With China emerging as a new frontier of global IT outsourcing, many Chinese IT service suppliers are actively expanding in three major markets: Asia, especially Japan, the West, especially the United States, and the Chinese domestic market. Compared to multinational suppliers and established Indian suppliers, Chinese IT service firms are at a relatively early, but rapidly growing stage, which offers a unique opportunity to explore an understudied topic in the information systems literature: internationalization strategies of IT service suppliers from emerging economies. Through a three-part qualitative case study of 13 China-based IT service firms, including almost all of the Chinese suppliers recognized globally, this study elaborates the inter-nationalization behavior and decision rationale of these suppliers. The findings show that these major Chinese suppliers include both firms that incrementally internationalize and firms that are “born global.” For both types of firms, the entry and growth in different markets is a highly dynamic activity combining a strategically planned, resource-seeking process and a flexible, opportunistic bricolage process based on existing operation capabilities and client relationships. The suppliers dynamically oscillate between these processes to exploit and create opportunities while expanding in multiple markets.
It is a great honor to become the 11 th Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly.It is also very humbling to be in the company of the 10 illustrious scholars who preceded me.I am thrilled to start my EIC tenure at this point in my career.I would like to give special thanks to the members of the MISQ Policy Council, who
Because of its very nature, and reinforced by the compartmentalization of our research institutions, our discipline has evolved in segmented ways along the various reference disciplines.One of the biggest division lies along the lines of "behavioral information systems" versus "economics of information systems," as if these are completely orthogonal subfields.In my last editorial, I tried to point out that the different IS approaches are actually very close in many aspects, and that there are great opportunities for intradisciplinary IS research.Here I proceed with this general theme, focusing on the growing field of behavioral economics and its connection with IS research.In the first chapter of their excellent book Advances in Behavioral Economics, Camerer and Loewenstein (2004) open the first paragraph with the following sentence: "Behavioral economics increases the explanatory power of economics by providing it with more realistic psychology foundations."Many of the insightful developments of behavioral economics are about incorporating cognitive principles to how economists approach decision making by individuals.Much of what the IS field is about relates to information processing for decision making.With the advent of the Internet and all its evolving technologies, the decision-making IS environments have proliferated and expanded in complexity, reaching billions of individuals and consumers.These environments are characterized by increasing information richness and interactive decision making, often resulting in economic transactions: crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, electronic marketplaces, personalization and recommendation systems, synthetic and virtual environments of augmented reality, games and gamification, just to name a few.In addition, embedded in these environments are the important issues of privacy, trust, and security, which are fundamentally connected to both behavioral and economic aspects.Behavioral economics methods can bring enormous potential to inform and complement IS research.And, very importantly, due to the information richness and complexity of these environments, IS researchers, who have deeper understanding of these environments than anybody else, can contribute back to advance the field of behavioral economics.In much of what follows, I draw heavily from Camerer and Loewenstein.Their book provides a great introduction to the field of behavioral economics connecting past efforts to future opportunities. Historical PerspectiveHow do two disciplines that were separated through most of the 20 th century find common ground to open new research horizons?At the turn of the 20 th century, the discipline of economics went through the neoclassical revolution, built on assumptions about rationality of human behavior-the homo-economics.It led to the belief by economists that economics was like a natural science, with the concept of utility and its mathematical treatment forming its foundation.Although there was recognition that cognitive
Information systems journal rankings and ratings help scholars focus their publishing efforts and are widely used surrogates for judging the quality of research. Over the years, numerous approaches have been used to rank IS journals, approaches such as citation metrics, school lists, acceptance rates, and expert assessments. However, the results of these approaches often conflict due to a host of validity concerns. In the current scientometric study, we make significant strides toward correcting for these limitations in the ranking of mainstream IS journals. We compare expert rankings to bibliometric measures such as the ISI Impact Factor™, the h-index, and social network analysis metrics. Among other findings, we conclude that bibliometric measures provide very similar results to expert-based methods in determining a tiered structure of IS journals, thereby suggesting that bibliometrics can be a complete, less expensive, and more efficient substitute for expert assessment. We also find strong support for seven of the eight journals in the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars’ “basket” of journals. A cluster analysis of our results indicates a two-tiered separation in the quality of the highest quality IS journals—with MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems belonging, in that order, to the highest A+ tier. Journal quality metrics fit nicely into the sociology of science literature and can be useful in models that attempt to explain how knowledge disseminates through scientific communities.
This paper demonstrates the value of Archer’s morphogenetic approach (MA) in understanding and explaining the complexity of the broader context within which many developing country information and communication technology (ICT) projects are implemented. It does this by using MA’s analytical and explanatory apparatus to examine the evolution of the context of public sector ICT provision in Kenya over the period 1963–2006. In addition to demonstrating the practical value of MA, the paper contributes to the Information Systems literature on ICT for development (ICT4D). The analysis identifies (1) global normative pressures, polity, the national socio-economic base, disruptive technology, and the emergence of multistakeholder networks as key forces in shaping the evolutionary trajectory, (2) the explicit treatment of time and temporality as key for understanding mechanisms underpinning the evolutionary process, and (3) the difficulty of cleanly isolating the implementation of individual public sector ICT projects from the broader context and ICT4D agendas. The discussion elaborates on the features of MA found to be particularly valuable in this study. The paper concludes that explicitly attending to time and temporality, and to the broader context for ICT4D projects, would contribute to the development of more nuanced accounts of such projects and a more emancipatory outlook for ICT4D research.
In this paper, critical realism and activity theory are compared within the context of theorizing technology-mediated organizational change. An activity theoretic analysis of the implementation of large-scale disruptive information systems in a public sector setting (in particular concerning paramedic treatment of heart attack patients and ambulance dispatch work activity) is used to illustrate how activity theory makes a significant contribution to critical realism, by (1) locating technology within “activity systems” and theorizing change through contradictions and congruencies within those systems; (2) developing recent critical realism-inspired theorization of the “inscription” of cultural and social relations within technology; and (3) developing recent insights of critical realist researchers regarding the way in which the performance management agenda is mediated through IS.
Adapting user interfaces to a user’s cultural background can increase satisfaction, revenue, and market share. Conventional approaches to catering for culture are restricted to adaptations for specific countries and modify only a limited number of interface components, such as the language or date and time formats. We argue that a more comprehensive personalization of interfaces to cultural background is needed to appeal to users in expanding markets. This paper introduces a low-cost, yet efficient method to achieve this goal: cultural adaptivity. Culturally adaptive interfaces are able to adapt their look and feel to suit visual preferences. In a design science approach, we have developed a number of artifacts that support cultural adaptivity, including a prototype web application. We evaluate the efficacy of the prototype’s automatically generated interfaces by comparing them with the preferred interfaces of 105 Rwandan, Swiss, Thai, and multicultural users. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of providing users with interfaces that correspond to their cultural preferences in a novel yet effective manner.
Critical realism offers exciting prospects in shifting attention toward the real problems that one faces and their underlying causes. As such, it offers a robust framework for the use of a variety of methods in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and significance of information systems in the contemporary world. One of the interesting tensions is that Archer's argument for the centrality of reflexivity in contemporary conditions tends to downplay both routine action and tacit forms of knowing, whereas a considerable volume of work on organizations and IS stresses the centrality of both. A great strength of the paper is that MA is used in an in-depth study to reveal over a long time line the processes and mechanisms that explain how the ICT for development trajectory emerged from the interplay of interactions at different levels of players in global, national, public, private, third sector, and civil society institutions and organizations.