The rise in violent crime across major U.S. cities, fueled mainly by gang members using social media to broadcast messages of loss and aggression, poses an urgent challenge. Although prior research has examined gang-affiliated social media content, there remains a crucial gap in identifying which posts serve as credible signals of impending violence. Addressing this gap is essential for enhancing community safety, improving resource allocation, and optimizing law enforcement strategies. This study introduces a novel research model grounded in a contextualized adaptation of signaling theory. The model identifies key indicators of credible signals, such as follower count, specific hashtags, and retweet counts, which correlate with gang-related aggression. Environmental factors, such as temperature, are also examined for their influence on violent crime escalation. Using this contextualized theory, we designed a machine learning model to predict violent crime counts, training it on a dataset of 143,700 gang-affiliated tweets and their accompanying text and metadata. This approach enables automated identification of credible social media signals related to gang violence. The findings contribute to theory and practice by offering new insights into social media credibility and its link to violent crime, and by demonstrating how such signals can be used for prediction. Furthermore, the predictive model provides law enforcement with advanced tools to anticipate crime and inform community-based prevention strategies and policy development.

Although starting the process of digitalisation is not difficult for many global companies, successful implementation of digitalisation is much more elusive. Our study thus addresses the following research question: How can companies manage and sustain the positive outcomes of digitalisation, particularly in a volatile environment? We developed a new framework based on dynamics capabilities theory. Through an investigation of 203 Chinese manufacturing companies that have achieved varying degrees of digitalisation, we found that two primary types of strategic flexibility – resource and coordination flexibility – fully mediated the positive relationship between digitalisation and firm performance. Moreover, market turbulence enhanced the positive mediation effects of strategic flexibility (i.e., resource and coordination flexibility) on the digitalisation – performance relationship. This result suggests that when a company faces a highly uncertain market environment but seeks to maintain the performance boost resulting from digitalisation, it needs to place increased emphasis on the flexibility with which it manages and updates its resource portfolios. Our proposed moderated-mediation mechanisms contribute to strategic IS research on digitalisation by elucidating how companies can manage and sustain successful digitalisation outcomes. Our findings also provide insights managers can use to unlock successful implementation of digitalisation.

IT governance (ITG) is crucial in achieving IT strategic alignment, but many organizations find this to be an elusive goal. We thus expand ITG into two components: ITG mechanisms and ITG principles. We propose that beyond the mere option of ITG mechanisms, organizations must fully embrace the broader “spirit” of ITG, which occurs when an organization is committed to ITG principles coupled with top leadership support. To test our theorization, we first developed and validated two new measures. We used the ITG framework of COBIT to create a measure of commitment to COBIT principles (CCP), and we found that CCP fully mediates ITG mechanisms’ relationship with strategic alignment. We thus illuminate a missing link between adopting ITG mechanisms and achieving strategic alignment by demonstrating the need to focus on ITG principles. We show that top leadership support for IT, including support at the board level, not only enhances CCP but also directly contributes to improved strategic alignment. Our study establishes that adopting ITG mechanisms is necessary but insufficient for achieving strategic alignment. Effective organizations go beyond implementing isolated ITG mechanisms; they fully embrace integrated COBIT-based principles, guided by a strong infusion of top leadership support, including board-level support.

Sustainable, smart connected cars (SSCCs) are one of the representative sustainable products that leverage smart technologies (e.g., the internet of things, artificial intelligence, big data). Although many studies have investigated consumers’ purchase decisions regarding sustainable products, little research has addressed SSCCs and the relationship between privacy, disclosure intentions, and purchase intentions in SSCCs. These relationships are important because the use of smart technology products requires large volumes of consumers’ personal information, which can lead to severe privacy issues when adopting SSCCs. Accordingly, consumers’ preferences for features of sustainable products could conflict with their privacy concerns when they disclose personal information. Thus, we investigate the relationship between the several benefits of SSCCs and privacy-related decisions when purchasing SSCCs. We propose an extended privacy trade-off model based on three critical assumptions: two types of privacy trade-offs, bidirectional privacy reduction, and anchoring effects. We also investigate the effects of government subsidies for purchasing SSCCs regarding the relationship between governments, companies, and consumers. To validate our model, we test the effects of interaction between privacy concerns and the benefits of SSCCs on disclosure intentions and purchase intentions. Our repeated tests for the various benefits of SSCCs demonstrate the robustness of the model. Our results indicate that when consumers consider purchasing SSCCs, sustainability plays the role of the common good in trading for privacy concerns. In addition, government subsidies to encourage companies’ sustainable products increase disclosure intentions and purchase intentions. We conclude that the status of sustainability as a common goal among governments, companies, and consumers represents an opportunity to balance the privacy tensions in the sale and purchase of SSCCs.

One needs to look only at recent data breaches to be reminded of the severe and far-reaching damage caused by privacy threats. In light of these threats, global healthcare leaders are striving to understand how to protect patient information without the loss of benefits (utility) that results from privacy-preserving mechanisms. Consequently, our study examines the relatively unexplored issue of simultaneously responding to information privacy threats and maintaining utility in a healthcare privacy compliance context. Counterintuitively, we also identify a symbiotic relationship between these two focal and interdependent efforts. We adopt an interpretive qualitative research method leveraging the value-focused thinking (VFT) approach which results in two major contributions: (1) the development of a value-driven framework presented as a means-end objective network providing a list of 16 means objectives and seven key fundamental objectives enabling higher-quality privacy decision making vis-à-vis privacy and utility. Our second and central contribution (2) is a theoretical framework of privacy impact assessment (PIA) emphasising the interplay and balance between making appropriate decisions in responding to information privacy while not hindering healthcare operations. This work provides the foundation for proposing four compelling propositions for future healthcare privacy research.

Exchanging social support on online health communities (OHCs) can be beneficial to people's health, but the OHC characteristics that promote environments in which users feel socially supported are understudied. We develop a model that examines the mediating influence of OHC cohesiveness, altruism , and universality on the relationships between active and passive use and received OHC social support. Our findings indicate that social support can be derived from both active and passive use of the OHC. Although active use can directly stimulate received OHC social support, the relationship between passive use and social support is fully mediated by OHC group dynamics.

1. With thousands of peer-reviewed publications and thousands of applications in education, industry, and government, gamification has taken the world by storm. But this explosion of gamification i...

In this essay, we outline some important concerns in the hope of improving the effectiveness of security and privacy research. We discuss the need to re-examine our understanding of information technology and information system (IS) artefacts and to expand the range of the latter to include those artificial phenomena that are crucial to information security and privacy research. We then briefly discuss some prevalent limitations in theory, methodology, and contributions that generally weaken security/privacy studies and jeopardise their chances of publication in a top IS journal. More importantly, we suggest remedies for these weaknesses, identifying specific improvements that can be made and offering a couple of illustrations of such improvements. In particular, we address the notion of loose re-contextualisation, using deterrence theory research as an example. We also provide an illustration of how the focus on intentions may have resulted in an underuse of powerful theories in security and privacy research, because such theories explain more than just intentions. We then outline three promising opportunities for IS research that should be particularly compelling to security and privacy researchers: online platforms, the Internet of things, and big data. All of these carry innate information security and privacy risks and vulnerabilities that can be addressed only by researching each link of the systems chain, that is, technologies–policies–processes–people–society–economy–legislature. We conclude by suggesting several specific opportunities for new research in these areas.

Trust and distrust are considered crucial elements affecting online relationships – particularly those involving electronic transactions. Although some studies propose that they are distinct, others claim that they are merely opposite ends of one continuum. Further adding to the debate is the possibility of ambivalence, a topic that has not been examined in electronic transaction relationships. Unfortunately, current models of trust and distrust have limitations that impede explanations of how – or even if – ambivalence is generated by feelings of trust and distrust and how these two constructs can best coexist. We thus propose a hybrid model which considers the limitations and strengths of previous models. Namely, we posit that trust and distrust can coexist as separate components with related continua. We use polynomial regression analysis (PRA) and response surface analysis (RSA) to test these complex relationships. Using an empirical study of online consumer behaviour with 521 experienced online consumers, strong empirical validation is found for the model. We examine the effects of ambivalence on the truster’s intentions towards a website and find a small positive effect which increases such intentions. PRA and RSA confirm that trust and distrust are most likely separate components – not opposite ends of a continuum – with related continua. The continua within the subconstructs of trust and distrust likely have more complex and interesting relationships than have been considered previously. These findings lead to interesting future research opportunities on trust, distrust and ambivalence using advanced techniques such as PRA and RSA.

Research shows that despite organisational efforts to achieve privacy compliance, privacy breaches continue to rise. The extant studies on organisational privacy compliance concentrate on the extent to which privacy threats can be alleviated through a combination of technical and human controls and the positive (and often intended) influences of these controls. This focus inadvertently neglects unintended consequences such as impeded workflow in medical practices. To address this research conflict, this study uses an interpretive grounded theory research approach to investigate the consequences of privacy safeguard enactment in medical practices, including whether it influences their ability to meet privacy requirements and whether workflows are impeded. Our central contribution is a theoretical framework, the unintended consequences of privacy safeguard enactment (UCPSE) framework, which explicates the process by which privacy safeguards are evaluated and subsequently bypassed and the resulting influence on organisational compliance. The UCPSE highlights the importance of the imbalance challenge, which is the result of unintended consequences outweighing the intended consequences of privacy safeguard enactment. Failure to address the imbalance challenge leads to the adoption of workarounds that may ultimately harm the organisation’s privacy compliance. Despite several research calls, the consequences and effectiveness of organisational privacy efforts are largely missing from both information systems and health informatics research. This study is one of the first attempts to both systematically identify the impacts of privacy safeguard enactment and to examine its implications for privacy compliance in the healthcare domain. The findings also have practical implications for healthcare executives on the UCPSE and how they could alleviate the imbalance challenge to thwart workarounds and the subsequent negative effects on privacy compliance.

An extensive body of research has tested the information systems success model in many contexts. Surprisingly, few of these studies have applied it to e-commerce. A study by represents one such initiative, but it is crucial to address several remaining gaps associated with that study. Moreover, no e-commerce success model has considered the Arab world, which exhibits unique cultural factors influencing e-commerce. The authors' study proposes an improved IS success model for e-commerce in the Arab world. This model, based on that of , adds several enhancements to the validity and generalisability of his efforts, uses the latest SEM techniques, including both monetary and nonmonetary value conceptualisations, uses a multidimensional conceptualisation of system quality, and proposes specific factors of e-commerce service quality. The authors tested the proposed research model with a truly randomised sampling approach using 288 experienced business-to-consumer (B2C) consumers in the Arab world. The results largely support our hypothesised model. The most important difference between our results and those of previous studies is our finding that although service quality influences value, it has no bearing on user satisfaction in an Arab context. This study will be useful for practitioners and researchers seeking to improve the understanding of B2C e-commerce success in the Arab world.

Abstract Privacy concerns can greatly hinder consumers' intentions to interact with a website. The success of a website therefore depends on its ability to improve consumers' perceptions of privacy assurance. Seals and assurance statements are mechanisms often used to increase this assurance; however, the findings of the extant literature regarding the effectiveness of these tools are mixed. We propose a model based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) that explains conditions under which privacy assurance is more or less effective, clarifying the contradictory findings in previous literature. We test our model in a free‐simulation online experiment, and the results of the analysis indicate that the inclusion of assurance statements and the combination, understanding, and assurance of seals influence privacy assurance. Privacy assurance is most effective when seals and statements are accompanied by the peripheral cues of website quality and brand image and when counter‐argumentation—through transaction risk—is minimized. Importantly, we show ELM to be an appropriate theoretical lens to explain the equivocal results in the literature. Finally, we suggest theoretical and practical implications.

The global use of online communities has exploded to involve hundreds of millions of users. Despite the tremendous social impact and business opportunities afforded by these communities, little information systems (IS) research has addressed them – especially in a cross-cultural context. Our research proposes an online community self-disclosure model, tested in a cross-cultural setting using data provided by French and British working professionals. Our model is based on social exchange theory (SET) and social penetration theory (SPT), as well as on cross-cultural theory related to individualism-collectivism. SET explains that individuals engage in relationships when the perceived costs associated with the relationship are less than the expected benefits. SPT extends SET to explain that individuals participate in self-disclosure to foster relationships – reciprocation is the primary benefit of self-disclosure, whereas risk is the foundational cost of self-disclosure. Our study established several important findings: positive social influence to use an online community increases online community self-disclosure; reciprocity increases self-disclosure; online community trust increases self-disclosure; and privacy risk beliefs decrease self-disclosure. Meanwhile, a tendency toward collectivism increases self-disclosure. We further found that French participants had higher scores on horizontal individualism than British participants. Several other findings and their implications for practice are also discussed.

Globalization has led to the increasing use of organizational teams comprising individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds. Existing research suggests that collaborative software may benefit multicultural teams. However, most prior studies are limited by their focus on U.S. and Western cultures. We explore this issue by comprehensively examining the literature on cultural effects on collaborative software use. This article makes several contributions by providing common nomenclatures and theoretical perspectives that are essential to promoting scientific progress in this area. It focuses mainly on empirical collaborative software studies in which culture is a key conceptual construct. We discuss underlying cultural theories, research methodologies, and findings of major collaborative software studies on the impact of culture. This article provides insights into various issues surrounding this line of research and highlights future research opportunities.