Recently in Theory Category

Call for Papers : European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) Special Issue on Information Systems, Identity and Identification

Research into the role of 'identity' in organizations has become increasingly popular in recent years.  Scholars from different organizational and management disciplines have applied the concept to address a wide variety of issues.  Lyon (2009) emphasizes that the topic can include both technological issues of identification and social issues of organizational and personal identity.  The European Journal of Information Systems has published a number of papers in each of these areas in recent years.

The purpose of this special issue is to solicit original research in information systems that studies questions of identity / identification.
Of particular interest will be papers that critically explore the inter-dependencies between technical issues of identification and social issues of identity.  For example, how pseudonymous authentication methods for social networks or organizational intranets can shape what information individuals choose to disclose in these environments, or how attitudes to personalised mobile devices are affected by identification technologies like biometrics, global positioning or RFID.  Furthermore, we encourage submissions that examine the interrelationships between organizational practices, change, information systems, and the shaping and articulation of personal and social identities.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The interrelationship of technology and identity in the context of IS implementation;
• The role of identity in enabling collaboration and coordination across groups and organizations;
• The relationship between identity, power and organizational politics;
• Information systems research issues created by the study of identity;
• Implementation, acceptance and ongoing challenges of access management;
• The role of organizational identity in enabling organizational sustainability;
• The influence of the presentation and perception of identity on information technology use;
• Public sector usage of identity technologies;
• Anonymity, pseudonymity, privacy and security concerns about technologies for identification.

Prospective authors are encouraged to contact the guest editors to discuss their proposals before submission.

Guest Editors for the Special Issue
Uri Gal, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark (ug.caict@cbs.dk) Edgar A.
Whitley, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
(e.a.whitley@lse.ac.uk)

Deadline for submissions 15 January 2011

For more details see here.

Two papers have been accepted to the 8th SIG-SI / SIG-USE research symposium at this year's annual meeting of the American Society of Information Science & Technology.

I will be presenting a paper I co-authored with Dr. Steve Sawyer of Syracuse University where we situate Social Informatics in the broader theoretical debate on the socio-technical nature of information and communications technologies (ICT).  This paper is in the vein of, and draws on, the insights of the Leonardi & Barley paper discussed in the prior post.

You can read this paper here.

I will also be presenting as a research poster on some early findings from my dissertation research on the influence of organizational identity on the design of complex inter-organizational information systems.  Specifically, I find that organizational identity claims are reflected in both the organizational and technological designs of integrated criminal justice information systems.

You can read the paper here.

Paul Leonardi and Stephen Barley have written an excellent paper on how we theorize technology and social action.  It is by far the best treatment of this subject I have ever read.

Social theorists of technology continue to battle with issues of materiality and social context, structure and agency.  Leonardi and Barley frame this as a tension between the materialism (artifact) and the idealism (people) and determinism (structure) and voluneerism (agency).  Their analysis shows that theorists tend to favor or lean towards idealism and volunteerism resulting in little to no agency being assigned to the artifact; and that this 'tilting' is a result of conflating materialism with determinism (e.g., if one assigns any agency to the material properties of a technological artifact, one is by definition a technological determinist).

Indeed in my own work I have found that there is an inertial tendency to drift towards the social half of socio-technical.  Part of this I believe is because accounting for both the social and the technical simultaneously is messy, difficult, and ambiguous.  It's difficult to present a parsimonius explanation of a phenomenon when by definition there is more than one contributing factor.  Saying "it's both materiality and idealism" can be dissatisfying.

Key to this article is the argument that materialism matters - a loaded gun retains its lethality independent of whether its used as a hammer - and that theorists need to do a better job of accounting for the affordances and constraints presented by technology's material properties.