Data Work: How Energy Advisors and Clients Make IoT Data Accountable

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the ‘overhead cost’ of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.     

Service encounter thinklets: how to empower service agents to put value co‐creation into practice

The concept of value co‐creation and the service encounter as locus of this value co‐creation gained much academic interest, notably in marketing research and service sciences. While the current research discourse mainly follows conceptual perspectives, there has been little research on the practical implications on service agents' enabling co‐creation of value in the information technology (IT)‐supported service encounters with clients. In this paper, we seek to bridge this gap and first use the example of IT‐supported citizen advisory services to show the fundamental deficiencies in current service agents regarding the implementation of value co‐creation work practices. We introduce the concept of service encounter thinklets, adapted from collaboration engineering, to overcome these deficiencies and to empower service agents to put value co‐creation into practice. We show how service encounter thinklets can complement existing advisory support measures to enable service agents to transform the IT‐supported customer service encounter into a collaborative work environment, bringing together themselves, customers and supporting information systems to co‐create the advisory's value. A test with employees in a public administration's front office has provided first evidence that service encounter thinklets can effectively empower service agents on the job to adapt their work practices and to bring value co‐creation into practice.     

The Beauty of Ugliness: Preserving while Communicating Online with Shared Graphic Photos

In this paper, we report on interviews with 11 Shia content creators who create and share graphic, bloody photos of Tatbeer, a religious ritual involving self-harm practices on Ashura, the death anniversary of the prophet Muhammad’s grandson. We show how graphic images serve as an object of communication in religious practices with the local community, the inner-self, and a wider audience. In particular, we highlight how content creators appropriated, in their own words, “ugly” photos to preserve the authenticity and beauty of their rituals while communicating their own interpretation of such rituals to others. We suggest that ugliness may be regarded as a useful resource to inform systems that seek to invite dialogue with marginalized or minority groups.     

An institutional theory perspective on e-HRM’s strategic potential in MNC subsidiaries

This paper extends the application of institutional theory to electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and strategic information systems (IS) more generally, in a multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary setting. By adopting Scott’s (2001) institutional theory perspective, this paper explores the effects of host-country institutional factors on strategic e-HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries. More specifically, the aims of this paper were, first, to shed light on how regulative, cognitive and normative institutional dimensions affect Western-based e-HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries in China, and second, to examine how these institutional factors influence the strategic potential of e-HRM in this setting. Based on interview data collected from key informants in 10 MNC subsidiaries from Beijing and Shanghai, the findings illustrate how institutional pressures create both positive transformational and negative dysfunctional consequences for subsidiaries, and that subsidiary responses to these pressures can substantially affect the ability of IS to achieve its strategic potential. Although observed local adaptations were seen to restrict the strategic potential of IS, in some cases responses seem to have enabled the transposition of a new set of strategic IS practices to this non-Western setting.     

Student sensemaking with science diagrams in a computer-based setting

This paper reports on a study of students’ conceptual sensemaking with science diagrams within a computer-based learning environment aimed at supporting collaborative learning. Through the microanalysis of students’ interactions in a project about energy and heat transfer, we demonstrate how representations become productive social and cognitive resources in the students’ conceptual sensemaking. Taking a socio-cultural approach, the study aims to contribute on two levels. First, by providing insight into the interactional processes in which students encounter a particular type of representation: science diagrams. Second, the study aims to demonstrate that an important aspect of students’ encounters with science representations concerns making sense of how to respond to institutional norms and social practices embedded within the context of schooling. The findings demonstrate how the science diagrams become productive social and individual resources for the students by slowing down the students’ conceptual sensemaking processes and by opening up a space for the interpretation and negotiation of scientific concepts, as well as of the representations themselves. The study also shows the challenges involved when students move from oral to written accounts in their inquiries.     

Design für Kostentransparenz in Anlageberatungsgespr?chen

Investment advisory services of financial service providers (FSPs) exhibit several characteristics that are detrimental to advisory quality. The interaction of advisor and client is strained by a lack of transparency regarding the advisory process (what activities are performed and why) and the information used therein (what information is used for what purpose and with what effect), as well as regarding the precise costs of the service and the recommended products. In prior research, we suggested that process and information transparency issues may be appropriately addressed with collaborative information technology (IT) artifacts. In this paper, we argue that collaborative, transparent artifacts may also be a premise of enabling cost transparency. To this end, we describe a complete research cycle of designing, implementing, and evaluating a shared cost-transparent IT artifact to support client-advisor interaction in investment advisory encounters. Evaluation results suggest the efficacy of our design in improving the clients?? perceived cost transparency as well as increase their satisfaction and their willingness to pay for the received investment advice. These findings may also challenge the common belief of FSPs that transparent, fee-based advisory services would neither be accepted by clients nor be economically viable. Practical implications of these findings for designing advisory encounters with supportive IT are discussed.     

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH FOR SHARING SEMANTIC WEB TRUST RATINGS

In the context of the Semantic Web, it may be beneficial for a user (consumer) to receive ratings from other users (advisors) regarding the reliability of an information source (provider). We offer a method for building more effective social networks of trust by critiquing the ratings provided by the advisors. Our approach models the consumer's private reputations of advisors based on ratings for providers whom the consumer has had experience with. It models public reputations of the advisors according to all ratings from these advisors for providers, including those who are unknown to the consumer. We then combine private and public reputations by assigning weights for each of them. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is robust even when there are large numbers of advisors providing large numbers of unfair ratings. We show that we can effectively model the trustworthiness of advisors even when the population of providers grows increasingly large and discuss how our approach is beneficial in modeling providers. As such, we present a framework for sharing ratings of possibly unreliable sources, of value as users on the Semantic Web attempt to critique the trustworthiness of the information they seek.     

Monetary Practices of Traditional Rural Communities in Ethiopia: Implications for New Financial Technology Design

With the development of ubiquitous technologies that support the digitization of money, research is needed on how individuals’ private life practices are affected by new technological financial systems and how cash-based practices can inform their design. In this article, we report the cash-based monetary practices of one Ethiopian rural community and identify their implications for the design of new financial technology. Particularly, we focus on addressing the question, What characteristic features should go into the design of mobile money application(s) to embody a rural Ethiopian community’s money practices in social (marriage and death) and religious contexts? Primary data on everyday practices of the community were collected. Analysis of our data reveals that new financial technology design should support lived experiences such as embedded social meaning, segregated and aggregate money control, restricted money use, identity extension and hiding, refusal and acceptance of donations, disclosed and secret money practices, and assigning aesthetics to money. The article concludes by discussing possible ways of mapping these concepts into financial system design, thus contributing toward the development of cashless transactions and a cashless society.     

IT-gestützte individualisierte Altersvorsorgeberatung

The paper outlines, how financial service providers can generate competitive advantages through innovative IT-support for their financial advisory processes. Therefore a generic concept for individualised financial advisory processes is enhanced by the consideration of tax and social contribution effects. This concept is operationalised for the important field of private retirement planning. Thus IT-support for the process of individualised advice is essential because of its high complexity and enables an individualised optimisation of customers’ portfolios. In cooperation with a German financial service provider this concept is already successfully implemented in a first release and will be extended and improved in the future.     

Filtering unfair ratings from dishonest advisors in multi-criteria e-markets: a biclustering-based approach

In multiagent e-markets, trust between interaction partners (buying agents and selling agents) is vital for any transaction to be successful. Given the difficulty for a buyer to directly judge the quality (trustworthiness) of a seller for a transaction, a buyer also seeks opinions from other buyers (called advisors) in the marketplace to determine the seller’s trustworthiness. However, advisors may act dishonestly by conveying misleading information about the seller. We propose a novel approach to identify such dishonest advisors, while evaluating a seller’s trustworthiness on multiple criteria. It is based on a biclustering method which clusters honest advisors on different criteria. Correlation between advisors’ ratings to various criteria is used as additional information to accurately filter dishonest advisors. A transitive mechanism is also employed in the biclustering process to cope with rating sparsity. Further, we introduce a parallelization technique to reduce the time complexity involved in the biclustering process. Detailed experiments in simulated environments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach against strategic attacks from dishonest advisors. Evaluation on three real datasets confirms the effectiveness of our approach in real environments.     

Advisory services in the virtual world: an empowerment perspective

The virtual world is growing in popularity and incorporates many state-of-the-art technologies. In particular, many new applications are currently being explored by public and private organisations in these virtual environments. This study examines the interesting phenomenon of providing virtual advisors to assist users in accomplishing their tasks in the virtual world. The advisory areas under discussion include commerce, health (physical and mental), academia, ethics and travel. Then a systematic framework is developed to reveal the best practices in the provision of virtual advisors, eliciting thought-provoking discussions of the current status and future trends in the use of virtual advisors in the virtual world.     

Creativity and Repetition

In this paper we seek to explore the concept of the ‘new’ through enquiring into the role of the body, thus opening categories that may allow a sensing of the affective ‘new’ in organizing processes. We use various theoretical concepts such as ‘repetition’ and ‘habitual appropriation’ to look at modern dance. We aim to show how the investigation of embodied processes allows us to make links between the old and the new, the creative and the unimaginative, and ultimately may help us to generate an infinite array of creative practices.     

Speaking things into existence: Ontological foundations of identity representation and management

Conceptual models capture knowledge about domains of reality. Therefore, conceptual models and their modelling constructs should be based on theories about the world—that is, they should be grounded in ontology. Identity is fundamental to ontology and conceptual modelling because it addresses the very existence of objects and conceptual systems in general. Classification involves grouping objects that share similarities and delineating them from objects that fall under other concepts (qualitative identity). However, among objects that fall under the same concept, we must also distinguish between individual objects (individual identity). In this paper, we analyze the ontological question of identity, focusing specifically on institutional identity, which is the identity of socially constructed institutional objects. An institutional entity is a language construct that is ‘spoken into existence’. We elaborate on how institutional identity changes how we understand conceptual modelling and the models produced. We show that different models result if we base modelling on a property-based conception of identity compared to an institutional one. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber principles, which embrace a property-based view of identity, as an anchor to the existing literature to point out how this type of ontology sidesteps identity in general and institutional identity in particular. We contribute theoretically by providing the first in-depth ontological analysis of what the notion of institutional identity can bring to conceptual modelling. We also contribute a solid ontological grounding of identity management and the identity of things in digital infrastructures.     

高速列车旅客信息系统咨询子系统的研究

本文全面介绍了高速列车旅客信息系统中的信息咨询子系统，阐述了系统目标、系统网络结构及功能设想，探讨了数据组织与管理方法和信息资源的获得与更新等内容．     

Affordances of social media in collective action: the case of Free Lunch for Children in China

This paper studies the socialised affordances of social media in the processes of collective action, exploring the role of technology in the under‐researched area of civil society. We examine the case of Free Lunch for Children (FL4C), a charitable programme in China based on the microblogging platform, Weibo. Adopting the perspective of affordances‐for‐practice, we draw upon the collective action model to better understand the sociomaterial practices and social processes involving social media, and seek to address the ‘when’ and ‘how’ questions of affordances. The study generates theoretical and practical implications for understanding the role of social media in social transformation.     

Exploring the Belief Systems of Software Development Professionals

It is commonly accepted that an individual's beliefs and actions are based on his or her assessment and perceptions of the world. In order to determine what practices an individual is likely to follow at any given time, it is necessary to understand the individual's behavioral intention in a given circumstance. From an Information Technology perspective, a software development professional's belief systems are potentially the basis for the adoption and implementation of new and innovative work practices and processes. In this article, we explore the belief systems of software development professionals in order to understand the beliefs underlying intention and practice, and we seek answers about how they adopt or reject new and innovative software development processes and practices. The results point out a strong influence of past experiences, personality types, and repeated behavior on current software development processes and practices in industrial settings.     

MISMIS – A comprehensive decision support system for stock market investment

Nowadays, stock market is becoming a popular investment platform for both institutional and individual investors. The current financial information systems serve to provide latest information. However, they lack sophisticated analytical tools. This paper proposes a new architecture for financial information systems. The developed prototype is entitled as the Multi-level and Interactive Stock Market Investment System (MISMIS). It is specially designed for investors to build their financial models to forecast stock price and index. The performance of the financial models can be evaluated on a virtual trading platform. There are other features in MISMIS that are tailor-made to handle financial data; these include synchronized time frame, time series prediction techniques, preprocessing and transformation functions, multi-level modeling and interactive user interface. To illustrate the capability of MISMIS, we have evaluated strategies of trading the future options of Hang Seng Index (HSI). We find that historical HSI, Dow Jones Index, property price index, retailing sales figure, prime lending rate, and consumer price index in Hong Kong are essential factors affecting the performance of the trading of HSI’s future option. Also there are some feedbacks from the in-depth interviews of six financial consultant upon how they perceived the prototype MISMIS.     

Knowledge risks in organizational networks: The practice perspective

This commentary paper aims to highlight issues associated with the supposed ability to transfer knowledge across networks. In response to the paper “Risks in Organizational Networks: An Exploratory Framework”, (Trkman and Desouza, 2012, pp. 1–17), we argue that the taken-for-granted assumption that knowledge is transferrable represents a risk in itself. We analyze knowledge in networks using a practice perspective – in turn we consider knowledge as enacted in social practices and as context-specific. In contrast with Trkman and Desouza’s paper, we argue that if knowledge is seen as enacted in practice, a framework that maps risks associated with knowledge transfer is limiting. We conclude that, since knowing in practice is emergent and not fully controllable, adopting a set of best practices on how to effectively transfer (or not) knowledge could itself be risky for managers who then believe that knowledge can be treated as a commodity and easily moved about a network.