Aron Lindberg

Coordinating Interdependencies in Online Communities: A Study of an Open Source Software Project

To manage work interdependencies, online communities draw on a variety of arm’s length coordination mechanisms offered by information technology platforms and associated practices. However, “unresolved interdependencies” remain that cannot be addressed by such arm’s length mechanisms. These interdependencies reflect, for example, unidentified or emerging knowledge-based dependencies between the community members or unaccounted relationships between ongoing community tasks. At the same time, online communities cannot resort to hierarchical coordination mechanisms such as incentives or command structures to address such interdependencies. So, how do they manage such interdependencies? To address this question, we conduct an exploratory, theory-generating case study involving qualitative and computational analyses of development activities within an open source software community: Rubinius. We analyze the ongoing management of interdependencies within the community and find that unresolved interdependencies ...

Towards a Theory of Affordance Ecologies

To understand how pervasive digitalization is changing organizational practice, scholars need to get to grips with how technology becomes intertwined with and embedded in practice and what its effects are for organizing and its outcomes. This needs to be done in ways that avoid the Scylla of technological determinism and the Charybdis of social relativism (Baxter, 2008; Kling, 1992; Markus & Robey, 1988). To achieve this, a potentially powerful theoretical device has been proposed — the affordance construct (e.g. Leonardi, 2012; Markus & Silver, 2008). This allows us to characterize features of technological artefacts in relation to specific users within specific contexts (e.g. email technology affords asynchronous communication between members of a software development team). Though the affordance concept was initially developed in ecological psychology to combat mentalist explanations of behaviour (Gibson, 1977, 1979), it has been increasingly adopted within the information systems (IS) literature to serve different theoretical purposes (DeSanctis, 2003; Markus, 2005; Norman, 2002). In the IS discourse the construct is primarily used in relational terms as a means to avoid giving primacy to either the material features of the artefact or the pure social construction of its usage. Due to this relational character it has been argued to resolve the theoretical tension between pure material or constructivist accounts of technology use.

Algorithmic Agency in Information Systems: Research Opportunities for Data Analytics of Digital Traces

The complex networks of today involve algorithms, humans, machines, and tools. As a consequence of their digital and sociotechnical nature, they increasingly exhibit autonomous and intelligent characteristics. This development puts prevailing assumptions about information systems at stake. In this paper, we specifically engage with a radical reframing of past conceptualizations of machine intelligence or agency. Based on our theorizing, we advance and substantiate a novel algorithmic agency perspective that centers around three key characteristics: algorithmic interpretation, data generativity, and input translation. These characteristics pave the way for a new wave of research in information systems. Our proposed research opportunities for data analytics of digital traces address conditions for, features of, and approaches to algorithmic agency.

Theorizing Modes of Open Source Software Development

Open Source Software (OSS) development is distributed across actors and artifacts and involves translating diffuse representations into distinct sets of contiguous code artifacts. Despite the highly distributed and dynamic nature of OSS development, it is often described in unitary, monolithic terms - an unfortunate situation which masks considerable variance across OSS development processes. Therefore we explore reasons for systematic variance in these processes so as to enable more effective OSS development practices. Drawing on theory of distributed cognition, we develop a language of cognitive translations, which occur within and across distributed social arrangements and structural conditions of sharing knowledge. This language provides micro-foundations for understanding how different modes of OSS development emerge. Through examining how generative characteristics of social and structural distributions in OSS shape distinct development pathways, we propose a theoretically derived typology explaining the characteristics, dynamics, and conditions for success of different modes of OSS development.