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The purpose of this study is to contribute to research concerning the role of digital infrastructure in digital government. This is done by answering the research question: how does digital infrastructuring constrain ambidexterity in public sector organizations?

The research is designed as a clinical inquiry in a large Swedish municipality, involving data collection in the form of interviews and internal documents. The method of analysis involves both exploring generative mechanisms in digital infrastructuring and theorizing on the findings based on previous literature.

The findings identify four generative mechanisms through which stability and change in digital infrastructuring constrain ambidexterity in terms of both efficiency (exploitation) and innovation (exploration).

This study’s limitations are related to international and intersectoral transferability and risks associated with its approach to clinical inquiry. The main implications are its contribution to the literature on how stability counteracts not only innovation but also efficiency and how change counteracts not only efficiency but also innovation.

This study identifies clear generative mechanisms that should be avoided by managers striving for digital government, and it offers clear recommendations for said managers regarding how to avoid them.

This study offers implications for national-level digital infrastructure policy and contributes to efforts to increase the capabilities of digital government.

As two of the four identified generative mechanisms are novel contributions, this study offers a concrete addition to existing research. This study has resulted in factual change in the studied organization as well as at the national level through successful dissemination of the findings for both policy and practice in other public sector organizations.

This chapter focuses on performance measurement and management systems (PMMS) in the inter-municipal cooperation context by considering the development of new capabilities required to exploit the digital governance potentialities in which data integration is essential. The analysis relied on the advent of digital governance, the Italian public informative systems reform, as well as on local governments (LG) renewals through the Union of Municipalities (UMs) – one of the most widespread structured forms of inter-municipal cooperation – based on the sustainability of local service delivery. Through a review of the literature and the conceptual outcomes resulting from the analysis of the dynamic capabilities (DCs) theory applied to digital governance, this chapter aims at suggesting a useful contribution for an effective improvement of PMMS in the public sector networks, with the consequent improvement of resilience in policy management. Thus, the broad information required by the UMs and the complexity of its administration together with the constraints regarding the need to share a common vision and strategy, plan objectives, targets, measurement, and evaluation processes are considered. In particular, three propositions have been developed as guidelines for achieving coordination, coherence, and integration of measuring and managing performances in public networks. This evidence will offer insights allowing scholars and practitioners a practical understanding of whether and how DCs – applied to digital governance – address PMMS challenges within an inter-municipal cooperative context.

This chapter uses multiple research methods, including quantitative science mapping analysis (SciMat) and a qualitative literature review, to provide insight into the academic debate unfolding at the intersection of big data and business processes. SciMat analysis based on keyword co-occurrence enabled identifying 12 of the most productive research themes, as reflected in a poll of 301 articles about big data and business processes. The three most important themes are: firm performance, Industry 4.0, and innovation. The traditional literature review on firm performance indicated that big data analytics (BDA) positively influence business process performance and have a beneficial impact on a firm’s performance, that is, the role of big data is viewed as critical in the context of Industry 4.0 because it enhances productivity and improves business processes. The benefits of BDA can be achieved only if the organizational obstacles related to planning, workforce attitude, and alignment with strategy are overcome. Moreover, big data is perceived as a significant source of innovation in an organization and can be conceptualized with the use of a resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. BDA positively influence business processes, which is strengthened by adequate implementation and openness to innovation.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: to describe the equity-oriented design of a publicly accessible and openly networked computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) initiative that has supported educator discussion about equity topics; to identify design principles for equity-oriented design in open education; and to propose a model for the design of open learning initiatives that are mutually committed to educational equity and educational openness.

This paper draws from design-based research methodology, specifically design narrative and the worked example. The paper is one response to the need for more “designerly work” in the learning sciences, generally, and more specifically in domains such as CSCL.

Four design principles are identified that informed the equity-oriented creation and iteration of the Marginal Syllabus, an open CSCL initiative: leveraging the open web, fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships, working with open content and engaging professional learning as an open practice. This paper also advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The model integrates design principles to assist CSCL and open education designers and researchers in creating or iterating projects to be more equity-oriented learning opportunities.

This paper’s design narrative identifies Marginal Syllabus design principles and advances the open palimpsests model for equity-oriented design in open education. The design narrative demonstrates how critical perspectives on the relationship between equity and digital technology can encourage collaboration among diverse project stakeholders, attune to the dynamics of power and agency and respond to the worldly needs of partners and participants.

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.

Social media stage online patterns of social interaction that differ remarkably from ordinary forms of acting, talking and relating. To unravel these differences, we review the literature on micro-sociology and social psychology and derive a shorthand version of socially-embedded forms of interaction. We use that version as a yardstick for reconstructing and assessing the patterns of sociality social media promote. Our analysis shows that social media platforms stage highly stylized forms of social interaction such as liking, following, tagging, etc. that essentially serve the purpose of generating a calculable and machine-readable data footprint out of user platform participation. This online stylization of social interaction and the data it procures are, however, only the first steps of what we call the infrastructuring of social media. Social media use the data footprint that results from the stylization of social interaction to derive larger (and commercially relevant) social entities such as audiences, networks and groups that are constantly fed back to individuals and groups of users as personalized recommendations of one form or another. Social media infrastructure sociality as they provide the backstage operations and technological facilities out of which new habits and modes of social relatedness emerge and diffuse across the social fabric.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, transparency became a rhetorical token used to provide a solution to financial problems. This study examines how transparency materialized in the context of the European securitization industry, which was largely blamed for the credit crunch. The authors show that although transparency was broadly associated with a political call for financial system reform, in the European securitization industry it provided the basis on which to repurpose its market infrastructure. The authors introduce the concept of transparency work to show that transparency is a market achievement organized as a standardization network of heterogeneous actors aiming at establishing a new calculative infrastructure for managing credit risk. Combining insights from information infrastructure research and Economic Sociology, the authors contribute to a distributed and networked understanding of information infrastructure development.

This study investigates the role of collaborative spaces as organizational support for internal innovation through cross-functional teams and for open innovation with external stakeholders. In particular, the study focuses on collaborative spaces as tools for multiplex (i.e., simultaneous internal and external boundary management in innovation projects).

The authors conducted a qualitative study in a multi-divisional organization that set up in its headquarters a collaborative space for collaborative product development. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

Findings highlight that the relation between expectations and experiences about the collaborative space impact on employees' ability to perform boundary work inside and outside the organization. In addition to the collaborative space's affording role for expectations about hands-on collaborative innovation (space as laboratory), the study also highlights a set of collaboration constraints. These latter are generated by perceived boundary configurations (i.e. degree of boundary permeability and infrastructure in internal and external collaborations) and by discrepancies between expectations (space as laboratory) and actual collaboration experiences in the space (i.e. space as maze, cloister, showcase and silo). We show that space-generated constraints slow down internal and external boundary work for innovation and generate a trade-off between them.

Using the process-based perspective of boundary work, the paper connects studies on cross-functional teaming and open innovation through the concept of “multiplex boundary work.” It also contributes to the literature on boundary work by showing the challenges of using collaborative spaces as organizational support tools for multiplex boundary spanning.