Social media’s dual role as a source of both societal benefits and harms poses significant challenges to its responsible use. While existing literature primarily focuses on organisational and regulatory responsibilities, it sometimes overlooks individual user responsibility. This paper develops a theoretical framework that suggests user characteristics – specifically, conscientiousness and moral tolerance – are key moderators in the responsible (or irresponsible) actualisation of social media’s ambiguous affordances. Grounded in virtue ethics, the framework maintains that four archetypal user characters – narcissist, dogmatist, nihilist, and altruist – shape how social media affordances are actualised. Our work contributes to the Information Systems (IS) literature by adding a nuanced understanding of how responsible use shapes and is shaped by social media users and the sociotechnical context. The framework offers a basis for future research to examine the interaction between user characteristics, affordance ambiguity, and responsible social media use, underscoring the need for technocentric and sociocentric design interventions to promote responsible use.

Widespread on social networking sites (SNSs), envy has been linked to an array of detrimental outcomes for users’ well-being. While envy has been considered a status-related emotion and is likely to be experienced in response to perceiving another’s higher status, there is a lack of research exploring how status perceptions influence the emergence of envy on SNSs. This is important because SNSs typically quantify social interactions and reach with metrics that indicate users’ relative rank and status in the network. To understand how status perceptions impact SNS users, we introduce a new form of metric-based digital status rooted in SNS metrics that are available and visible on a platform. Drawing on social comparison theory and status literature, we conducted an online experiment to investigate how different forms of status contribute to the proliferation of envy on SNSs. Our findings shed light on how metric-based digital status influences feelings of envy on SNSs. Specifically, we could show that metric-based digital status impacts envy through increasing perceptions of others’ socioeconomic and sociometric statuses. Our study contributes to the growing discourse on the negative outcomes associated with SNS use and its consequences for users and society.

Global crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, change the context for research and bring with them many professional challenges for IS researchers – not the least of which is disrupting carefully thought-out data collection efforts. In this confessional tale, we describe how moving from an “open research ecosystem” to a “socially distanced research ecosystem” has affected a long-planned data collection effort. While government orders to socially distance and physically isolate may have made the world “stand still” for some, we found that these orders had dynamic and consequential effects for our in-process research. Against the backdrop of significant threats posed by the contextual change to our data collection, we explain how the crisis also opened up opportunities to invigorate our understanding of how the environment affects how we conduct research. We conclude our tale with guidelines for how to successfully respond when your research is interrupted by a change of context.

Mobile technologies have dramatically increased the number of work-related interruptions, especially after regular work hours. At the same time, many employees have limited freedom to decide how and when they accomplish their work, a condition that renders the explosion of interruptions especially problematic. This study proposes that perceived interruption overload negatively impacts work-related technology-usage via workers’ experiences of work-life conflict, a key source of stress, and that this indirect effect is stronger for lower levels of worker control (moderated mediation). Data were collected from 601 knowledge workers and analyzed through Conditional process analysis, which integrates moderation and mediation analyses. The results supported our model. This study takes an important step toward elucidating the role of mobile technology in work-life conflict and technostress, and it illustrates the roles of perceived interruption overload as well as conflict and technostress in IT use.

Although prior research has frequently focused on aggregate IT capital, most firms invest in specific types with different goals. Each type of capital represents a distinct factor of a firm’s production function. Drawing on a theory-of-production framework, we disaggregate overall IT capital into specific types to examine their unique effects on firm performance over time. We categorize these IT-specific production factors into a firm’s installed personal computers for individual information access, servers for collective information access, storage capacity for information stock, and nodes for information flow. We investigate when and how each IT capital type contributes to firm performance by analyzing the 5-year panel data of 1,548 US firms. Our findings show that individual information access capital and collective information access capital have immediate effects on profitability through cost efficiency or sales growth. By contrast, information stock capital has a lagged effect on profitability. In addition, information stock capital complements individual information access capital in improving profitability, as well as contributing to sales growth and cost efficiency equivalent to firm size. These results extend the existing research on firm-level effects of IT investments by demonstrating that different IT capital effects have unique ways of affecting firm performance.

Using a pathological perspective (e.g., addiction), some research suggests that technology engagement leads to poor self-regulation of behaviours. Rather than pathologise predictors of negative outcomes of IT use, we offer an alternative, identity-based explanation to investigate the role of identity in relation to an individual’s perceptions of his/her media use and the potential negative consequences of such use. We build on recent advances in conceptualising IT identity, defined as the extent to which one perceives an IT as central to who he/she is, to explore one’s self-identification with social networking sites (SNS) within a broader nomological net of deficient self-regulation, IS habit, use, and normative pressures. Results of a survey of 214 college students indicate that if an individual has strong self-identification with a particular SNS, it will increase perceptions of poor self-control over his/her time. Our study contributes to the literature by highlighting the utility of an identity-based (vs. pathology-based) explanation for such outcomes, which has distinct implications for interventions aimed at improving these outcomes. We suggest future research to advance understanding of IT identity’s antecedents and consequences, and discuss practical implications for managing SNS use in workplace and academic settings.

• Focus on post-adoption , an important area that we need to better understand. • Explicating how and why trust in IT influences post-adoptive behavior (mediation). • Taking a theory-driven approach to studying post-adoption, which is rarely done. • Refraining from using adoption theories such as TAM in the post-adoption context. • Introduction of bootstrapping as an advanced test of mediation to IS research. Since the underutilization of technology often prevents organizations from reaping expected benefits from IT investments, an increasing body of literature studies how to elicit value-added, post-adoptive IT use behaviors. Such behaviors include extended and innovative feature use, both of which are exploratory in nature and can lead to improved work performance. Since these exploratory behaviors can be risky, research has directed attention to trust in technology as an antecedent to post-adoptive IT use. In parallel, research has examined how computer self-efficacy relates to post-adoptive IT use. While such research has found that both trust and efficacy can lead to value-added IT use and that they might do so interdependently, scant research has examined the interplay between these antecedents to post-adoptive IT use. Drawing on the Model of Proactive Work Behavior with a focus on its predictions about trust and efficacy, we develop a research model that integrates trust in technology and computer self-efficacy in the post-adoption context. Our model suggests that the two concepts are interdependent such that trust-related impacts on post-adoptive use behaviors unfold via computer-related self-efficacy beliefs. Contemporary tests of mediation on data from more than 350 respondents provided support for our model. Hence, our findings begin to open the black box by which trust-related impacts on post-adoptive behaviors unfold, revealing computer self-efficacy as an important mediating factor. In doing so, this study furthers understanding of how, and why, trust matters in post-adoptive usage, enabling strategic change management by elucidating the “fit” between technological characteristics and post-adoptive usage.

Methods for detecting and summarizing emergent keywords have been extensively studied since social media and microblogging activities have started to play an important role in data analysis and decision making. We present a fast system for monitoring emergent keywords and summarizing a document stream based on the dynamic semantic graphs of streaming documents. We introduce the notion of dynamic eigenvector centrality for ranking emergent keywords, and present an algorithm for summarizing emergent events that is based on the minimum weight set cover. Our system is demonstrated on the streaming Twitter data related to public security.

Top management has been concerned with IT-business strategic alignment (hereafter referred to as alignment) for the past 30 years. Consequently, alignment researchers have developed many models to explain how alignment generates value for firms. However, these models use inconsistent definitions and measures of alignment, which has led to conflicting results and has potentially inhibited the progress of research on this critical topic. This paper emphasizes the importance of demarcating the six alignment types that are sometimes confused in the literature into a single, unified model. It also reports on the development of definitions and measures of these six types of alignment including alignment between IT and business strategies (i.e., intellectual alignment), between IT and business infrastructures and processes (i.e., operational alignment), and across these two domains such that strategies are linked with infrastructures and processes (i.e., four types of cross-domain alignment). Analyzing survey data collected from 140 Chief Information Officers, we found each measure possesses desirable psychometric properties. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Fostering customer loyalty is a key objective for online businesses. Initial transactions with new customers are less profitable than transactions with existing customers, making loyalty an important strategy. Drawing on research examining online customer loyalty (termed e-loyalty), switching costs, and trust, this study provides an empirical test of the relative influence of trust vs switching costs on e-loyalty for e-service providers. We further examine whether trust moderates the relationship between switching costs and e-loyalty. We propose that in the presence of high customer trust, e-service providers should have less need to rely on switching costs as a driver of e-loyalty. We test the hypothesized relationships using data collected from 299 repeat users of online travel services. Our results confirm that trust is a more important predictor of e-loyalty than switching costs. In addition, we find that the impact of switching costs on e-loyalty depends on the level of trust felt by customers. This study extends our understanding of customer loyalty, switching costs, and trust in e-commerce environments and provides practical, theory-driven guidelines to e-businesses seeking to develop customer loyalty programmes.

Since the introduction of the Motivational Technology Acceptance Model in 1992, many researchers have considered both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation as antecedents of intent to use and actual use of a system. However, it has been a long-standing and largely unchallenged assumption that intrinsic motivation (i.e., fun or enjoyment) is a more dominant predictor of hedonic (fun) application use and that extrinsic motivation (i.e., usefulness) is a more dominant predictor of utilitarian (practical) application use. In this article, we probe whether system type serves as a boundary condition (i.e., moderator) for understanding an individual’s interaction with information technology. Specifically, we examine whether perceived enjoyment’s influence on perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, intention, and use varies with system type. On the basis of a meta-analytic structural equation modeling analysis of 185 studies between 1992 and February 2011, our findings suggest intrinsic motivation is equally relevant for predicting intentions toward using and actual use of both hedonic and utilitarian systems. Therefore, our meta-analytic results call into question the rigidity of the assumption that system type is a ‘boundary condition’ for understanding individuals’ interaction with information technology. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.

While information on multidimensional constructs and empirical methods has become more accessible, there remain substantial challenges to theorizing about their form and implications. There are at least two ostensible reasons for such difficulties. First is the issue of terminology; many different terms are currently used to represent the same structural concept, and there is no evidence of standardization taking place around a single set of terms. Second, many studies do not clearly explain the theoretical reasons for choosing the specific multidimensional form of their constructs. To address these deficiencies, we use concepts from the research methods literature, and illustrations from the information systems (IS) literature, to review definitions and issues related to conceptualizing and operationalizing structural models that include multidimensional constructs. Such advice is necessary if we are going to develop and test increasingly sophisticated theoretical models in IS research. We also offer guidelines about how to conceptualize specific forms of multidimensional constructs. By lending greater conceptual clarity to the literature, we believe that this paper provides a foundation for future research incorporating multidimensional constructs in empirical analysis.

This article examines within-culture variance in the influence of values on perceptions and use of information technology (IT). Based on cross-cultural research, we suggest that cultural values influence technology acceptance and use. Specifically, we argue that masculinity/femininity and individualism/collectivism directly influence personal innovativeness with IT, computer anxiety, and computer self-efficacy, and have a mediated effect on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and use of IT. Overall, analysis provides support for the research model. Our results suggest that masculinity/femininity influences computer selfefficacy, computer anxiety, and personal innovativeness with IT. We also offer implications for research and practice.