With this issue, Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) is entering the fifth decade of its publication. This is the time to reaffirm our long-standing commitments as a top-tier Information-System (IS) publication venue.
In the preeminent – epistemic – aspect of its activity, JMIS has always stood for the publication of papers making a significant novel contribution to the knowledge in our domain. That is why we publish only full-scale research papers. A publication in JMIS means that the authors have made such a contribution to knowledge. Our outstanding corps of reviewers, supported by our blue-ribbon Editorial Board, vouches for that through a rigorous peer-review process and the final recommendation to publish. Our editors’ understanding of the field of IS has always been an inclusive one, and that is our strength as the Journal both reflects and shapes the growth and evolution of our discipline. The intellectual heft of our research work has been and will be determining our role in knowledge creation in the community of scholarly disciplines. Our research may overlap with the cognate disciplines, and so it should be. Walling ourselves off would take away from our raison d’être in the house of science. As a field centering on information technology (IT), we accumulate the knowledge we are able to apply to the ever new, and ever more potent, constituent technologies. Our discipline is by its very nature subject to the need for evolution, while retaining its core. Over the long years, papers published in JMIS have originated or strongly contributed to numerous lines of IS research, be it the economics of IS, strategic deployment of IT, design research, neuroscience in IS research, behavioral cybersecurity and general resilience, IT-based deception, health informatics, immersive systems, AI-human collaboration and competition, to name only a few. The forty years of our publication have, after all, covered IS research almost from the origins of our field.
Organizational and collectively organized computing, researched by us with the sociotechnical approach, uniquely combines the understanding of information technology (IT) in the interaction with people, teams, communities, firms, government bodies, and society in their various configurations and activities. There are numerous theories and methodologies, some of them honed by our field, that lead us to knowledge discovery – and we aim to use the strongest of them for a research task at hand. We are able to analyze the interaction of technological systems with these human entities, and we are also able to design in a disciplined, sciences-of-the artificial fashion, where we contribute novel paradigmatic artifacts along with theoretical knowledge. The best of our papers are strongly generative, widely opening the doors to new discoveries.
As a top-tier journal, we also have a strong responsibility to support the inclusive well-being of society. Since we live the lives that are progressively defined by IT, it cannot be otherwise. The velocity of IT-driven change brings societal stresses and opportunities that our field is uniquely equipped to explore and help to deal with. This is another reason for fielding our big tent of IT-centered research. As the papers JMIS ultimately publishes move in the development process, we make every effort to bring out that societal contribution, to complement and perhaps to drive the principal epistemic value of the paper. An so, on to the issue’s papers.
The relationship between the law-enforcement personnel and the public is often fraught, in some cases tragically. IT-based surveillance can be seen as the Benthamite Panopticon harming societal welfare; the view is often taken without regard to who is being surveilled. Can the two ills be remedied to create a common good or at least alleviate the ills? In the first paper of the issue, Abdul Sesay, Ronald Ramirez, Marie-Claude Boudreau, and Gerald C. Kane show that it just may be, and show how it is done. Conducting an interpretive study of the control mechanisms in police organizations and deploying the lens of affordance theory, the authors conceptualize the actualization of the five affordances that constitutes an integral control mechanism. The operation of IS with the real-time input from the body-worn cameras of police officers formalizes the prior clan control mechanism into the bureaucratic one (in the original, generally positive sense of the word). The authors proceed to show how this IT-afforded form of control can be combined with the traditional, less formal and context-sensitive techniques, to lead to beneficial results. The authors do not shy from closely analyzing the negative aspects of the change. This conceptually rich work can very clearly be extended to the studies in other settings, surfacing the effects on employees, as well as on other stakeholders, and expanding the theory of organizational control. The study and the establishment of boundaries is very much of the moment.
Technological innovation is a highly significant factor in the increase of productivity, the basis of societal well-being. A lion’s share of this innovation is IT-related innovation. In fact, much of the IT innovation is actually multidisciplinary. One fruitful way, taken by the authors of the next paper, is to view this multidisciplinary innovation as constituted by modules emerging from several disciplines. We then can conceptualize the process of the innovative discovery as a recombinant and self-reinforcing ecosystem with a focal technology supported by other contributing ones. This is the view taken in the research work presented by Junho Joon, Gautam Pant, and Shagun Pant in the next paper. The study contributes the conceptual framework and a design-science artifact for the support of discovery. The authors deploy unsupervised learning to a dataset of millions of patents to surface their technology relatedness at a scale vastly surpassing human analysis. The approach enables us to go well beyond standing on the shoulders of giants in speeding up and supporting technological innovation.
Crowdsourcing is one of the collective processes enables by the Web that manifestly justify its existence. Sourcing the funds for human endeavours, known as crowdfunding, shines among other ventures – when done right. Two papers investigate what that means. Yi Wu, Hua (Jonathan) Ye, Matthew l. Jensen, and Linwei Liu empirically study the crowd fundraising for medical care, a worthy pursuit as we aim at the inclusive societal well-being. The authors show how donors’ sympathy can be aroused, and donations may be differentially raised, by providing positive and negative updates to the progress of the project. The authors further investigate the role of social endorsement of the project’s aims. In the next paper, Ta-Wei (Daniel) Kao, Li Zhang, Benjamin B.M. Shao, and Thomas Y. Choi examine general fundraising from the vantage of the network theory as they study the effect of social ties among related fundraisers on fundraising performance. The effect is largely positive. The two papers jointly reinforce our understanding of crowdfunding as a social process on the fund-seekers’ side: social ties and social endorsements exert a significant influence – just like in the physical world, but in a different way.
The use of chatbots, now newly empowered with the generative AI, is clearly on the rise, and expanding in its scope of action. Here, Agrim Sachdeva, Antino Kim, and Alan R. Dennis investigate empirically how the use of chatbots instead of the more traditional Web forms in collecting user reviews affects the nature of the received reviews and the overall user experience. Beyond that, the authors investigate the comparative effectiveness of the free-form versus structured (template-based) review collection. Deep analysis of the thought processes behind the nuanced results serves both theory and practice of the future online communication with all of a firms’ stakeholders.
The multiplicity of texts reflecting the perception of a firm in the financial and in the commercial marketplaces helps in assessing its prospects. This is particularly so as the sentiments regarding the elements of that positions evolve and change, gradually or at once. IS is a natural partner in sentiment analysis, as vast corpora of text can be scanned and sentiment evolution can be assessed with the use of machine learning. In the next paper, Jiexin Zheng, Ka Chung Ng, Rong Zheng, and Kar Yan Tam present and exercise a novel algorithm for sentiment analysis which combines a human input (the predefined word list that as made to evolve in time) with the algorithmic word-embedding technique to gauge the sentiment evolution with respect to a focal firm. The strength of the approach is in the dynamic nature of the sentiment-word list, which reflects the dynamism of the communications on the contemporary business scene. The authors exercise the approach and reveal significant differences with respect to the valence of the sentiments. The dynamic sentiment analysis method offered here is capable of contributing significantly to business intelligence.
Two subsequent papers engage strongly the technological side of our sociotechnical field of knowledge. The first of them, by He Li, William J. Kettinger, and Sungjin Yoo, examines the relationship between the deployment of cloud storage and security breaches. As a part of the extensive studies of various aspects of cybersecurity published in JMIS, the work contributes to our understanding of the influence of the now commonly used cloud storage on the security of the firm. The authors dichotomize the short-term versus the long-term security, as well the external versus the internal breaches. Using the attention-directed theoretical view to perform their longitudinal empirical analysis, the authors determine how the firms’ cloud-storage usage affects their different breach types over time. The work extends the theory by adding the temporal dimension and assists the cybersecurity practice in properly allocating the breach-prevention resources.
Our discipline can contribute to the cyber-protection with behavioral studies, as well as with technologically-oriented ones. The following paper, authored by Benjamin M. Ampel, Sagar Samtani, Hongyi Zhou, Hsinchun Chen, and Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr., focuses on the technological aspect of security-threat mitigation. The authors offer a cybersecurity risk-management framework that deploys the available hacker-attack data in an artifact linked to broadly used threat-mitigation software system. They illustrate the applicability of the combined framework and of the new artifact in protecting hospital IS. The capability to use the rich experiential data in conjunction with broadly deployed software framework significantly enhances a firm’s ability to protect itself from cyber-attackers. As a design-research study, the work presents both the novel artifact and the contribution to the cybersecurity risk-management knowledge. The authors distill the general cyber-protection capability analyses from the exercise of their approach.
The software architecture of a firm’s IS is the overall structure of software systems supporting the firm’s functioning and the new initiatives in the competitive environment of the company. The architecture should be planned, with the plan maintained as the infrastructure evolves. In reality, the architecture is, at least in part, emerging with the evolution. It is desirable, ceteris paribus, for the software apps that constitute a part of the architecture, while themselves evolving via modifications, to be stable in long-term use. Karl Akbari, Daniel Fürstenau, and Till J. Winkler investigate the premises of the architecturally embedded applications in dependence on the application governance. The essential of the governance is the more or less centralized distribution of the application planning and of the coordination of changes. Applying the multiple-contingency view to the architecture and deploying a sector’s longitudinal data, the researchers determine the characteristics of the fit between the organizational IS governance and the architecturally-embedded applications that lead to their longevity.
There are multiple and highly diverse reasons for the turnover of IT professionals. As we know full well, turnover is costly, and sometimes destabilizing. Here, we shall see that it may also be infectious and self-reinforcing. In the concluding paper of the issue, Manuel Wiesche, Christoph Pflügler, and Jason B. Thatcher explore the social influence as a factor in the turnover. They develop a turnover model to study the influence of departing software-team members on other members of the team. The authors test the model using the social network of a large employer of IT professionals. They reinforce their findings with multi-case study of several software-development teams. The potential chain turnover reaction discovered by Wiesche and the co-authors should alert the employers to the weight of the first leaver and contributes to our knowledge of the social context of turnover.