Ulrike Schultze

Design principles for competence management systems: a synthesis of an action research study

Even though the literature on competence in organizations recognizes the need to align organization level core competence with individual level job competence, it does not consider the role of information technology in managing competence across the macro and micro levels. To address this shortcoming, we embarked on an action research study that develops and tests design principles for competence management systems. This research develops an integrative model of competence that not only outlines the interaction between organizational and individual level competence and the role of technology in this process, but also incorporates a typology of competence (competence-in-stock, competence-in-use, and competence-in-the-making). Six Swedish organizations participated in our research project, which took 30 months and consisted of two action research cycles involving numerous data collection strategies and interventions such as prototypes. In addition to developing a set of design principles and considering their implications for both research and practice, this article includes a self-assessment of the study by evaluating it according to the criteria for canonical action research.

Knowledge management technology and the reproduction of knowledge work practices

Abstract Organizations seeking ways to manage their knowledge assets are increasingly turning to information technology for solutions. As knowledge management systems are being developed and implemented, it behooves both practitioners and researchers to learn from the successes and failures of more established types of information systems including MIS and DSS. According to the Standish Group, the implementation success rate for these systems runs at around 30%. Many argue that these low success rates are, in part, attributable to technologists’ lack of understanding of the situated work practices of the systems’ user communities. This has lead to increasing calls for research on work practice in the field of Information Systems. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what is meant by work practice. Furthermore, the consideration of work practice outside of its circuit of reproduction can be misleading. By circuits of reproduction we mean the reciprocal relationships through which practice creates and recreates the objectified social structures and conditions in which it occurs. In this paper, we adopt Bourdieus Theory of Practice to illuminate work practices and their circuits of reproduction. Relying on data that were collected during an eight-month ethnography of knowledge work practices in a US-based, Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, we focus on the situated “gatekeeping” practices of a group of competitive intelligence analysts and explore how their situated practices were at odds with the generalized “gatekeeping” practices embedded in a knowledge management technology whose implementation they themselves were advocating. We argue that their inability to see this incongruence until very late in the pilot implementation is associated with an understanding of their work practices in isolation, i.e. outside of their circuits of reproduction.

Designing interviews to generate rich data for information systems research

Information Systems (IS) publications that use interviews for data generation tend to provide very little insight into the research process and very few rely on a carefully chosen and well-articulated interviewing method. Given the wide variety of interviewing approaches available to qualitative researchers, it seems that the IS discipline is lagging behind and can easily enhance its methodological sophistication. In this paper, we address this opportunity by (i) highlighting the potential of interviewing as a means of generating data that provides insight into peoples experiential life; (ii) discussing the various epistemological stances that can be taken to interviewing; (iii) introducing and illustrating three interviewing methods (i.e., appreciative, laddering and photo-diary interviewing); and (iv) juxtaposing these methods to identify the conditions under which they are most effective.

Metaphors of virtuality: shaping an emergent reality

Abstract In this paper, we explore the contemporary discourse associated with the new phenomenon of virtual organizing, and identify a number of metaphors used in this discourse to characterize various aspects of virtuality. We believe paying attention to such metaphors is important because in the absence of experiences (direct or vicarious) to guide practice, the images and ideals promoted in the discourse will shape peoples views of and actions towards this new way of organizing. As such, metaphors play a powerful role in structuring the reality of virtuality. To understand the kind of reality being imagined and incited, we examine the various metaphors being proposed in the practitioner-directed literature on virtual organizing. We find that this discourse contains a multiplicity of different metaphors, each highlighting and hiding distinct aspects of virtual organizing. We identify five overarching metaphors in this discourse. These metaphors (re)present virtual organizing as a platform , as existing in space , as composed of bits , as operating as a community , and as engaging in a network of relationships. We analyze these metaphors in terms of their assumptions and presumptions about how to organize work, as well as their affordances and challenges. We conclude by considering what the consequences might be for people acting on the basis of such different, and often contradictory, metaphors in practice.

Embodiment and presence in virtual worlds: a review

The multimodal, 3D-graphical communication platforms known as virtual worlds have their historical roots in multi-user domains/dungeons (MUDs) and virtual reality (VR). Given the extensive research on these technologies and the novelty of virtual worlds as a topic of study in information systems (IS), it behooves us to learn from the concepts, theories and insights generated primarily by other disciplines that have focused on these technologies. Because neither MUDs nor VR have significant organizational application, thus locating them outside of the IS discipline’s purview, very little of this literature has found its way into IS research thus far. This article reviews the extant literature on virtual environments and seeks to make its insights accessible to IS research on virtual worlds. In particular, this will focus on concepts, theories and insights regarding embodiment and presence, which are afforded by the avatar, a distinguishing technological artifact of virtual worlds.

Research Commentary---Virtual Worlds: A Performative Perspective on Globally Distributed, Immersive Work

Virtual worlds are immersive, simulated, persistent and dynamic environments that include rich graphical 3-D spaces, high fidelity audio, motion, viewpoint, and interactivity. Initially dismissed as environments of play, virtual worlds have gained legitimacy in business and educational settings for their application in globally-distributed work, project management, online learning, and real-time simulation. Understanding the emergent aspects of these virtual worlds and their implications for organizations will require both new theories and new methods. We propose that a performative perspective may be particularly useful as it challenges the existence of independent objects with fixed or given properties and boundaries, and focuses instead on situated and relational practices that enact entangled and contingent boundaries, entities, identities, and effects.

From Work to Activity: Technology and the Narrative of Progress

Information technology transforms work in all its variety into uniform inscriptions that are combinable across time and space. Its digitized codings and classifications are immutable mobiles which claim to represent the true form of work to management and workers alike. Activity based costing is an accounting technology that produces such immutable mobiles. It promises to capture the essence of work and transport it unchanged from the factory floor to the manager’s suite. We use this accounting technology as an exemplar to trace the rhetoric of how new worlds and new logics of work are created with the inspiration of information technology. We do so by analyzing a central story with which activity based costing justifies itself and makes its truth claims, and by identifying the kind of world, organization and work it creates. By expanding and extending the plot of the story told by the principal proponents of activity based costing, we expose some contradictions of this powerful system of representation and locate it within a larger narrative that promises progress through information technology.

The Role of Relational and Operational Performance in Business-to-Business Customers’ Adoption of Self-Service Technology

The authors explore whether and why business-to-business customers using service relationship designs—service delivery systems that promote repeated personal interactions between a customer and a specific service provider—will adopt self-service technology (SST). Their results show that these customers associate operational performance gains and relational performance losses with a prospective SST. Whereas perceived operational performance gains increase customers’ intention to adopt SST, perceived relational performance losses decrease it. However, these main effects are moderated by customers’ purchase frequency and their enacted service design, which refers to the way that customers actually experience firms’ intended service designs. Specifically, the positive effect of perceived operational performance gains on customers’ intention to adopt SST was weaker for customers with higher purchase frequency. Similarly, the negative effect of perceived relational performance losses on customers’ intention to adopt SST was strongest for customers who had enacted strong service relationships.

On Knowledge Work

The management of knowledge and of knowledge work are regarded as the key challenges in the information economy and knowledge intensive firms. Even though the term knowledge work is used increasingly there is some ambiguity surrounding what constitutes knowledge work and who are regarded as knowledge workers. In this chapter knowledge work as a category of work is explored. Knowledge work is defined from different perspectives — the economic, the labor process, and the work practice perspective — and the implications of using knowledge work as a category of work in both research and practice are discussed.

Performing Embodied Identity in Virtual Worlds

Embodied identity, that is, who we are as a result of our interactions with the world around us with and through our bodies, is increasingly challenged in online environments where identity performances are seemingly untethered from the users body that is sitting at the computer. Even though disembodiment has been severely criticized in the literature, most conceptualizations of the role of users’ bodies in virtuality nevertheless reflect a representational logic, which fails to capture contemporary users’ experience of cyborgism. Relying on data collected from nine entrepreneurs in the virtual world Second Life (SL), this paper asks how embodied identity is performed in virtual worlds. Contrasting representationalism with performativity, this study highlights that the SL entrepreneurs intentionally re-presented in their avatars some of the attributes of physical bodies, but that they also engaged in habitual practices in-world, thereby unconsciously enacting embodied identities in both their ‘real’ and virtual lives.