Information Systems DIGEST Podcast NTNU - Digital Enterprise

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest University Lecturer Arto Lanamäki from the University of Oulu in Finland. Much of his research is qualitative and phenomenon-driven research, concerning the role of information technologies in social practices. He is currently working in the Research Council of Finland (Suomen Akatemia) funded AI-REG project (2022-2026) investigating the European Act on Artificial Intelligence. While publishing mostly in the field of IS, he champions a certain research eclecticism and a boundary-breaking ethos. His research has been published in the Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS), among others.

In this episode, we first catch-up with Arto's research and new AI legislation, before turning our attention to paradigms in IS.  We consider the historical saturation of positivism in the IS discipline, the leaning into interpretivism before narrowing in on a paradigm gaining attention called 'critical realism'.  What is critical realism? Why is it important for IS? What does Arto think of critical realism? Tune in to find out. Also, colours.

References:
Barley, S. R. (2006). When I Write My Masterpiece: Thoughts on What Makes a Paper Interesting. Academy of Management Journal, 49(1), 16-20.
Brock, S., & Mares, E. (2014). Realism and Anti-realism. Routledge. 
Chen, W., & Hirschheim, R. (2004). A paradigmatic and methodological examination of information systems research from 1991 to 2001. Information Systems Journal, 14, 197-235. 
Giere, R. N. (2010). Scientific Perspectivism. University of Chicago press. 
Lanamäki, A. (2023). Agnostic Affordances: Challenging the Critical Realist Connection. In M. R. Jones, A. S. Mukherjee, D. Thapa, & Y. Zheng (Eds.), After Latour: Globalisation, Inequity and Climate Change. IFIPJWC 2023 (Vol. 696, pp. 265-279). Springer.
Lanamäki, A. (in press). Questioning the Third Way Rhetoric of Critical Realism. The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371492086_Questioning_the_Third_Way_Rhetoric_of_Critical_Realism
Lanamäki, A., Väyrynen, K., Laari-Salmela, S., & Kinnula, M. (2020). Examining relational digital transformation through the unfolding of local practices of the Finnish taxi industry. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 29(3), 101622. 
Mason, R. (2021). Social kinds are essentially mind-dependent. Philosophical Studies, 178(12), 3975-3994. 
Menand, L. (2002). The Metaphysical Club. Flamingo. 
Misak, C. (2013). The American Pragmatists. Oxford University Press. 
Orlikowski, W. J., & Baroudi, J. J. (1991). Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions. Information Systems Research, 2(1), 1-28.
Siponen, M., & Tsohou, A. (2018). Demystifying the Influential IS Legends of Positivism. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 19(7), 600-617. 
Volkoff, O., & Strong, D. M. (2013). Critical Realism and Affordances: Theorizing IT-Associated Organizational Change Processes. MIS Quarterly, 37(3), 819-834.
Weber, R. (2004). Editor's Comments: The Rhetoric of Positivism versus Interpretivism: A Personal View. MIS Quarterly, 28(1), iii-xii
Link to all references /

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest Entrepreneur  and Associate Professor Shellie Boudreau  formerly from Aalborg University, Denmark. (Note: Shellie is no longer working at Aalborg University but at the time of recording she was). Her main research interests started with biomedical engineering for pain and health technology, but through her passion of communication, a desire to move beyond traditional academic roles was found. Shellie is CEO of the research based start-up Aglance Solutions which is a result of her own pain-based research morphed into a software business called Navigate Pain. Shellie has further pushed her entrepreneurial spirit through a communication-focused company called ContentAvenue with a purpose of overcoming the academic and business gap and effectively communicate science.
In this episode, we deviate from some of the expected patterns of this podcast and instead we traverse the boundaries of academia and industry. We reflect on how we can take research-based ideas and transform them into innovations, the trials and tribulations of walking the tightrope of an academic entrepreneur, and learn more about Shellie's experiences doing both all while dealing with some of the taboos of leaving academia. 

Sources:
Scientific Communication: https://contentavenue.com/ 

Blog post: https://blog.contentavenue.com/with-great-power-comes-three-reasons-why-scientists-dread-interviews/

Navigate Pain Software: https://www.aglancesolutions.com/blog/categories/navigate-pain-software

Muracki, J., Kumorek, M., Kisilewicz, A., Pożarowszczyk, B., Larsen, D. B., Kawczyński, A., & Boudreau, S. (2019). Practical use of the navigate pain application for the assessment of the area, location, and frequency of the pain location in young soccer goalkeepers. Journal of Human Kinetics, 69(1), 125-135.

Galve Villa, M., S Palsson, T., Cid Royo, A., R Bjarkam, C., & Boudreau, S. A. (2020). Digital pain mapping and tracking in patients with chronic pain: Longitudinal study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(10), e21475.

NERDs - Network for Research Entrepreneur Developers

Twitter: @contentave

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest Assistant Professor Sam Zaza  from Middle Tennessee State University, USA. Her main research interests lie in diversity, equity, and inclusion; IT career and nature of work, and methodological approaches. She is active in AIS as the SIG Social Inclusion President, SIG Lead President, and Women College CoChair and is the recent winner of the Diversity and Inclusion Advocate of the Year (2023). Sam has published her work in various journals such as Information & Organization, and Communications of the Association for Information Systems, among other proceedings in regional and international conferences.
March is women's month, and we are back for the second time to talk about women in information systems. We unravel what social inclusion is and consider social inclusion from varying perspectives applied to the information systems discipline. We explore and reflect on what are 'our' challenges for social inclusion in conferences and the IS community, ponder why there is limited gender-related research, and ways forward for change. 

References:
Gupta, B., Loiacono, E. T., Dutchak, I. G., & Thatcher, J. B. (2019). A field-based view on gender in the information systems discipline: Preliminary evidence and an agenda for change. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20(12), 2. 
Loiacono, E., Iyer, L., Ashong Elliot, M. A., & Cooper, V. A. (2021). Engaging Women in Information Systems: Where Are We Headed?.
 Masiero, Silvia and Aaltonen, Aleksi, "Gender Bias in Information Systems Research: A Literature Review" (2020). AISWN International Research Workshop on Women, IS and Grand Challenges 2020. 2.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/aiswn2020/2
 Trauth, E. M., & Howcroft, D. (2006). Social inclusion and the information systems field: why now?. In Social Inclusion: Societal and Organizational Implications for Information Systems: IFIP TC8 WG8. 2 International Working Conference, July 12–15, 2006, Limerick, Ireland (pp. 3-12). Springer US.
Trauth, E. (2017). A research agenda for social inclusion in information systems. ACM SIGMIS Database: the Database for Advances in Information Systems, 48(2), 9-20.
Zaza, Sam; Annabi, Hala; and Connolly, Amy J., "All you need to know about publishing Social Inclusion Research in high-quality IS Journals?" (2022). AMCIS 2022 TREOs. 25. https://aisel.aisnet.org/treos_amcis2022/25 
Zhou, Shimi; Loiacono, Eleanor; Nerur, Sridhar; Randolph, Adriane B.; Lingo, Elizabeth; Iyer, Lakshmi; and Carter, Michelle, "Authorship, Collaboration, and Influence of Women IS Scholars: Using Social Network Analysis" (2022). AMCIS 2022 Proceedings. 6. https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2022/sig_si/sig_si/6
 
Other sources:
AIS Women's Network: https://www.aiswn.org and Twitter @AISWN_AIS
Women's IMPACT IT Research Grant: https://impactit.pages.wm.edu/ 
Check out these other women-oriented podcasts:
https://www.cathymazak.com/podcast/
https://theresearchher.com/ 

Special note: I am disgusted that I need to disclose this. Hate speech will not be tolerated and any offenders will be blocked and reported. 

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest  Professor Torgeir Dingsøyr. Torgeir is professor in software engineering – agile at the Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is further adjunct chief research scientist at the SimulaMet research laboratory. His research has focused on teamwork and learning in software development, as well as development methods for large software projects and programs. He has published in the software engineering, information systems and project management fields.
This episode is the first in a planned ongoing series pushing towards education and educational materials in different formats. The purpose of this episode is to discuss qualitative case studies and the intended audience is aimed towards early-stage researchers such as those working on their PhD, master students, or those reflecting on what it means to do a case study. We will be unravelling some of the underlying theoretical and practical mysteries of qualitative case studies by using Torgeir's explanatory (2023) and exploratory (2018) case studies in the context of software development projects. It is recommended to read both of these articles linked below first to better follow along the examples and implications. The theoretical discussion is guided by Yin's (2011) 6-stage process model: plan, design, prepare, collect, analyze, and share.

References:
Explanatory case study https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-022-10230-6
Dingsøyr, T., Bjørnson, F. O., Schrof, J., & Sporsem, T. (2023). A longitudinal explanatory case study of coordination in a very large development programme: the impact of transitioning from a first-to a second-generation large-scale agile development method. Empirical Software Engineering, 28(1), 1-49.

Exploratory case study https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9524-2
Dingsøyr, T., Moe, N. B., Fægri, T. E., & Seim, E. A. (2018). Exploring software development at the very large-scale: a revelatory case study and research agenda for agile method adaptation. Empirical Software Engineering, 23, 490-520. 

Dingsøyr, T., Nerur, S., Balijepally, V., and Moe, N. B., (2012). A Decade of Agile Methodologies: Towards Explaining Agile Software Development. Journal of Systems and Software, vol. 85, pp. 1213-1221.

Wohlin, C. (2021). Case Study Research in Software Engineering—It is a Case, and it is a Study, but is it a Case Study?. Information and Software Technology, 133, 106514.

Yin, R. K. (2011). Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods. 6th Eds. Sage.

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest  Professor Myriam Lewkowicz. Myriam works at Troyes University of Technology where she heads the pluri-disciplinary research group Tech-CICO. She is interested in defining digital technologies to support existing collective practices or to design new collective activities. This interdisciplinary research proposes reflections and approaches for the analysis and the design of new products and services to support cooperative work. The main application domains for this research for the last fifteen years have been healthcare (social support, coordination, telemedicine) and the industry (digital transformation, maintenance). She is a member of the program committees of the main conferences in Cooperative Work, Social Software, and Human-Machine Interaction, chairs the European scientific association EUSSET, and is deputy editor-in-chief of the CSCW journal "The Journal of Collaborative Computing and Work Practices".

In this episode we are inspired by the upcoming ECSCW conference hosted by NTNU in Trondheim this year (2023) from June 5th-9th and thus we examine the historical movements that were formative for the conference and the field. Myriam shares with us her wealth of knowledge and lived-experience in CSCW, with a special emphasis on the community and the orientation towards practice and design.  Consider submitting a workshop proposal, journal paper, poster and more to this welcoming community: deadline is February 20th, 2023.

References:
Lewkowicz, M., & Schmidt, K. (2020). Introducing ‘ECSCW Contributions’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 29(6), 627-628. 
Lewkowicz, M., and Romain L. "The missing “turn to practice” in the digital transformation of industry." Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 28.3 (2019): 655-683
Greif, I. How we started CSCW. Nat Electron 2, 132 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-019-0229-y

More information:
Conference website: https://ecscw.eusset.eu/2023/

CSCW: https://www.eusset.eu/events/summer-school/

Host Casandra Grundstrom is joined by special guest  Associate Professor David Ribes. David joins us from the University of Washington in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and is the deLAB director. He is a sociologist of science and technology and focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures. David's work investigates the long-term changes in objects of research in varying domains including ecology, particle physics, and health (HIV/AIDS).

In this episode, we reflect on (cyber)infrastructures from a sociotechnical perspective. Further considering how what we build for research now impacts the long-term outcomes and what those unintended consequences might be; real-world examples from David's cases are discussed in ecology and health. We then shift to consider the long-now in connection with sustainability and conducting research. 
 
New music made for this podcast from a talented NTNU music student: https://soundcloud.com/demo-little/technological-outbreak
References:
Ribes, D., & Lee, C. P. (2010). Sociotechnical studies of cyberinfrastructure and e-research: Current themes and future trajectories. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 19(3), 231-244.

Ribes, D. and T. A. Finholt (2009). "The Long Now of Infrastructure: Articulating Tensions in Development." Journal for the Association of Information Systems (JAIS): Special issue on eInfrastructures 10(5): 375-398.

Ribes, D. (2017). Notes on the concept of data interoperability: Cases from an ecology of AIDS research infrastructures. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1514-1526).

Inman, S., & Ribes, D. (2018). Data Streams, Data Seams: Toward a seamful representationof data interoperability.
More information:
http://www.davidribes.com/