ASAC 2009 Niagara Falls, Ontario Hamid Nach (Student) Albert Lejeune École des Sciences de la Gestion Université du Québec à Montréal THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ON IDENTITY: FRAMING THE RESEARCH AGENDA1 With the increasingly pervasive use of information technology (IT) in organizations, identity has become a pressing contemporary issue with wide-ranging implications for research and practice. Interestingly, no rigorous effort has yet been made to assess how IS researchers have studied the impact of IT on identity. In this research we are interested in filling this gap. We identified and analyzed 25 Information Systems (IS) empirical articles that adopted an identity frame and were published in 30 leading IS journals between 1997 and 2007. Based on this analysis, we assert that IS researchers have still insufficiently explored the ITidentity linkage. In this paper, we suggest that the identity frame should be brought into the mainstream of the IS discipline. We believe it offers great theoretical promise and provides a fruitful avenue for interesting empirical analyses that should yield a better understanding of the social transformation induced by IT and possibly improve individual and organizational lives. Introduction Much has been written in the past decade about the impact of information technologies (IT) on individuals, groups and organizations. The social impacts of IT, particularly, have received widespread attention (e.g. Monteiro and Hanseth 1996; Orlikowski 1996; Vaast and Walsham 2005; Barley 1986; Manning 1996; Pozzebon and Pinsonneault 2006). In recent years there has been a slowly growing interest in the study of the impact of IT on identity – that is, how IT affects what people believe about who they are (Walsham 2001). It is suggested, indeed, that IT enables new communication formats and new modes of selecting, organizing, and presenting information. In turn, these new formats reshape social activity, modify or dismantle traditional practices, and spur or shape new ones (Cerulo 1997). By changing the way people work, IT may redefine their roles and challenge their identities (Lamb and Davidson 2005). Meyrowitz (1985) was one of the first researchers to explore the linkage between IT and identity; he described how electronic media tend to merge personal and public spheres and set new forums for identity construction. Later research (e.g Walsham 1998; Kilduff et al. 1997) has described how IT reshapes individual and collective identities in organizational settings. Walsham (1998), for example, examined linkages between the use of information technology and transformations of the 1 The authors wish to thank Marlei Pozzebon of HEC Montreal who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The financial support of the InnoV research group is gratefully acknowledged. professional identities of white collar workers. Kilduff et al. (1997), in a similar vein, describe, through an 11-month ethnographic study of a Japanese high technology company, how engineers sustain their identities, for the most part, through the technologies they produce. Lamb and Davidson (2005) suggest that integrating identity into information technology research is a promising area of study with interesting arrays of theoretical and empirical possibilities. Such studies can improve our understanding of the relationship between IT and social transformation processes and possibly improve individual and organizational lives. However, while disciplines such as social psychology (Crossley 2000; Tajfel 1981), organizational behavior (Kreiner and Ashforth 2004), social sciences (Castells 1999; Davis 2000) and management sciences (Glyn 2000; Alvesson and Willmott 2002) have been investigating the question of identity for a long time, it is only recently that information systems (IS) researchers have become interested in identity issues. It is significant that, no rigorous effort has been made so far to assess how IS researchers have studied the IT-identity linkage. Such a review would help define what has been learned so far and point out promising paths for future research. In this research we are interested in filling this gap. We have identified and analyzed 25 IS empirical articles that adopted an identity frame and were published in 30 leading information systems journals over the last 10 years (1997 – 2007). A particular outcome of this analysis has been to suggest that IS researchers have still not sufficiently explored issues surrounding information technology’s impact on identity. We assert that significant further insights would seem possible through the careful exploration of the role of IT in identity construction processes, since only minimal research has been done on this issue. In this paper, we suggest that the identity frame should be brought into the mainstream of IS discipline. As a first step towards this objective, we provide a research agenda, based on recent streams of research on management and social sciences, with concrete directions to tackle inquiries examining the consequences of IT for identity. Hopefully, this will set the stage for IS researchers to delve into this under-researched area. The paper is structured as follows: in the first section we discuss why it is important to study the impact of information technology on identity. Next, we present the concept of identity and the process of journal and article selection. In the last section, we discuss the findings and set the research agenda for future IS inquiries. Why study the link between IT and identity? Sociologists such as Whyte (1956) have described the ways in which people identify themselves with the kind of work they do and the organization where they work (Lamb and Davidson 2005). But with the increasingly pervasive use of information technology in organizations, IT has become an integral part of work practices; new communication and information technologies enable new ways of doing old things and facilitate new modes of interaction (Barrett et al. 2001). They also blur the boundaries of the organization and “stretch” social practices and institutions over larger spans of space and time (Giddens 1991). These shifts are likely to cause anxiety and undermine individuals’ identities as the reference point for identity construction becomes a moving target. Tensions between old and new skills call for answers to the questions “Who am I, what do I stand for and how should I act?” (Sveningsson and Larsson 2006). Indeed, exposure to new ways of interacting and doing work puts pressure on individuals to rapidly re-identify with different knowledge forms and re-establish a sense of coherence and security (Barrett et al. 2001). This challenge provides, interestingly, fertile ground for observing unanticipated consequences of information technology on people’s identities, as much remains to be explored (Walsham 1998, 2000; Lamb and Davidson 2005). Furthermore, although the identity frame has begun to attract attention in the IS discipline, a broad appreciation of its potential as an analytical category has not been yet fully gained. In other disciplines, however, identity has already become an established means for analyzing many aspects of organizational life (Pratt 1998; Foreman and Whetten 2002). In management and social sciences, for example, a steady growing volume of research has demonstrated the utility of the identity construct, employing it in a variety of ways to explore and explain a range of organizational phenomena (Foreman and Whetten 2002). Thus, identity has been used to explain organizational processes and behaviors such as cooperation (Dutton et al. 1994), loyalty (Chung et al. 2001), commitment (Sass and Canary 1991), motivation (Knippenberg 2000), communication patterns (Korver and van Ruler 2003), career change (Ibarra 2007), dynamics of control and resistance (Sveningsson and Larsson 2006; Humphreys and Brown 2002), organizational change (McInnes et al. 2006), leadership and managerial work (Alvesson and Willmott 2002). Such studies have produced a wealth of insights and a great many theoretical accounts. For instance, the study of identity helped explain why some members of organizations regularly engage in cooperative behaviors that benefit the organization, whereas others do not (Dukerich et al. 2002). Chreim (2002) examined how organizational members experience identity shifts during organizational change. Kosmala and Herrbach (2006) studied the dynamic interplay between power, identity and resistance to organizational control. Ibarra (1999) added to identity research by theorizing on how people adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves that serve as trials for possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities. Interestingly, we believe there is room for IT investigators to expand and enrich this identity literature as the introduction of information systems is often accompanied by dramatic identity shifts that affect, in turn, individual and collective behavior. A cross-fertilization between IS research and studies on identification would produce valuable insights on organizational life, as IT-identity linkage is still poorly understood. In short, we argue that a greater emphasis on the identity frame is needed in IT literature. Such a frame is a promising path for future research and would offer IT researchers a vantage point better to understand IT consequences on individuals, groups, organizations and societies. In this paper we invite IS researchers, including ourselves, to pay greater attention to, and to contribute towards, an emergent literature that places identity at the center of organization research. In the following section, we present the concept of identity and its various ontological and epistemological conceptualizations. The concept of identity So what is identity? Identities are lenses through which people make sense of the world (Weick 1995). They are usually associated with a set of labels that people use to express who they are (Reed and Bolton 2005). The question “Who am I?” involves not only who or what people believe themselves to be but also how they should respond to social experiences and be regarded by others (Lutgen-Sandvik 2008). People construct their identities from a wide array of interdependent social resources such as ethnicity, workplace and education. These resources shape their selves and convey a sense of who they are (Lamb and Davidson 2002). Identities play a role of orientation and provide the framework within which things have meaning for us (Sveningsson and Larsson 2006). They are stronger sources of meaning than roles because they involve a process of self-construction and individuation. Identities organize the meaning while roles organize the functions (Castells 1999). The concept of identity has been studied in multiple ways reflecting various ontological and epistemological assumptions, of which the most prominent are essentialism, constructivism, critical approach, and postmodernism (Alvesson et al. 2008; Cerulo 1997). In the following sections we describe how identity is conceptualized in each of these paradigms. Essentialism: Deeply rooted in the functionalist assumptions of determinism and stability, essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the invariable and fixed properties that define the “whatness” of a given entity (Fuss 1989). Therefore, identity, in the essentialist view, is predetermined and fixed construct. It is based on “essential” and “natural” attributes such as gender, race, region, age, and ethnicity (Cerulo 1997). These attributes imply stable categories, unvarying standards and mutually exclusive oppositions such as man/woman, in-group/out-group, etc. (Young 1990). Socials actors are believed to internalize these attributes and build a unified sense of self. In this stream of research, the essence or the origins of identity are usually taken for granted or rendered irrelevant (Croucher 2003). Notably, the essentialist conceptualization of identity is vividly challenged by the constructivist view as we will discuss next. Constructivists argue that essentialists fail to appreciate that individuals can have multiple identities, some of them intersecting or colliding with others, and varying in salience across time and across context (Croucher 2003). This leads us to present the constructivist view of identity. Constructivism: Constructivists maintain that reality is the product of human relations and interactions (Berger and Luckman 1967). Therefore, identity, as Goffman suggests (1959), can only be understood through a person’s interaction with others; it is not a distinctive trait possessed by individuals (Giddens 1991). Constructivists reject the essentialist conceptualization of identity, they assert that individuals and groups are not merely passive recipients and that identity is something that “people accept, resist, choose, specify, invent, redefine, reject, actively defend and so forth” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, p 77). Authors such as Alvesson (2008) and Pratt et al. (2006) regard identities as an ongoing interactional accomplishment. Consequently, their approach embraces the possibilities of emergence, plurality, malleability and discontinuity of identity and social embeddedness of identity processes (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). This change in view also shifts the focus, as suggested by Lamb and Davidson (2005), from “What is identity?” to “How is identity enacted?” Identities in this perspective are multiple and overlapping and their content and meaning shift across time and space for individuals, groups and societies (Croucher 2003). Critical Approach: Critical scholars generally aim to understand the political nature of the organization and the power struggles of groups and individuals by exposing alienating and restrictive social conditions and revealing ways that can liberate humans from repressive relations (Alvesson et al. 2008; Alvesson and Willmott 2002). Critical investigators conceptualize identity as in flux and influenced by major societal forces in a historical period (Henrickson 2000). They posit that topics of power inequality often underlie identity considerations (e.g. race, gender, occupation, etc.) (Alvarez 2002). Therefore, the examination of power relations in the light of identity issues “provides a means by which the ‘darker’ aspects of contemporary organizational life might be revealed and questioned” (Alvesson et al. 2008, p. 17). Scholars who use critical discourse analysis, in particular, view identities as dialogically produced through discourse (Alvarez 2002). Postmodernism: Reality in the postmodernist view is reified in texts and discourse (Richards 2006). In the spirit of Foucault (1971), Derrida (1978) and Rorty (1989), postmodern-identity scholars deconstruct established identity categories in an effort to shed light on every aspect of “being” (Cerulo 1997). Identities, in this stream, are often portrayed as fluid, fragmented and precarious where ambiguity and conflict are integral to it (Linstead and Robyn 2002; Dunn 2000). It is also suggested that identities are masks that can be slipped on or off (Strauss 1997). For Strauss (1997), masks allow people to acquire a superficial and fragile identity and move from one group to another or from one relationship to another. Consequently, for social actors seeking a stable ontological self, the postmodern landscape may seem bleak (Crossley 2000). Indeed, a project of self seems burdened with difficulties, confusion and inconsistency. Yet the postmodernist approach to identity is strongly criticized for overstating disorder, fluidity and chaos (Crossley 2000). Commentators, such as Giddens (1991), argue that even in a highly modern society, the construction of identity is still marked by standards and institutions and hence cannot be arbitrary or totally fluid. Concluding remarks: The multiple conceptualizations of identity reflect the various research interests of researchers. For essentialists, “identity may be seen as a solution to a number of organizational problems and a positive force that needs to be optimized” (Alvesson et al. 2008, p. 17). For scholars taking a constructivist framework, the concept presents opportunities to “enrich the study of organizations with in-depth insights and descriptions that can stimulate people’s reflections on who they are and what they do” (Alvesson et al. 2008, p. 17). Those who take a critical stance consider identity as a mean to expose problems associated with cultural and political irrationalities. Finally, for postmodernists, focusing on issues of identity provides a means by which the “darker” aspects of contemporary organizational life might be revealed (Alvesson et al. 2008). It is also argued that individuals and organizations are better understood in terms of becoming than being (Ashforth 1998). Hence, there seem to be trends away from fixed and monolithic views of identity to discursive approaches that view identity as constructed and emergent without assuming it is highly fluid or radically decentred (Sveningsson and Alvesson 2003; Alvesson et al. 2008). In this paper, we have attempted to assess how IS scholars have studied the impact of IT on identity; we describe this attempt in the following pages. Method In order to assess how IS researchers have studied the link between information technology and identity, we conducted a comprehensive literature review over the last 10 years of IT publications (1997-2007). We used two relatively recent articles that ranked top IS journals to determine the list of relevant publications. The first is an article by Rainer and Miller (2005) and the second is by Lowry et al. (2004). Rainer and Miller (2005) synthesized nine journal ranking studies published between 1991 and 2003 and proposed a composite ranking of the top 50 IS journals. Lowry et al. (2004) used a world-scale survey and proposed rankings of top IS journals on a world-wide basis and by world region. Using the two ranking schemes allowed us, first, to increase the probability that journals chosen for the research represent the leading IS journals and, second, to ensure that at least the top 20 journals in the three regions – North America, Europe and Australasia – are taken into account as proposed by Lowry et al. (2004). Table 1 presents the 30 IS leading journals that were considered. Table 1: Journals surveyed 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 MISQ CACM ISR MS JMIS HBR DS DSS ACMT OIS IEEE T SW IEEE SW I&M EJIS SMR COR OS MIS Quarterly Communication of the ACM Information System Research Management Science Journal of MIS Harvard Business Review Decision Science Decision Support System ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering IEEE Software Information and Management European Journal of IS Sloan Management Review Computers and Operations Research Organization Science 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 JSIS JIS I&O2 ISYS O&R JOC JAIS ISJ IT&P JIT DB IJIM ASQ ISOC Journal of Strategic Information Systems Journal of Information Systems Information & Organization Information Systems Operations Research Journal of (On) Computing Journal of the AIS Information Systems Journal IT and People Journal of IT The Database for Advances in Information Systems International Journal of Information Management Administrative Science Quarterly Information Society To select articles, we reviewed each journal, examining the table of contents and then the articles themselves. When only abstracts were available, we requested the full paper from the authors. While selecting articles, we considered only empirical studies, i.e. those where data were actually collected in the field and analyzed. Therefore, articles such as research essays, issues and opinions were excluded from our sample (e.g. Gallivan and Srite, 2005, Edgar, 1997). Books, book chapters and conference proceedings were also excluded (e.g. Turkle, 1995). This initial selection process produced a total of 18 articles. We then used the ABI-Inform Data Base to find additional articles whose text or abstract contains the keys words “information technology” or “information system” and “identity”, in order to make sure that no relevant article was missed. The articles by Walsham (1998), Mosse and Byrne (2005), Schwarz and Watson (2005), Moon et al. (2006), Brocklehurst (2001), Cunha and Orlikowski (2008) and Alvarez (2008) were then included in the sample. Articles that build on an identity theory but make no reference to identity as a construct were excluded (e.g. Yujong, 2005). Moreover, to ensure that the sample is representative of identity research in the IT field, we did not consider studies that are beyond the scope of IS discipline such as those that fall in the marketing realm (e.g, Schau and Gilly (2003), Papacharissi (2002)), or those that focus on digital identities (e.g. Bhargav-Spantzel et al. 2006). Hence, the process of article selection resulted in a final sample of n=25 articles. Articles were then grouped based on their ontological assumptions as presented in Table 2. The findings derived from our analysis are presented in the next section. Findings and Discussion The surveyed articles were carefully analyzed in terms of their main purpose, their paradigmatic assumptions; their theoretical lens and units of analysis. As a first observation, we note that Information and Organization published the most articles on the impact of IT on identity with five articles followed by Information Technology & People and The Information Society with three articles each. Two articles were published in Organization Science and two others in Information Systems Research. There was either one or no article published in the remaining journals. Further, in so far as there has been a minimal number of papers published in top IS journals (25 articles), we note that little academic effort has yet been made to address the IT-identity linkage. Previous research, however, had highlighted the need to tackle issues of identity in relation to information and communication technologies in order better to understand social transformations caused by IT (Walsham, 1998). Interestingly, there seems to be an increase of the number of the published articles during the second half of the covered period: 18 studies 2 AMIT: Accounting Management and Information Technology prior to 2001. as opposed to only 7 in the first half (1997-2001). This trend would reflect an encouraging surge of interest of identity as a research topic in the IS field. Main purpose: As for the overall purpose of these studies, as few as five articles aimed to develop a theory about IT’s impact on identity (e.g. Lamb and Kling, 2003, Barrett et al., 2001) while 13 articles were descriptive (e.g. Vaast, 2007). Seven articles of our sample tested existing theories (e.g. Schwarz and Watson, 2005, Lee et al. 2006). Hence, we concur with authors such as Walsham (1998) and Lamb and Davidson (2005) who argue that identity as an analytical category in IS continues to be undertheorized, but we also note a significant contribution which is the 2003 MISQ paper of the year by Lamb and Kling. The authors propose a re-conceptualization of the traditional view of the “IT user” as a “social actor”. The social actor is characterized by four main dimensions: affiliations, environments, interactions and identities. The first two dimensions relate individuals to their organizations and to their environments. The second two dimensions relate organizationally-situated individuals to others and to the information technologies they use to interact with and present themselves to others (Lamb, 2006). Paradigmatic assumptions: Interestingly, the paradigmatic assumptions of the 25 studies are predominantly constructivist; indeed, 14 articles were constructivist-based while 6 were essentialist. Four researches used critical lens and a single article embraced the postmodernist perspective. Although we do not advocate the supremacy of a paradigm over another, we believe that the rise of the constructivist frame in IT-identity inquiries is encouraging. Indeed, such a view may be relevant to present grounded evidence on how IT is implicated in processes of identity construction in light of contextual settings. The essentialist view, because it sees identity as fixed, obscures these processes and does not consider how actors actively cope with IT challenges to their identity. Furthermore, a notable aspect of the 14 constructivist articles of our sample is the theoretical views on which they were based. Indeed, 8 of these studies used Gidden’s structuration theory (1984) and his later works on modernity and self-identity (Giddens, 1991) as theoretical frameworks. Central to these studies are the concepts of “separation of time and space” — in which information technology is identified as playing an important role —, the “disembedding of social institutions” and the “reflexivity of modernity and self-identity”. In these researches, structuration theory seemed particularly useful to highlight issues of identity in emerging contexts where information and communication technologies are mediating traditionally face-to-face interactions. Barrett and Walsham (1999), for example, examined the social transformation induced by IT in an insurance market, both at the institutional and the individual levels, with particular attention to transformation of identity. D'Mello and Sahay (2007), in a similar vein, investigate the relationship between mobility and changes in identity in the context of global software work. Theoretical lens: We also examined the theoretical frameworks of the surveyed articles. We noted that a variety of theories have been mobilized in the study of the impact of IT on identity. Remarkably, much essentialist research has used the social identity theory (SIT) as theoretical background (e.g. Lee et al. 2006). The theory posits that individuals define themselves in terms of salient group membership (Ashforth and Mael, 1989). Arguably, although SIT can be applied in innovative ways, these studies tend to adopt a fairly static view of the theory. Identity, in these researches, is mostly conceptualized as a moderating variable or an independent variable, where one’s degree of identification with a group or an organization is used to explain a range of social and organizational phenomena such as conflict, as in the study by Hinds and Mortensen (2005), or technology acceptance, as in Lee et al. (2006). Moon et al. (2006) used the social identity theory as a theoretical lens to document how the use of blogs develops a social virtual identity which will in turn lead to global life satisfaction. Critical scholars, on the other hand, used critical discourse analysis on two occasions (Alvarez, 2008, Alvarez, 2002). Alvarez (2002) analyzed the IS requirement analysis discourse to illuminate issues of identity, conflict and power. In a later paper (2008), she critically examined how the implementation of an enterprise system challenged existing roles and professional identities. The single postmodern study in our sample is by Schultze and Boland (2000). The authors present a study of the work practices of a group of outsourced computer systems administrators. They describe how their “identities are composed of a multitude of texts —written by or about them— that that are fragmented and multiplied in time and space such as electronic databases and electronic mailboxes” (Schultze and Boland, 2000, p. 191). They also describe how administrators’ writings create an “informational body” that removes them from the confines of a particular place and technology. Units of analysis: In terms of units of analysis, investigators were mainly interested in the individual level (17 articles) and the group level (6 articles). This is not very surprising, since, according to Agarwal and Lucas (2005), too much emphasis has been placed on micro-level research on the impact of IT. Some research, however, used mixed levels of analysis to explore the dynamic interplay among technology, individuals, groups, and institutions. Barrett et al. (2001) and Barrett and Walsham (1999), for example, attempted to link the changing nature of self-identity with transformations at the institutional level. Surprisingly, no study investigated the impact of IT on organizational identity. IT, however, may be strongly implicated in shaping or defining organizational identity in high-tech companies, for example. Our knowledge of such issues remains limited, creating opportunities for further research. In the following section, we look to the future by setting a research agenda indicating how we might develop further studies on IT challenges to identities. Table 2: Articles grouped according to their ontological assumptions Essentialist perspective Author(s) Description Hinds and Mortensen, 2005 The study investigates how shared identity and shared context Social identity theory moderate the effect of geographic distribution on team conflict. Theory testing Group - Task Kim et al., 2007 The research evaluates the impact of ethnicity on individuals’ Communication connectedness to the Internet. infrastructure theory Theory testing Group Schwarz and Watson, 2005 The study explores how employee perceptions of group membership guide the change outcomes of an organization implementing new information technology. Theory testing Group Lee et al., 2006 The study links the theory of self-identity to TAM and verifies its effect on technology acceptance. Ma and Agarwal, 2007 Theoretical background Social identity theory Overall purpose of the Unit of analysis study Social identity theory Theory testing Technology acceptance model The article quantitatively measures the impact of community Social psychology theory Theory testing infrastructure design and identity verification on knowledge contribution in computer-mediated communication. Individual Individual The goal of the study is to investigate the impact of blogs on Social identity theory social identity on the Internet. Theory testing Author(s) Description Overall purpose of the Unit of analysis study D'Mello and Sahay, 2007 The research investigates the relationship between mobility Structuration theory and changes in identity in the context of global software work (GSW). Theory building Individual Brocklehurst, 2001 The paper documents the experience of a group of Structuration theory professional workers who moved, as they use IT, from being conventional office workers to becoming homeworkers. Theory testing Group Avery and Baker, 2002 The research examines the impact of IT on the household in a Use of “reframing” home-based work context. Descriptive Group Moon et al., 2006 Individual Constructivist perspective Theoretical background Mosse and Byrne, 2005 The study examines how the process of collective identity formation and information systems implementation are interconnected. Structuration theory Network theory Descriptive Group Kilduff et al., 1997 The study investigates the technologies that create and sustain Structuration theory workplace identity. Descriptive Group Trauth, 2002 The objective of paper is to theorize about women’s participation in the IT sector by examining the relationship between social shaping of IT and gender identity. Socio-cultural approach Theory building Individual Wynn and Katz, 1997 The article examines how Internet affects cultural processes and social identities. Social theory Descriptive Individual Cunha and Orlikowski, 2008 The study examines how employees used an online forum to Practice perspective help them deal with changes that they perceived as threatening to their identity. Descriptive Individual Lamb and Davidson, 2005 The study explores how IT challenges scientific professional Interactionism identity. Post-structuralism Network theory The study analyzes professional identity at multiple levels of Structuration theory the social context and self in relation to the use of new information technology in organizations. Descriptive Individual - Group Descriptive Individual Theory building Individual Walsham, 1998 Lamb and Kling, 2003 The authors develop the social actor model. Barrett et al., 2001 The research examines social transformations induced by GIS Structuration theory at the institutional and individual level. Theory building Individual - institution Barrett and Walsham, 1999 The study examines social transformations induced by IT in Structuration theory insurance market at the institutional and individual level. Theory building Individual - institution Vaast, 2007 The study investigates participants’ self-presentation in occupational online forums. Descriptive Individual Critical approach perspective Socio-technical theory Institutional theory Structuration theory Symbolic interactionism Author(s) Description Theoretical background Alvarez, 2008 The study investigates the impact of an enterprise system on structure, power relations and identity. The research investigates issues of identity, conflict and power in IS requirement analysis. The paper describes an action research which made use of an ethnographic style of interpretive enquiry to improve the alignment of a health information system to the requirements of its users. The research examines aspects of gender and women as IT workers. Critical discourse analysis Descriptive Individual Critical discourse analysis Descriptive Individual Feminist approach Descriptive Individual Action research Descriptive Individual Theoretical background Overall purpose of the Unit of analysis study Alvarez, 2002 Adam et al., 2006 Thompson, 2002 Overall purpose of the Unit of analysis study Postmodernism Author(s) Description Schultze and Boland, 2000 The study examines the tensions between place and space of Theory of practice outsourced computer systems administrators. Descriptive Individual Framing the research agenda Our systematic review of the literature reveals that there is, indeed, an emerging interest in the study of the impact of IT on identity within the information systems field. However, there still seems to be room to develop novel and nuanced theoretical accounts in order better to understand IT challenges to identity. So what should we explore even further? In this section we suggest some promising research avenues that could lead to further development and testing of new theoretical models. Legitimizing, resistance and project identities: Castells’s (1999) conceptualization of identity is a promising theoretical account that can be useful to IS researchers interested in the study of the linkage between IT and identities. Castells (1997) distinguishes between three forms of identity: 1) legitimizing identity introduced by dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination over social actors, 2) resistance identity generated by actors in opposition to the logic of domination and 3) project identity produced by those who seek to build, around a project, a new identity that redefines their position in society. Castells’ emphasis on the “project” as a focal point for identity construction and presentation inspired researchers such as Lamb and Davidson (2005) to examine how scientists build their professional identities. The authors reported that, even in contexts of high individualist rewards, professional scientists build their identities, primarily, around projects, in which information technologies are constructed and used with different stakeholders. Interestingly, the concept of project identity still seems to deliver on its promise. Indeed, there remain opportunities to examine, for example, how organizational actors use IT projects that transcend the boundaries of the organization to build their identity; “IT specialists” are a good example, since it is argued that some develop their professional identity around world-wide open source projects rather than organizational projects (Nach and Lejeune, 2007). Further research will be also needed to examine social consequences of IT in light of the concepts of legitimizing identity and resistance identity. Phenomena such as resistance to IT implementation, for instance, could be explained by shedding light on the dialectic relations between legitimizing identity induced by top-down forces (e.g. ERP best practices, monitoring technologies) and resistance identity constructed by users. Identity work: Within the fields of management and social psychology, there is a growing interest in the examination of identity construction processes (such as forming, strengthening and revising) rather than the end-states of individuals’ identity (Ibarra, 1999, Alvesson et al., 2008, Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). These active processes are referred to as “identity work” and aim at securing a reasonably strong and coherent self as a basis for social relations (Knights and Willmott, 1989, Alvesson et al., 2008). Identity work may either, in complex and fragmented contexts, be more or less continuously ongoing or, in contexts high on stability, be a theme of engagement during crises or transitions (Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Although this work focuses on individual agency, it also construes social groups’ influence on identity construction to be significant (Pratt et al., 2006). In the IS literature on identity, practically no attention was given to such work. Rather, the focus has been primarily on changes in the substance of identity induced by IT. Walsham (1998), for instance, while he examined the transformation of identity introduced by newly implemented technologies, did not consider how workers actively re-constructed their identities while using the new systems. We believe IT will benefit from studies that go beyond the initial introduction of technologies and consider the usage phase and how information technologies are part of individuals’ identity work. Only then will we be able to create a fuller picture of the multifaceted identity transformation caused by IT. Identity regulation: As stated earlier, identity work is subject to social and organizational forces that have implications for the shaping and direction of identity. These forces are termed “identity regulation”. They encompass the more or less intentional effects of social practices on processes of identity construction and reconstruction (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Organization elites may consider identity regulation as a mean of organizational control to create “docile selves” (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Among the surveyed articles, none focused on processes of identity regulation underlying the use of information technologies. The introduction of a new technology, however, often introduces new discursive practices that may involve active identity regulation. Remarkably, while organizational scholars are increasingly interested in issues of identity construction and regulation, IS research continues to lag behind. We believe there is a need for in-depth empirical studies analyzing processes of construction and regulation; such studies would make a significant contribution to the IT literature. Anti identity: In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in anti-identity as a research topic in management literature (e.g. Sveningsson and Larsson, 2006, Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003, Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001). Defining an anti-identity is finding a meaning to the question "Who am I not?” (Elsbach and Bhattacharya, 2001). Carroll and Levy (2008) argue that one of the ways we narrow down the answer of what it is we are, do and stand for is by being aware of what it is we aren’t, don’t do and desire not to be thought of as. Hence, anti-identity could be perceived as being driven either by rejection of an existing identification or by seduction by an alternative identification (Carroll and Levy, 2008). It can also indicate a transitional or provisional phase of an identity change (Kosmala and Herrbach, 2006). In the IS discipline, anti-identity remains a virtually unexplored research area. The concept, however, provides creative ways to understand a range of IS phenomena such as technology acceptance and adoption. Indeed, individuals may reject a technology because of what it makes them feel about themselves. Clearly, there is much work to be done examining the IT related conditions under which people are more likely to acquiesce or reject some forms of identification. Ambivalent identity: IT has been shown to have, in some instances, both positive and negative impacts on individuals and work practices (e.g. Pinsonneault and Kraemer 1997). While the examination of the contradictory effects of IT is not new in the IT literature (e.g. Robey and Boudreau 1999), future research may wish to consider the identity frame in the study of the phenomena. Indeed, individuals may find particular aspects of a technology to be relevant to their identity and find others as discrepant; which suggests that IT may produce conflicting self-relevant meanings. This is called “ambivalent identification” or schizo or conflicted identification (Kreiner and Ashforth, 2004). These “two minds” people, as expressed by Pratt (2000), experience clashes in their role because of incompatible demands on their identity. For example, a manager may find a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) to be valuable as it provides a certain amount of structure to meetings, but at the same time he may be against the participative leadership promoted by the system as he sees himself as a “directive leader” who typically seeks followers’ compliance. Hence, individuals holding an ambivalent identity may be torn by contradictory thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (Weigert and Franks, 1989) and alternatively move toward, away, or against their role (Pratt and Doucet, 2000). We believe IS researchers should pay greater attention to ambivalence dynamics as we still know little about them. Emotional work: Commentators such as Johnson and Morgeson (2005) argue that identities are not merely cognitive constructions. People also attach varying levels of emotional significance to their identities. Emotions like pride, enthusiasm, joy and self-esteem are key ways by which identity is expressed or “performed” (Butler, 1990). In Hochschild’s terms (1979), this “emotional work” is required for the construction of identities. Thus far, it is not clear how IT and identity intertwine where frustration, anger, pride, relief, or joy may all be experienced. What is the emotional work required of actors working with information technologies in order to construct their identities, and how do they manage it? Such studies would clearly contribute to both research and practice. Provisional self: Ibarra (1999) suggests that adaptation to new work roles is a process of creating, testing, and refining provisional identities. The resulting identities are provisional because they have yet to be rehearsed and refined with experience and internalized as a full and coherent professional identity (Ibarra, 1999). Interestingly, the concept of adaptation has been widely discussed in the IS literature as in Sokol (1994) and Tyre and Orlikowski (1996). Others have focused on the way users respond to changes or disruptions induced by information technology (e.g Beaudry and Pinsonneault, 2005). However, although these studies have offered valuable insights on how social actors adapt to a new IT-based environment, the identity frame has been largely overlooked. The concept of provisional self, for example, would help understand the adaptation process by shedding light on how information technology proposes identity alternatives that social actors provisionally enact and, later, revise, discard or retain. Extended self: Rochberg-Halton (1984) argues that ‘the world of meaning that we create for ourselves, and that creates our selves, extends literally into the objective surroundings” (p. 335). Based on this premise, Belk (1988) proposes the concept of “extended self”, which posits that our possessions are a major contributor to and reflection of our identities. The concept is of particular interest since it opens the self to the world with which the individual is interacting (Zouaghi and Darpy, 2003). Fischer (1992) showed that IT has been a resource for identity construction and selfpresentation since the early diffusion of telephone technology. Hence, it would be of particular interest to investigate how people identify with technologies they construct or use (e.g. socialnetworking technologies, mobile technologies) to the point where these technologies become essential extensions of their selves. Organizational identity: Identity is a multilevel notion that can be explored at the individual, group and organization level. While individual and group identities have been the main focus of IS investigators, organizational identity remains a totally unexplored area. Golden-Biddle and Rao (1997) define organizational identity as the shared beliefs of members about the central, enduring, and distinctive characteristics of the organization. There are several intriguing and current questions related to the impact of information technology on organizational identity that seem to be as yet inadequately explored but which constitute an ambitious agenda. Questions such as “How is organizational identity related to information technology?” or “What is the role of information technology in the construction, maintenance and/or alteration of organizational identity?” should be explored further. Methodological considerations: When examining the way IT sustains and shapes individual and collective identities, we suggest that it may be of particular interest to examine the contextual setting in some detail and over time. In-depth interviews or participant observation are particularly relevant. There may also be opportunities to apply the identity concept simultaneously at multiple levels of analysis, since phenomena at the organizational level reflect, and are reflected in, issues at the individual and societal levels (Jones and Karsten, 2008). There are a host of fascinating and important questions that have not as yet yielded to effective empirical exploration. For example, further inquiries might investigate how IT-enabled changes in individual identities (micro-level) recursively shape collective and organizational identities (macro- level). Table 3 summarizes the research avenues outlined in this paper. Table 3: Opportunities for future IS research on the linkage between identity and IT Identity work Examination of how IT is implicated on individuals’ identity work. Emotional work Examination of emotional works involved in identity construction when interacting with information technology Project identity, legitimizing Investigation of how organizational actors construct identities around projects in which IT identity and resistance is used. Investigation of how dominant institutions extend their domination over social identity actors through the use of IT. Examination of the IT-related conditions under which people identify and resist some forms of identification. Anti-identity Examination of the IT-related conditions under which people acquiesce or reject some forms of identification. Ambivalent identity: Exploration of the dynamics of ambivalent identification induced by information technology. Identity regulation Examination of how elite groups (top management) use information technology as a means of identity regulation. Provisional self Investigation of how information technology proposes identity alternatives that social actors provisionally enact and, later, revise, discard or retain. Extended self Investigation of how people identify with the technologies they construct and/or use and how these technologies become essential extensions of their identities. Organizational identity Investigation of the role of information technology in the construction, maintenance and/or alteration of organizational identity. Methodological considerations Use of in-depth interviews or participant observation and mixture of levels of analysis. Conclusion The purpose of this study was twofold: first to assess how IS researchers have studied the linkage between IT and identity, second to propose a research agenda to the IS community to tackle further inquiries into how IT may impact identities. As a particular outcome of this research, we assert that, interestingly, identity is an emerging analytical category in the IS discipline; however, the literature seems still a loosely affiliated body of research, and our knowledge of the linkage between information technology and identity remains, thus far, limited. Through this research, we call on IS theorists to bring the identity frame into the mainstream of IS discipline. More particularly, we urge them to develop a sharper eye for the diverse and fine-tuned ways in which IT sustains and reshapes individual, group and organizational identities. As a first step towards this goal, we have provided a research agenda that sets the stage for IS researchers to delve into this under-researched area. This agenda, however, is not intended to be seen as offering a complete account of what to be pursued as there may be other opportunities in addressing the issue. 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