Osama Mansour

The current paper addresses one of the core yet complex issues in the study of technology in organizations: the relationship between the social and the material. Many scholars in the field of Information Systems have used the notion of affordance as a lens to investigate and theorize this relationship. However, knowledge contributions in this area are often abstract and impractical, or at least compel further conceptual development. This paper uses a relational view of affordances to study organizational social media affordances based on empirical data collected about the use of the Wiki technology at two large multinational organizations – CCC and IBM. It theorizes four key mechanisms – referring to other affordances (referential), collectively enacting significant affordances (communal), situation-dependent exploitation of affordances (situatedness), and exploiting other opportunities for action (multiplicity), that embody the interaction between the social and the material. These...

Digital application marketplaces are increasingly relevant for digital platform owners seeking to reap the benefits of distributing, brokering, and operating applications by third-party developers. Owners of such marketplaces have two vital goals: address the needs of heterogeneous end-users and attract third-party developers. A key element in simultaneously accommodating these goals is value creation. However, and while there is emerging literature on digital application marketplaces, little empirical evidence exits about the value creation process in which marketplace owners conduct. Drawing on a research study of third-party developers, we synthesize value creation perspective and digital platforms literature to develop an understanding of value creation in digital application marketplaces from the perspective of third-party developers. Our study identifies and explores seven different value sources and their associated value creation and realization. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing digital platform literature and contributes new knowledge about new forms of value creation.

The social media are often perceived as tools that support openness and flexible participation among individuals and communities. This might explain the reason why social media have become indispensible for many daily practices in organizations. But how do these organizations appropriate and use these media relative to their formal structures and characteristics is a question in focus for the current paper. Drawing on classical concepts of organizational bureaucracy from Weber (1978) and Eisenstadt (1959), we present a qualitative analysis of empirical data obtained from two large organizations that use a wiki as a collaborative knowledge platform. The results show how the tendency to organize the use of the wiki through introducing structure might create barriers for open and democratic collaboration and knowledge sharing at the workplace. They also show that while a freer approach to using wikis might allow for self-organizing, there is still a possibility for enacting social structures that limit openness and flexibility. As such, the paper contributes novel insights into how social media might be used in bureaucracies and soft bureaucracies.

This thesis examines organizational use of social media. It focuses on developing an understanding of the ways by which social media are used within formal organizational settings. From the vantage point of this thesis such an understanding can be achieved by looking at tensions and incompatibilities that might potentially exist between social media and organization because of their distinct characteristics. It is argued that the distinct characteristics of social media (e.g. openness, transparency, flexibility, etc.) and organization (e.g., hierarchy, formal relationships, standard procedures, etc.) may engender tensions and incompatibilities that affect the ways of using social media and their potential in organizations. The main premise here is that the possibilities, behaviors, and practices afforded by social media are recognizably different in nature from common and established organizational practices, behaviors, norms, and routines.
Through a structurational understanding of organizational use of social media, influenced by Giddens’ theory of structuration and Orlikowski’s practice lens for studying technology use, this thesis offers the perspective of immiscibility to capture tensions and incompatibilities driven by the distinctive characteristics of social media and organization. It basically offers a way of seeing social media use in organizations as a dynamic, in- practice interplay between social media and organization characteristics. One key argument in this thesis is that the immiscible interplay of social media and organization, produces, at least in transition, ‘a bureaucracy of social media’. Social media, it is argued, are used in ways that are essentially bureaucratic, reflecting and also reinforcing established characteristics of formal organizations through the production and reproduction of structures which are driven by the immiscible interplay.
The development of such an understanding was achieved through multiple research studies focusing on the use of the wiki technology for knowledge collaboration and sharing in two large, multinational organizations: CCC and IBM. A number of qualitative methods were used in these studies to collect empirical evidence from the two organizations including interviews, field visits, observations, and document analysis. The overarching contribution of this thesis centers on offering a unique way of understanding organizational use of social media by putting forward tensions and incompatibilities between social media and organization and also by providing an understanding of how such tensions and incompatibilities affect the potential for change by social media.

The evolution of social media has introduced novel possibilities for work and interaction in organizations. The wiki technology is one important kind of social media technologies that is increasingly used to facilitate the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge within communities. Given the increasing use of social media in organizations and the lack of knowledge on their consequences for organizing, we use an affordance lens to explore the enactment of organizational wiki affordances. Using qualitative data obtained through interviews, field visits, and documents from two multinational organizations –CCC and IBM– we first identified eight affordances that describe various wiki possibilities and practices. We then identified four properties of these affordances including multiplicity, referential, situatedness, and communal. These properties represent the main contribution of the paper in that they extend the notion of affordance by theorizing new concepts that describe relational dynamics, situated and contextual conditions, and social factors involved in enacting, perceiving, and exploiting affordances.

The question of whether intelligence can be attributed to groups or not has been raised in many scientific disciplines. In the field of computer-supported collaborative learning, this question has been examined to understand how computer-mediated environments can augment human cognition and learning on a group level. The era of social computing which represents the emergence of Web 2.0 collaborative technologies and social media has stimulated a wide discussion about collective intelligence and the global brain. This paper reviews the theory of distributed cognition in the light of these concepts in an attempt to analyze and understand the emergence process of intelligence that takes place in the context of computer-mediated collaborative and social media environments. It concludes by showing that the cognitive organization, which occurs within social interactions serves as a catalyst for intelligence to emerge on a group level. Also a process model has been developed to show the process of collaborative knowledge construction in Wikipedia that characterizes such cognitive organization.

The discussion of the core identity of IS research is dominated by a heated controversy between the narrow and the broad views. The paper reviews different perspectives of the core identity of IS and stand in with the broad view. It argued that the constant changes and developments of IT capabilities dynamically drive the core focus of IS research and thus a broader view should be adopted. The paper presents the recent changes and developments of IT in the social computing era where we have shown how recent developments have widened the scope of IS research by involving multiple social aspects of investigation. The paper concluded by proposing some properties of IS research in this era.

The current chapter discusses issues related to the use of the wiki technology at the workplace for social knowledge collaboration and sharing. This kind of tech- nology is principally flexible and free in the sense of allowing people to create, edit, and shape content collaboratively. However, this chapter argues that the ap- plication and use of a wiki within an organizational setting might be influenced by social and structural properties that govern collaboration and sharing. It is based on empirical data obtained through eleven semi-structured interviews with em- ployees working for a large multinational organization. The theory of structuration was used as a theoretical framework to guide the empirical inquiry. Eventually, the chapter concludes with discussing a number of structures associated with evolving norms, interpretations, and resources that govern and shape the use of a wiki as a tool for social and open collaboration.

The widespread adoption and use of social media in almost every aspect of our daily lives may outpace existing empirical understandings. In organizations, social media are increasingly used by professional individuals and communities to support dynamic collaboration and knowledge sharing. While there is a growing amount of research on this subject, still little is known on how people use different kinds of social media in practice. That is, there is a need for an empirical understanding that addresses actual use practices of social media within the formal boundaries of organizations. To this end, we report on results from a qualitative comparative study of the use of wikis at two global organizations. Our aim is to develop an empirical understanding of the enactment of structures and the ways by which people structure and organize their wiki use practices by drawing on Orlikowski’s (2000) practice lens. The findings from our analysis suggest a number of enacted structures that reflect diverse wiki use practices. Our main contribution centers on developing three key mechanisms that provide means for understanding the structuring of the use of technology.

The email has been for many years now an indispensable organizational tool for personal communication and group collaboration. However, recently, the evolution of the wiki technology has introduced novel forms of open collaboration and flexible communication. More organizations are increasingly adopting and using this technology at the workplace. This paper reports on results from an interpretive case study which explored the evolution in collaborative and communicative practices. It examined the perceptions of members of communities of practice towards the differences between using a wiki and an email for collaboration within their communities. The case was primarily based on 16 interviews at a large multinational organization. The paper concludes with rich insights into five themes which characterize the major differences between wiki and email collaboration. These themes are nature or purpose of use, patterns or forms of collaboration, technological characteristics, representation of content, and habitual behavior.