The 10 most-cited articles in MIS Quarterly, 2020

Today’s healthcare workers, specifically nurses, are experiencing technostress associated with the use of healthcare information technology (HIT). Technostress is often characterized by IS researchers as negative, or as being on the “dark side” of technology. However, a broader reading of the stress literature suggests that technostress may be both positive and negative, and can therefore have a “bright side” in addition to a dark side. The objective of this study is to conceptualize a holistic technostress process that includes positive and negative components of technostress embedded in two subprocesses: the techno-eustress subprocess and the techno-distress subprocess, respectively. The study instantiates this holistic technostress model through a sequential mixed-methods research design in the context of HIT. Phase 1 of the design is a qualitative, interpretive case study involving interviews with 32 nurses. Based on the findings from the case study, the paper builds a research model that operationalizes the concepts embedded in the holistic technostress model and identifies…

Echo chambers and filter bubbles are potent metaphors that encapsulate widespread public fear that the use of social media may limit the information that users encounter or consume online. Specifically, the concern is that social media algorithms combined with tendencies to interact with like-minded others both limits users’ exposure to diverse viewpoints and encourages the adoption of more extreme ideological positions. Yet empirical evidence about how social media shapes information consumption is inconclusive. We articulate how characteristics of platform algorithms and users’ online social networks may combine to shape user behavior. We bring greater conceptual clarity to this phenomenon by expanding beyond discussion of a binary presence or absence of echo chambers and filter bubbles to a richer set of outcomes incorporating changes in both diversity and slant of users’ information sources. Using a data set with over four years of web browsing history for a representative panel of nearly 200,000 U.S. adults, we analyzed how individuals’ social media usage was associated with…

How should firms configure organizational capabilities to achieve competitive advantage in complex digital environments? To answer this question, we investigate parsimonious configurations for high firm performance in digital environments characterized by organized complexity. We adopt a configurational perspective accompanied by a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explicate complex nonlinear relationships among key digital and non-digital capabilities in the form of conjunction, equifinality, and asymmetry in producing the outcome. With this approach, we shift attention from individual capabilities to configurations of capabilities to develop a better understanding of the complex role of IT in the digital world. Our analyses, using a rare and unique dataset of 376 observations for organizations in healthcare, education, manufacturing, and service sectors in the United States, reveal three key findings. First, IT-enabled information analytics capability alone is neither necessary nor sufficient in any configuration for high performance; however, it is an…

The classical view of an information system is that it represents and reflects physical reality. We suggest this classical view is increasingly obsolete: digital technologies are now creating and shaping physical reality. We call this phenomenon the ontological reversal. The ontological reversal is where the digital version is created first, and the physical version second (if needed). This ontological reversal challenges us to think about the role of humans and technology in society. It also challenges us to think about our role as IS scholars in this digital world and what it means for our research agendas.

Complexity is all around us in this increasingly digital world. Global digital infrastructure, social media, Internet of Things, robotic process automation, digital business platforms, algorithmic decision making, and other digitally enabled networks and ecosystems fuel complexity by fostering hyper-connections and mutual dependencies among human actors, technical artifacts, processes, organizations, and institutions. Complexity affects human agencies and experiences in all dimensions. Individuals and organizations turn to digitally enabled solutions to cope with the wicked problems arising out of digitalization. In the digital world, complexity and digital solutions present new opportunities and challenges for information systems (IS) research. The purpose of this special issue is to foster the development of new IS theories on the causes, dynamics, and consequences of complexity in increasing digital sociotechnical systems. In this essay, we discuss the key theories and methods of complexity science, and illustrate emerging new IS research challenges and opportunities in complex…

This paper draws on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to explore the transformation of an analog automation product platform as it was infused with extensive and deepening digital capacities over a 40-year period. Our case demonstrates how the deepening digitization of components and functions drives complexity by connecting the platform to multiple social and technical settings and producing new interactions and information exchanges. The increased connectivity and dynamism invited unexpected and significant architectural and organizational shifts that moved the platform toward an ecosystem-centered organizing logic. CAS theory and its notion of constrained generating procedures (CGPs) are used to analyze how new connections and interactions produced a multilevel and nonlinear change in the platform organization. We offer two main contributions. First, we provide a novel empirical analysis of how product platform digitization leads to phase transitions and show the mediating role of three mechanisms in this process treated as CGPs: interaction rules, design control, and…

This research methods article proposes a visual data analytics framework to enhance social media research using deep learning models. Drawing on the literature of information systems and marketing, complemented with data-driven methods, we propose a number of visual and textual content features including complexity, similarity, and consistency measures that can play important roles in the persuasiveness of social media content. We then employ state-of-the-art machine learning approaches such as deep learning and text mining to operationalize these new content features in a scalable and systematic manner. For the newly developed features, we validate them against human coders on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Furthermore, we conduct two case studies with a large social media dataset from Tumblr to show the effectiveness of the proposed content features. The first case study demonstrates that both theoretically motivated and data-driven features significantly improve the model’s power to predict the popularity of a post, and the second one highlights the relationships between content…

Introduction to Special Issue: The Role of Information Systems and Analytics in Chronic Disease Prevention and Management

While there has been much work on the relationship between information technology (IT) and organizational change, there has been limited research that theorizes the relationship between IT and societal change. This paper draws on institutional theory, in particular institutional logics, to develop a model of IT and societal change, which we argue is critical in an era of large-scale digital transformation. Our approach is based on a view of society as an interinstitutional system, reflecting the multiplicity of logics at the societal level. We conceptualize societal change as shifts in the multiplicity of logics, with a focus on changes in the levels of centrality and compatibility. Our model relates these changes to the materiality of technology through the concept of IT affordances. We propose three mechanisms (sensegiving, translating, and decoupling) through which IT affordances become elements of societal change. We identify three corresponding carriers through which IT affordances gain scale and stability (objects, networks, and platforms). We discuss the implications of our…