In this paper, we report on a qualitative exploratory case study of a national-level government-led digital transformation. We depart from most studies on government digital transformation that largely focus on improving existing services, bureaucratic processes, or adopting emerging digital technologies. Instead, we analyze the process of a government-led digital transformation aimed at addressing significant institutional voids within a resource-constrained context. Drawing from 60 interviews with stakeholders in the Ghanaian FinTech ecosystem, we theorize the concept of digital branching strategy as an alternative lens to envisage government-led digital transformation that considers the resource-constrained context and characteristics of governments. Our findings show that governments, especially those in resource-constrained contexts pursue digital transformation through exploring frugal innovations and leveraging established resources, structures, and relationships within an ecosystem. We subsequently develop a process model to explain the mechanisms of a national-level government-led digital transformation. Based on the findings and the model, our study offers critical insights to re-imagine government-led digital transformation in resource-constrained contexts by demonstrating how pursuing a digital branching strategy leads to planned and emergent outcomes because of the generative nature of the transformation.

Abstract This study examines what happens when an online community (OC) platform is shut down. In particular, it builds on recent interest from information science on everyday life information seeking, providing insights into the socio‐emotional roles enacted by users following community closure. A qualitative study is undertaken on 12 months of social media comments relating to the closure of an OC platform. We identify and discuss the socio‐emotional information roles that manifest, and present a model of their relationship to different aspects of the closure. We make theoretical connections between the notion of socio‐emotional information roles and both the information behavior and practice literature, as well as research on community and participant roles. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Financial technology (FinTech) is widely recognised as important in addressing financial inclusion. However, limited research theorises how new entrants and incumbents work together in FinTech ecosystems to shape financial inclusion. We undertake a theory-generating case study with multilevel interacting organisations in Ghana, where, like many other African countries, the growth in FinTech has led to new opportunities for financial inclusion. We conceptualise three practices, as building blocks at the ecosystem level, through which incumbents and new entrants shape financial inclusion: (1) innovative and collaborative practices, (2) protectionist and equitable practices, and (3) legitimising and sustaining practices. We articulate a theoretical model that explains how the practices shape financial inclusion and propose three theoretical propositions of how financial inclusion in developing countries is being scaled and shaped in terms of actors, relationships, and practices.

While there is a growing body of research on information behavior during nonroutine events such as natural disasters, the research has largely neglected older persons as a specific group despite their identification as a demographic that suffers disproportionately during disasters. To address this gap, this article reports on the study of the information behavior and related activities of older persons during natural disasters. Based on a qualitative study, we draw on the theory of information worlds to study the key activities of preparing, responding, and recovering from disasters. The article contributes to the information behavior literature by developing a more informed understanding of both the interrelationship between the information worlds and activities of older persons, and how older persons seek and share information during disasters.

The set of articles in this special issue bring together a diverse set of scholars concerned with research that illuminates people's experiences with and perceptions of information within the traditions of information behavior (Wilson, 1999) or information practice (Savolainen, 2007).\nWhile there is a well‐established body of frameworks and models (Case & Given, 2016; Fisher, Erdelez, & McKechnie, 2005) which support theorizing information behavior and information practice, there are questions about how these help conceptualize the changing relationship between technology and information. In proposing this special issue, we were particularly interested in new theoretical perspectives and theoretical developments. These include the “practice‐turn,” affordances and sociomateriality (Gibson, 1977; Orlikowski, 2007; Schatzki, Knorr‐Cetina, & von Savigny, 2001). We were particularly interested in the ways in which these theories contribute to information studies and demonstrate that the discipline offers a fertile landscape for expanding these theories. We expected that scholars would present articles that used or developed these theories to focus on the ways people engage with information technology and the way it changes how people interact with information. What we found, however, was that most of the submissions looked towards other forms of materiality and interaction providing a theoretically rich, stimulating, and novel set of alternative understandings.

The domain of cultural variations in interpersonal communication is becoming increasingly important in various areas, including human–human interaction (e.g., business settings) and human–computer interaction (e.g., during simulations, or with social robots). User‐generated content (UGC) in social media can provide an invaluable source of culturally diverse viewpoints for supporting the understanding of cultural variations. However, discovering and organizing UGC is notoriously challenging and laborious for humans, especially in ill‐defined domains such as culture. This calls for computational approaches to automate the UGC sensemaking process by using tagging, linking, and exploring. Semantic technologies allow automated structuring and qualitative analysis of UGC, but are dependent on the availability of an ontology representing the main concepts in a specific domain. For the domain of cultural variations in interpersonal communication, no ontological model exists. This paper presents the first such ontological model, called AMOn+, which defines cultural variations and enables tagging culture‐related mentions in textual content. AMOn+ is designed based on a novel interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical models of culture with crowdsourced knowledge (DBpedia). An evaluation of AMOn+ demonstrated its fitness‐for‐purpose regarding domain coverage for annotating culture‐related concepts mentioned in text corpora. This ontology can underpin computational models for making sense of UGC.

Public sector inter-organisational information sharing and interoperability is an area of increasing concern and intense investment for practice and an area of increasing scholarship. This paper focuses on one particular set of public sector organisations (emergency services) and illuminates the key technological and organisational issues they face concerning information sharing and interoperability. The particular contexts in which these are studied are ones where decisions are non-trivial and made in high-velocity environments. In these conditions the problems and significance of inter-organisational information sharing and interoperability are accentuated. We analyse data gathered from two studies: the first focused on ‘first responders’ (police, fire and ambulance services) in the United Kingdom. The second, a follow on study, with emergency service managers and interoperability project managers in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Using activity theory as a conceptual framework we describe the informational problems critical emergency responders face in their initial response to, and management of, an incident. We argue that rather than focusing on interoperability as a primarily technological issue it should be managed as an organisational and informational issue. Second, we argue that rather than designing for anomalous situations we should design systems, which will function during both anomalous and routine situations. Third, we argue for focus on harmonisation of policies, procedures and working practices.

Mobile technology and the information and communication services supported by it have become increasingly embedded in, and in some cases transformed, work and social activity and created new challenges for studying information systems. This paper focuses on the experience with mobile technology in an inherently mobile and information-intensive work activity – policing. Drawing upon data from this context this paper makes two key sets of contributions. Empirically, we illuminate the congruencies and contradictions between mobile technology and mobile working, and the relationship between the two, revealing a state of change based upon dialectic interaction. We highlight several ways in which mobile technology has changed the nature of mobile work activity. Theoretically we advance the use of activity theory to better understand the changes of mobile technology-mediated work. We extend traditional use of activity theory by adopting congruencies as an analytical lens, in addition to the approach of examining contradictions. The findings are applicable to other areas of mobile work and contribute to the body of knowledge concerning mobile technology-mediated work.

Social web content such as blogs, videos, and other user‐generated content present a vast source of rich “digital‐traces” of individuals' experiences. The use of digital traces to provide insight into human behavior remains underdeveloped. Recently, ontological approaches have been exploited for tagging and linking digital traces, with progress made in ontology models for well‐defined domains. However, the process of conceptualization for ill‐defined domains remains challenging, requiring interdisciplinary efforts to understand the main aspects and capture them in a computer processable form. The primary contribution of this article is a theory‐driven approach to ontology development that supports semantic augmentation of digital traces. Specifically, we argue that (a) activity theory can be used to develop more insightful conceptual models of ill‐defined activities, which (b) can be used to inform the development of an ontology, and (c) that this ontology can be used to guide the semantic augmentation of digital traces for making sense of phenomena. A case study of interpersonal communication is chosen to illustrate the applicability of the proposed multidisciplinary approach. The benefits of the approach are illustrated through an example application, demonstrating how it may be used to assemble and make sense of digital traces.

Abstract Over the last 7 years, the AIMTech Research Group in the University of Leeds has used cultural‐historical activity theory (CHAT) to inform a range of research activities in the fields of information behavior and information systems. In this article, we identify certain openings and theoretical challenges in the field of information behavior, which sparked our initial interest in CHAT: context, technology, and the link between practice and policy. We demonstrate the relevance of CHAT in studying information behavior and addressing the identified openings and argue that by providing a framework and hierarchy of activity‐action‐operation and semantic tools, CHAT is able to overcome many of the uncertainties concerning information behavior research. In particular, CHAT provides researchers a theoretical lens to account for context and activity mediation and, by doing so, can increase the significance of information behavior research to practice. In undertaking this endeavour, we have relied on literature from the fields of information science and others where CHAT is employed. We provide a detailed description of how CHAT may be applied to information behavior and account for the concepts we see as relevant to its study.