Knowledge that Transforms

The problem of detecting whether two behavioral constructs reference the same real-world phenomenon has existed for over 100 years. Discordant naming of constructs is here termed the construct identity fallacy (CIF). We designed and evaluated the construct identity detector (CID), the first tool with large-scale construct identity detection properties and the first tool that does not require respondent data. Through the adaptation and combination of different natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, six designs were created and evaluated against human expert decisions. All six designs were found capable of detecting construct identity, and a design combining two existing algorithms significantly outperformed the other approaches. A set of follow-up studies suggests the tool is valuable as a supplement to expert efforts in literature review and meta-analysis. Beyond design science contributions, this article has important implications related to the taxonomic structure of social and behavioral science constructs, for the jingle and jangle fallacy, the core of the Information Systems nomological network, and the inaccessibility of social and behavioral science knowledge. In sum, CID represents an important, albeit tentative, step toward discipline-wide identification of construct identities.

Crowdsourcing (CS) of micro tasks is a relatively new, open source work form enabled by information and communication technologies. While anecdotal evidence of its benefits abounds, our understanding of the phenomenon’s societal consequences remains limited. Drawing on value sensitive design (VSD), we explore microtask CS as perceived by crowd workers, revealing their values as a means of informing the design of CS platforms. Analyzing detailed narratives of 210 crowd workers participating in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we uncover a set of nine values they share: access, autonomy, fairness, transparency, communication, security, accountability, making an impact, and dignity. We find that these values are implicated in four crowdsourcing structures: compensation, governance, technology, and microtask. Two contrasting perceptions—empowerment and marginalization—coexist, forming a duality of microtask CS. The study contributes to the CS and VSD literatures, heightens awareness of worker marginalization in microtask CS, and offers guidelines for improving CS practice. Specifically, we offer recommendations regarding the ethical use of crowd workers (including for academic research), and call for improving MTurk platform design for greater worker empowerment.

This research note reports on an empirical investigation of the effect of the Internet on racial hate crimes in the United States from the period 2001–2008. We find evidence that, on average, broadband availability increases racial hate crimes. We also document that the Internet’s impact on these hate crimes is not uniform in that the positive effect is stronger in areas with higher levels of racism, which we identify as those with more segregation and a higher proportion of racially charged search terms, but not significant in areas with lower levels of racism. We analyze in depth whether Internet access will enhance hate group operations but find no support for the idea that this mechanism is driving the result. In contrast, we find that online access is increasing the incidence of racial hate crimes executed by lone wolf perpetrators. Several other mechanisms that could be driving the results are described. Overall, our results shed light on one of the many offline societal challenges from increased online access.

The social inclusion of newly resettled refugees is a significant issue confronting both refugees and their host societies. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly viewed as a useful resource in programs that provide settlement services or promote participation in society. This paper moves beyond the conventional discussion on the digital divide to explore what people are actually able to do and achieve with ICTs. We draw on an analysis of the use of ICTs for particular purposes by more than 50 resettled refugees to develop an explanation of the process by which ICT use contributes to their social inclusion. We propose that ICT constitutes a resource from which a set of five valuable capabilities is derived: to participate in an information society, to communicate effectively, to understand a new society, to be socially connected, and to express a cultural identity. In realizing these capabilities through ICT use, refugees exercise their agency and enhance their well-being in ways that assist them to function effectively in a new society and regain control over their disrupted lives.

The confluence of widely available malleable technology and the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend creates a new dynamic for information technology innovation in the workplace. Nontechnical users are empowered to adapt pliable technology in the course of normal usage episodes. We develop a theoretical perspective of adaptation behaviors by extending the adaptive structuration theory (AST) to the level of individuals, and present a topology of adaptation behaviors to capture the rich landscape of this emerging phenomenon. Based on this new theoretical perspective, we propose a research model and perform a survey study targeting young professionals to empirically investigate adaptation of malleable IT by users. Our findings reveal the compounding effects of four distinct adaptation behaviors including the insight that task adaptation mediates the effect of technology adaptation on individual performance. This study contributes by providing a theoretical framework for examining adaptation behaviors, extending AST to the level of individuals, and addressing specific criticisms of AST in the information systems literature.

Using longitudinal data of IT professionals’ activities in the SAP Community Network, and the career histories of these professionals obtained from LinkedIn, we investigate the relationship between an individual’s participation in Internet-enabled open knowledge communities and a major event of his/her career development: jobhopping. We measure individual participation in open knowledge communities by two dimensions of related activities: contribution and learning. We provide empirical evidence that contribution to knowledge communities leads to a higher likelihood of job-hopping, yet a greater amount of learning is associated with a higher probability of retention. We argue that the effect of contribution can be attributed to job market signaling and the effect of learning is primarily driven by enhanced job performance and career advancement within the current organization. A series of robustness tests were conducted to address the self-selection bias and to rule out some possible alternative explanations to these mechanisms. Our work contributes to the existing body of literature on networks of practice and provides supporting evidence that participation in these networks indeed leads to career benefits and status advancements. Additionally, our study takes the first step to fill the gap in the current literature on voluntary employee turnover that has so far ignored the impacts of employee participation in external knowledge communities, thus providing both theoretical and practical insights in the area of organizational research.

In this article, we assess the value of information technology related intangible assets and then use data on business practices and management capabilities to understand how this value is distributed across firms. Using a panel of 127 firms over the period 2003–2006, we replicate and extend the finding from Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Yang (2002) that $1 of computer hardware is correlated with more than $10 of market value. We account for the “missing $9” by broadening the definition of IT to include capitalized software, and then include all purchased and internally developed software, other internal IT services, IT consulting, and IT-related training (whether or not it is capitalized by the firm). In addition, we use data on IT-related business practices in order to analyze the distribution of IT-related intangibles within the sample. Our results suggest that the “invisible” IT not accounted for on balance sheets is being priced into the market value of firms. We also estimate that there is a 45% to 76% premium in market value for the firms with the highest organizational IT capabilities (based on separate measures of human resource practices, management practices, internal IT use, external IT use, and Internet capabilities), as compared to those with the lowest organizational IT capabilities. Our results thus suggest that contributions of IT to value depend heavily on other factors, and are not a rising tide that lifts all boats.

In this paper, we develop conjectures for understanding how information technology (IT) strategy and IT investments jointly influence profitability and the market value of the firm. We view IT strategy as an expression of the dominant strategic objective that the firm chooses to emphasize, which can be revenue expansion, cost reduction, or a dual emphasis in which both goals are pursued. Using data from more than 300 firms in the United States, we find that at the mean value of IT investments, firms with a dual IT strategic emphasis have a higher market value as measured by Tobin’s Q than firms with a revenue or a cost emphasis, but they have similar levels of profitability. Of greater importance, IT strategic emphasis plays a significant role in moderating the relationship between IT investments and firm performance. Dual-emphasis firms have a stronger IT–Tobin’s Q relationship than revenue-emphasis firms. Dual-emphasis firms also have a stronger IT– profitability relationship than either revenue- or cost-emphasis firms. Overall, these findings imply that, at low levels of IT investment, the firm may need to choose between revenue expansion and cost reduction, but at higher levels of IT investment, dual-emphasis in IT strategy or IT strategic ambidexterity increasingly pays off.