The editor-in-chief of MISQ in 1999, Allan Lee, wrote a monograph of how IT plays a role in the manuscript review process.  He points out that while IT plays a role in speeding up certain parts of the process, the human review has the biggest impact for a timely and quality review.  The timeline of an actual review that he did truly gives me an appreciation of the whole process.

The editor-in-chief of MISQ in 2005, Carol Saunders, wrote a monograph to find new sources for reviewers and to encourage  reviewers to do “developmental reviewing” rather than “gatekeeper reviewing” to increase the publication acceptance rate. She uses the metaphor of reviewers as skilled diamond cutters to turn rough manuscripts into gems.  Now I have a better appreciation of all the articles we have read this past semester – not all papers are perfect and they are gems with minor flaws that make a contributions to the field that we can learn from.

This study is much shorter than any of the recent research articles we have read.  The authors chose to leave much of the detail in the appendixes.  Overall, this article seems to provide a good example of how to structure an empirical study, but because of the lack of detail, the quality of the study is questionable.  There appears to be no strong IT artifact in the article, unless you count knowledge workers, which can encompass non-IT fields as well.  It is interesting that this study is related to the previous article about knowledge brokering (by Pawlowski and Robey), but the knowledge brokering article was published months before this article, which claims to be an “anything but mature (p.90)” area of study,  and even suggests future studies in knowledge brokering (in their fourth area for future study, p.101). The contribution that the authors claim to bring to the field might be a little too late. 

Another thing I noticed was “Organizational Climate” was a variable in Appendix C, but missing as a variable from all the other tables.   How do they measure organizational climate, and did they do analysis on different climates?  The authors need to better explain some of the new terminology (such as “collective action,” second-order construct,” and “pro-social norms”) in the article, but maybe they were trying to keep it brief for a reason. 

The stories and quotes from the IT professionals were interesting and easy for me to relate to.  However, I still find it difficult to understand the validity of this type of qualitative analysis.  For example, the authors say, “these work practices were seen as instrumental in the transfer of knowledge within ManDisco’s decentralized organization” on p. 662, but I question how they came to conclude this and who, if any, of their participants said or implied this.  How do you go from what people say, translate it into what they imply, and then make an absolute statement? The study might have been stronger if somehow it could be checked whether knowledge was actually transferred. This could be done by interviewing other non-IT professionals of ManDisco.

I want to feel that our blogging has a purpose -- to learn, disseminate knowledge, and to foster new ways of thinking.  What do you think of his comment?  Are we wasting our time? How do we make blogging a stronger media for action?

The theory uses the mindfulness theory from the psychology field to try to explain the phenomenon of mindless bandwagon IT adoption behavior of organizations.  Mindful behavior is described through the different IT innovation processes: comprehension, adoption, implementation, and assimilation.  These processes are interrelated with something the authors introduce as “intentionalities” which describes the purpose of each IT process.  Five attributes of mindfulness are used to describe each of the IT innovation processes. Then, I like how they used risks and rewards to explain mindlessness.

The article was well reasoned and had a good flow.  After explaining each mindfulness and mindlessness concept, the authors bring the concepts together and show how they interact within the organization level, and the interorganizational field.  The authors then make six proposals of how mindfulness and mindlessness will be observed in different scenarios/circumstances. They use nice short examples from the real world to come up with their line of reasoning for developing these proposals. 

The theory is just preliminary and has not been empirically tested, but offers many different paths for other researchers to continue working in. The article was overall very interesting and innovative, although a little too abstract for my personal taste.  Reading this paper helped me to see how mindless many of my company's own IT innovation processes are, and helps me to see how we can try to be more mindful and hopefully make more effective/successful IT decisions.

I’m not exactly sure why the editors of MISQ would publish this paper, since structuration theory has been used in IS studies before.  The only new thing was to show how conflict and contradiction worked in IS.  It almost seems that the authors were grasping at straws to try to find things that fit structural theory, and just wanted to publish another paper with a slightly different spin, which is not uncommon for researchers to do.  The author doesn’t even give a good reason for why he did this study. It seems like it is mostly a paper to complain about the Hofstede method.

There was no real hypothesis to test against, and I thought the author’s evidence was weak.  For example, the author claimed that the insurance company case resulted in changed attitudes.  However he did not measure if their attitudes changed, which could have been done using a simple survey. His only proof was that they changed the way they did business, which does not necessarily mean that attitudes changed.

This is more of a sociology paper; there wasn’t a real IT artifact in this paper.  Although the author claims that this paper focuses on software production, no software development activities were described.  If the author had focused on actual work activities to develop the systems, it might have been more IT-ish.  How long people work, whether they like their boss, whether they have a new duty to perform can apply to any business, not just IT.