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.

This paper introduces the special issue on information systems, identity and identification. In addition to introducing the papers in the special issue, it provides a state-of-the-art review of research into identity and identification to contextualise the contributions of the special issue papers. The paper reviews research themes in personal and organisational identity as well as research challenges in identification before considering the interplay between these two strands.

In 2004, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) implemented Full Cost, an activity-based accounting program through an agency-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. We apply Foucault’s notion of ‘dressage’ to highlight aspects of demonstrative control associated with this implementation effort and to outline the different dimensions along which control was distributed. We suggest that some elements of Full Cost and the ERP system were geared toward satisfying disciplinary requirements without necessarily contributing to productive activity. We term these elements dressage-as-control. Our findings indicate that dressage-as-control breeds dressage-as-response: employees’ responses to control imperatives that are intended merely to satisfy the demand for control by exhibiting public compliance, but make no direct contribution to the execution of work. Accordingly, we propose that the ideal of complete enterprise control remains unattainable, as aspects of demonstrative control are inevitably implicated within broader enterprise-wide control systems within contemporary organizations. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

In recent years, more companies engage in collaborative cross-organisational practices to achieve their business objectives. To cooperate effectively across boundaries requires organisations to overcome the tension between their distinct backgrounds and the need to create shared understandings with their partners for collaboration. This requires the creation of shared artefacts such as boundary objects. Whereas the past work on boundary objects has highlighted their role as translation devices, we examine them in relation to the information infrastructures within which they are embedded, and the identities of the organisations that use them. We propose a model that outlines the relationships among the three concepts and illustrate its dynamics by presenting two case studies that describe the introduction of three-dimensional modelling technologies into the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. Based on the case studies we suggest that boundary objects, in addition to facilitating cross-organisational communication, also help to form organisational identities. We further suggest the occurrence of a process whereby changes in boundary objects enable changes in information infrastructures and identities in one organisation. These changes, in turn, create the conditions for change in bordering organisations through shared boundary objects and boundary practices.