The 10 most-cited articles in MIS Quarterly, 2019

The sociotechnical perspective is often seen as one of the foundational viewpoints—or an “axis of cohesion”— for the Information Systems (IS) discipline, contributing to both its distinctiveness and its ability to coherently expand its boundaries. However, our review of papers in the two leading IS journals from 2000 to 2016 suggests that IS research has lost sight of the discipline’s sociotechnical character—a character that was widely acknowledged at the discipline’s inception. This is a problem because an axis of cohesion can be fundamental to a discipline’s long-term vitality. In order to address this issue, we offer ways to renew the sociotechnical perspective so that it can continue to serve as a distinctive and coherent foundation for the discipline. Our hope is that the renewed sociotechnical frame for the IS discipline discussed in the paper holds potential to contribute to the enduring strength of our diverse, distinctive, yet unified discipline. It also prompts members of the discipline to think more deeply about what it means to be an IS scholar.

News—real or fake—is now abundant on social media. News posts on social media focus users’ attention on the headlines, but does it matter who wrote the article? We investigate whether changing the presentation format to highlight the source of the article affects its believability and how social media users choose to engage with it. We conducted two experiments and found that nudging users to think about who wrote the article influenced the extent to which they believed it. The presentation format of highlighting the source had a main effect; it made users more skeptical of all articles, regardless of the source’s credibility. For unknown sources, low source ratings had a direct effect on believability. Believability, in turn, influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). We also found confirmation bias to be rampant: users were more likely to believe articles that aligned with their beliefs, over and above the effects of other factors.

A rich stream of research has identified numerous antecedents to employee compliance (and noncompliance) with information security policies. However, the number of competing theoretical perspectives and inconsistencies in the reported findings have hampered efforts to attain a clear understanding of what truly drives this behavior. To address this theoretical stalemate and build toward a consensus on the key antecedents of employees’ security policy compliance in different contexts, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relevant literature. Drawing on 95 empirical papers, we classified 401 independent variables into 17 distinct categories and analyzed each category’s relationship with security policy compliance, including an analysis for possible domain-specific moderators. A meta-analytic relative weight analysis determined the relative importance of each category in predicting security policy compliance, while adding robustness to our findings. At a broad level, our results suggest that much of the security policy compliance literature is plagued by suboptimal theoretical framing.…

Fake news (i.e., misinformation) on social media has sharply increased in the past few years. We conducted a behavioral experiment with EEG data from 83 social media users to understand whether they could detect fake news on social media, and whether the presence of a fake news flag affected their cognition and judgment. We found that the presence of a fake news flag triggered increased cognitive activity and users spent more time considering the headline. However, the flag had no effect on judgments about truth; flagging headlines as false did not influence users’ beliefs. A post hoc analysis shows that confirmation bias is pervasive, with users more likely to believe news headlines that align with their political opinions. Headlines that challenge their opinions receive little cognitive attention (i.e., they are ignored) and users are less likely to believe them.

The alignment between a firm’s business and information technology (IT) strategies continues to be important for research and practice. Prior research investigating the performance consequences of strategic IT alignment (SITA) has produced inconsistent results. This paper distinguishes between two roles of SITA: (1) as a state of congruence between business and IT, which is the primary focus of empirical studies, and (2) as reflecting a capability that may enable or inhibit the leveraging of IT investments, as has been discussed theoretically but not examined empirically. Based on the resource-based view (RBV), IT investment (ITI) is explicitly included as the resource that SITA as a capability can inherently help leverage. Also based on RBV, we argue that environmental uncertainty, which is examined in terms of dynamism, complexity, and munificence, moderates the effect of SITA on the relationship between ITI and firm performance. The research model is tested through panel-data analyses of data from 1999–2008, including 758 firm-year observations from 242 firms. This study is the…

Using a data set on individual investments in an online crowdfunding platform for mobile applications, this study examines whether an early investor’s experience within the platform serves as a credible signal of quality for other investors in the crowd and, if so, under what conditions. We find that early investors with experience—particularly investors with app development experience and investors with app investment experience—have a disproportionate influence on later investors in the crowd. Investors with app development experience are likely to have better knowledge of the product and are therefore found to be more influential for “concept apps” (apps in the pre-release stage), while investors with app investment experience with a better knowledge of market performance are found to be more influential for “live apps” (apps that are already being sold in the market). Our findings show that the majority of investors in this market, the crowd, although inexperienced, are rather sophisticated in their ability to identify and exploit nüanced differences in the underlying expertise…

Although technologies spurred by the “Internet of things” are increasingly being introduced in homes, only a few studies have examined the adoption or diffusion of such household technologies. One particular area of interest in this context is electricity consumption, especially the introduction of smart metering technology (SMT) in households. Despite its growing prominence, SMT implementation has met with various challenges across the world, including limited adoption by consumers. Thus, this study empirically examines the antecedents of SMT adoption by potential consumers. Using a mixed-methods design, the study first unearths the SMT-specific antecedents, then develops a contextualized model by drawing on theories from motivational psychology and the antecedents identified earlier, and finally tests this model using a large-scale survey of German consumers. The results provide support for many of the hypotheses and highlight the importance of motivational factors and some household demographic, privacy, and innovation-related factors on consumers’ intention to adopt SMT.

This paper investigates how individuals cope with IT security threats by taking into account both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping. While problem-focused coping (PFC) has been extensively studied in the IT security literature, little is known about emotion-focused coping (EFC). We propose that individuals employ both PFC and EFC to volitionally cope with IT security threats, and conceptually classify EFC into two categories: inward and outward. Our research model is tested by two studies: an experiment with 140 individuals and a survey of 934 respondents. Our results indicate that both inward EFC and outward EFC are stimulated by perceived threat, but that only inward EFC is reduced by perceived avoidability. Interestingly, inward EFC and outward EFC are found to have opposite effects on PFC. While inward EFC impedes PFC, outward EFC facilitates PFC. By integrating both EFC and PFC in a single model, we provide a more complete understanding of individual behavior under IT security threats. Moreover, by theorizing two categories of EFC and showing their opposing effects on…

Prompted by perceived shortcomings of prevailing conceptualizations of digital technology in IS, we propose a theory aimed at capturing both the ontological complexity of digital objects qua objects, and how their identity and use is bound up with various social associations. We begin with what it is to be an object, the differences between material and nonmaterial objects, and various categories of nonmaterial objects including syntactic objects and bitstrings. Building on these categories we develop a conception of digital objects and a novel “bearer” theory of how material and nonmaterial objects combine. The role of computation is considered, and how the identity and system functions of digital objects flow from their social positioning in the communities in which they arise. Various implications of the theory are identified, focusing on its use as a conceptual frame through which to view digital phenomena, and its potential to inform existing perspectives with regard both to how digital technology per se and the relationship between people and digital technology should be…