning the overreliance on algorithmic decision-making and the consequent need for qualitative research. Part II provides examples of the various qualitative methods that can be usefully employed in researching various digital phenomena and issues. Part III introduces a range of emergent issues concerning practice, knowing, datafication, technology design and implementation, data reliance and algorithms, digitalisation.
In this chapter, you will learn how technological innovations are changing the workplace.KeywordsTechnologies: basekeyand pacingInnovationRemote and hybrid workplacesWorkplace monitoring
Seizing the latest technological advances in distributed work, an increasing number of firms have set up offshore captive centers (CCs) in emerging economies to carry out sophisticated R&D work. We analyze survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work. Specifically, we examine the performance outcomes of projects using different technology-enabled coordination strategies to manage their interdependencies across multiple locations. We find that modularization of work across locations is largely ineffective when the underlying tasks are less routinized, less analyzable, and less familiar to the CC. Coordination based on information sharing across locations is effective when the CC performs tasks that are less familiar to it. A key contribution of our work is the explication of the task contingencies under which coordination based on modularization versus information sharing yield differential performance outcomes.
Information and communication technologies that strengthen knowledge-based governance in low and middleincome countries (LMIC) will affect work processes and organizations on a massive scale. This paper draws attention to demands on public sector organizations in resource-constrained contexts that face different challenges than in high-income societies. This paper from the Indian public healthcare sector reports on design, development, implementation, and scaling of a free and open-source software-based hospital information system for district hospitals. The paper focuses on the implications for work, competencies, and organization, building on and extending the concepts of "automate" and "informate." The paper focuses on the emerging and recursive interplay between information infrastructure and work within the context of organizational realities of a district hospital in an LMIC context, captured by the concepts of "infrastructuring of work" and "work of infrastructuring".
This paper investigates a web-based, medical research network that relies on patient self-reporting to collect and analyze data on the health status of patients, mostly suffering from severe conditions. The network organizes patient participation in ways that break with the strong expert culture of medical research. Patient data entry is largely unsupervised. It relies on a data architecture that encodes medical knowledge and medical categories, yet remains open to capturing details of patient life that have as a rule remained outside the purview of medical research. The network thus casts the pursuit of medical knowledge in a web-based context, marked by the pivotal importance of patient experience captured in the form of patient data. The originality of the network owes much to the innovative amalgamation of networking and computational functionalities built into a potent social media platform. The arrangements the network epitomizes could be seen as a harbinger of new models of organizing medical kn
In order to assess whether new theories are necessary to explain new forms of organizing or existing theories suffice, we must first specify exactly what makes a form of organizing “new.” We propose clear criteria for making such an assessment and show how they are useful in assessing if and when new theories of organizing may truly be needed. We illustrate our arguments by contrasting forms of organizing often considered novel, such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Oticon, against their traditional counterparts. We conclude that even when there may be little that existing theory cannot explain about individual elements in these new forms of organizing, opportunities for new theorizing lie in understanding the bundles of co-occurring elements that seem to underlie them and why the same bundles occur in widely disparate organizations.
This article reviews aspects of contemporary theory and research on work-life balance. It starts by exploring why work-life balance has become an important topic for research and policy in some countries and after outlining traditional perspectives examines the concept of balance and its implications for the study of the relation between work and the rest of life. A model outlining the causes, nature and consequences of a more or less acceptable work-life balance is presented and recent research is cited to illustrate the various dimensions. Finally, the topic is linked to the field of work and organizational psychology and a number of theoretical and conceptual issues of relevance to research in Europe are raised.
Online service marketplaces allow service buyers to post their project requests and service providers to bid for them. To reduce the transactional risks, marketplaces typically track and publish previous seller performance. By analyzing a detailed transactional data set with more than 1,800,000 bids corresponding to 270,000 projects posted between 2001 and 2010 in a leading online intermediary for software development services, we empirically study the effects of the reputation system on market outcomes. We consider both a structured measure summarized in a numerical reputation score and an unstructured measure based on the verbal praise left by previous buyers, which we encode using text mining techniques. We find that buyers trade off reputation (both structured and unstructured) and price and are willing to accept higher bids posted by more reputable bidders. Sellers also respond to changes in their own reputation through three different channels. They increase their bids with their reputation score (price effect) but primarily use a superior reputation to increase their probability of being selected (volume effect) as opposed to increasing their bid prices. Negative shocks in seller reputation are associated to an increase in the probability of seller exit (exit effect), but this effect is moderated by the investment that the seller has made in the site. We conclude that participants in this market are very responsive to the numerical reputation score and also to the unstructured reputational information, which behaves in a similar way to the structured numerical reputation score but provides complementary information.
This paper offers a theory of communication visibility based on a field study of the implementation of a new enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization. The emerging theory suggests that once invisible communication occurring between others in the organization becomes visible for third parties, those third parties could improve their metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of who knows what and who knows whom). Communication visibility, in this case made possible by the enterprise social networking site, leads to enhanced awareness of who knows what and whom through two interrelated mechanisms: message transparency and network translucence. Seeing the contents of other's messages helps third-party observers make inferences about coworkers' knowledge. Tangentially, seeing the structure of coworkers' communication networks helps third-party observers make inferences about those with whom coworkers regularly communicate. The emerging theory further suggests that enhanced metaknowledge can lead to more innovative products and services and less knowledge duplication if employees learn to work in new ways. By learning vicariously rather than through experience, workers can more effectively recombine existing ideas into new ideas and avoid duplicating work. Moreover, they can begin to proactively aggregate information perceived daily rather than engaging in reactive search after confronting a problem. I discuss the important implications of this emerging theory of communication visibility for work in the knowledge economy.
eLancing, or Internet freelancing, is spreading at an incredibly fast pace worldwide. The eLancing work environment is called a “marketplace,” which is a website where individuals interested in being hired and employers looking for individuals to perform some type of work meet. eLancing allows individuals from literally anywhere in the world to sign up and complete work using the Internet for an employer who literally can also be anywhere in the world. eLancing boasts millions of users and billions of dollars in transactions and it involves fundamental changes in the nature of work and in the employer–worker relationship. We discuss eLancing and challenges and opportunities it creates for human resource management (HRM) research and practice. Also, we offer a research agenda with the goal of understanding eLancing and its effects, particularly pertaining to the core HRM areas of job design and analysis, workforce planning, recruitment, selection, training and development, performance management, compensation, and legal issues. Given the increased importance of eLancing worldwide and its implications for worldwide work arrangements in the 21st century's international society, results of such scholarly research have the potential to help narrow the science–practice gap and also elevate the status, perceived value-added, and organizational and societal influence of HRM and related fields.
An abstract is not available.