Search results
1 – 10 of over 1000Tiina Kemppainen and Tiina Elina Paananen
This study examines the dualities of digital services – that is, how customers’ favorite everyday digital services can positively and negatively contribute to their well-being…
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the dualities of digital services – that is, how customers’ favorite everyday digital services can positively and negatively contribute to their well-being. Thus, the study describes the meanings of favorite digital services as part of customers’ everyday lives and the types of well-being to which such services can contribute.
Design/methodology/approach
We used a qualitative research approach through semi-structured interviews conducted in 2021 to collect data from 14 young adults (22–31 years old) who actively used digital services in their daily lives.
Findings
Our findings revealed that customers’ favorite everyday digital services can contribute to their mental well-being, social well-being, and intellectual well-being. Within these three dimensions of well-being, we identified nine dualities of digital services that describe their positive and negative contributions: (1) digital escapism versus digital disruption, (2) digital relaxation versus digital stress, (3) digital empowerment versus digital subjugation, (4) digital augmentation versus digital emptiness, (5) digital socialization versus digital isolation, (6) digital togetherness versus digital exclusion, (7) digital self-expression versus digital pressure, (8) digital learning versus digital dependence, and (9) digital inspiration versus digital stagnation.
Practical implications
These findings suggest that everyday digital services have the potential to contribute to customer well-being in various aspects – both positively and negatively – accentuating the need for service providers to decipher the impacts of their offerings on well-being. Indeed, understanding the relationship between digital services and customer well-being can help companies tailor their services to customers’ needs. Companies that prioritize customer well-being not only benefit their customers but also create sustainable growth opportunities in the long run. Further, companies can use the derived information in service design to develop marketing strategies that emphasize the positive impacts of their digital services on customer well-being.
Originality/value
Although prior transformative service studies have investigated the well-being of multiple stakeholders, such studies have focused on services related to the physical and healthcare domains. Consequently, the role of everyday digital services as contributors to customer well-being is an under-researched topic. In addition, the concept of well-being and its various dimensions has received limited attention in previous service research. By investigating everyday digital services and their multidimensional contribution to customer well-being, this study broadens the perspective on well-being within TSR and aids in refining a more precise conceptualization.
Details
Keywords
Qazi Imran Ahmad, Nosheen Fatima Warraich and Amara Malik
This study aims to investigate the everyday life information seeking behavior of transgender people in Pakistan.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the everyday life information seeking behavior of transgender people in Pakistan.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative study, based on a survey design, was conducted to explore the everyday information needs of transgender people along with the types and frequency of using information sources. This study further explored the barriers to seeking everyday life information. Data were collected from 378 transgender people from Pakistan.
Findings
Music related information was the most important daily life information need and television appeared as one of the primary information sources frequently consulted by the transgender people. The respondents revealed a variety of challenges in accessing information including lack of education, lack of understanding about available information sources, biased treatment by the public and lack of technological skills. Furthermore, a statistically significant difference was found in everyday information needs and sources consulted on the basis of their age and education.
Originality/value
The findings provide a guideline to educate information providers, government agencies and other stakeholders about the information needs of this marginalized community in Pakistan. This study also suggests ways in which stakeholder may improve information systems and services to better assist transgender people.
Details
Keywords
Niki Chatzipanagiotou, Anita Mirijamdotter and Christina Mörtberg
This paper aims to focus on academic library managers’ learning practices in the context of cooperative work supported by computational artefacts. Academic library managers’…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on academic library managers’ learning practices in the context of cooperative work supported by computational artefacts. Academic library managers’ everyday work is mainly cooperative. Their cooperation is supported predominantly by computational artefacts. Learning how to use the computational artefacts efficiently and effectively involves understanding the changes in everyday work that affect managers and, therefore, it requires deep understanding of their cooperative work practices.
Design/methodology/approach
Focused ethnography was conducted through participant observations, interviews and document analysis. Ten managers from a university library in Sweden participated in the research. A thematic method was used to analyse the empirical material. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and work-integrated learning was used as the conceptual lens.
Findings
Five learning practices were identified: collaboration, communication, coordination, decision-making processes and computational artefacts’ use. The findings show that learning is embedded in managers’ cooperative work practices, which do not necessarily include sufficient training time. Furthermore, learning was intertwined with cooperating and was situational. Managers learned by reflecting together on their own experiences and through joint cooperation and information sharing while using the computational artefacts.
Originality/value
The main contribution lies in providing insights into how academic library managers learn and cooperate in their everyday work, emphasizing the role of computational artefacts, the importance of the work context and the collective nature of learning. It also highlights the need for continual workplace learning in contemporary knowledge work environments. Thus, the research generates contributions to the informatics field by extending the understanding of managers’ work-integrated learning in their everyday cooperative work practices supported by computational artefacts’ use. It also contributes to the intersection of CSCW and work-integrated learning.
Details
Keywords
Julie Schweitzer, Tamara L. Mix and Jimmy J. Esquibel
This study aims to explore how key stakeholders and recipients of local food access programs operate strategically to meet individual and community food needs, enhance experiences…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore how key stakeholders and recipients of local food access programs operate strategically to meet individual and community food needs, enhance experiences of dignity and promote social justice. The study of a fragmented community food system highlights the connections between micro and meso dimensions of food access, illustrating how people work around food system limitations to access food.
Design/methodology/approach
Using qualitative in-depth interviews with food assistance managers, workers, volunteers and recipients, this study examines the period before the implementation of a centralized community-based food access initiative in a mid-sized, rural Oklahoma college town with a high rate of food insecurity. This study asks: What are community members’ experiences in a fragmented food assistance system? In what ways do individuals use everyday resistance and workarounds to actively promote experiences of dignity and social justice in food access spaces?
Findings
Those involved in sites of community food access build important networks to share information and engage in negotiation and trade to gain access to useful food resources. As forms of everyday resistance, such practices encourage co-construction of dignity and social justice in stigmatized spaces.
Originality/value
This research contributes to literature examining micro- and meso-level community dynamics that inform agency, dignity and social justice in community food access approaches.
Details
Keywords
Lukas Höper and Carsten Schulte
In today’s digital world, data-driven digital artefacts pose challenges for education, as many students lack an understanding of data and feel powerless when interacting with…
Abstract
Purpose
In today’s digital world, data-driven digital artefacts pose challenges for education, as many students lack an understanding of data and feel powerless when interacting with them. This paper aims to address these challenges and introduces the data awareness framework. It focuses on understanding data-driven technologies and reflecting on the role of data in everyday life. The paper also presents an empirical study on young school students’ data awareness.
Design/methodology/approach
The study involves a teaching unit on data awareness framed by a pre- and post-test design using a questionnaire on students’ awareness and understanding of and reflection on data practices of data-driven digital artefacts.
Findings
The study’s findings indicate that the data awareness framework supports students in understanding data practices of data-driven digital artefacts. The findings also suggest that the framework encourages students to reflect on these data practices and think about their daily behaviour.
Originality/value
Students learn a model about interactions with data-driven digital artefacts and use it to analyse data-driven applications. This approach appears to enable students to understand these artefacts from everyday life and reflect on these interactions. The work contributes to research on data and artificial intelligence literacies and suggests a way to support students in developing self-determination and agency during interactions with data-driven digital artefacts.
Details
Keywords
This study aims to explore aesthetic atmospheres and their affordances in urban squares to advance knowledge on the research and design of attractive living environments.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore aesthetic atmospheres and their affordances in urban squares to advance knowledge on the research and design of attractive living environments.
Design/methodology/approach
Descriptions of pleasant and unpleasant experiences of urban squares were collected using qualitative questionnaires with open-ended questions. The theoretical framework and the lens of aesthetic affordances were applied to pinpoint and understand the connections between the place attributes and experiences.
Findings
This study found four distinct aesthetic atmospheres formed by perceived synergies of both the material and immaterial aspects of the environment. It was also found that the atmospheres may shift. A model that shows the aesthetic atmospheres and their potential affordances as layered and emerging is presented.
Research limitations/implications
Everyday aesthetics considered as affordances open new research perspectives for the understanding of what generates attractive living environments – or not.
Practical implications
Aesthetics affordances may provide the design professionals and alike means on how to design places that engender specific aesthetic atmosphere.
Social implications
Gathering and discussing commonplace aesthetic experiences in everyday life may enhance democratic participation in place development among people with different levels of design expertise.
Originality/value
This study combines theories of place with a novel concept of aesthetic affordances to identify distinct aesthetic atmospheres. A holistic overview structure of how the various constituents of aesthetic atmospheres relate to each other provides new ways of studying and understanding urban aesthetic atmospheres.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims at contributing to our understanding of how self-settled Syrian refugees (registered and non-registered) use informal practices to forge their non-political agency…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims at contributing to our understanding of how self-settled Syrian refugees (registered and non-registered) use informal practices to forge their non-political agency and how this agency could be considered as political acts.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper was conducted per the qualitative data analysis (in-depth interviews and participant observation), attributed to the critical ethnographic approach, through which refugees’ everyday struggle is explored, additionally, that was incorporated with the analysis of Syrians’ Facebook groups and formal sources.
Findings
The research paper concluded that everyday struggle strategies are considered as political acts by acquiring rights that many self-settled Syrian refugees are stripped of by international humanitarian agencies and host government. Hence, registered and unregistered refugees equally forge what is called “informal citizenship” through their presence via a blend of agency forms ranging from hidden agency to explicit one and via their incorporating into the informal contexts, leading them to carve a position of semi-legality that help them to circumvent the formal structural hardship.
Originality/value
This paper endeavors to study how urban refugees as change agents can convert their illegal presence to “probably refugeeness” to unsettle the prominent recognition of them as illegal non-citizens in southern cities.
Details
Keywords
Sundeep Sahay and Esther N. Landen
The purpose of this paper is to understand how digital interventions are mediating the identity work of community health workers (CHWs) in the context of two African countries.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to understand how digital interventions are mediating the identity work of community health workers (CHWs) in the context of two African countries.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper analyzes the everyday work of CHWs in two low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts (Uganda and Malawi) and seeks to understand changes in collective identity and the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in mediating this “identity work”. As CHWs conduct their everyday tasks of care giving, data reporting and maintaining social interactions, they play two primary roles. One is the care giving role oriented towards the community, and two, is reporting and administrative work by virtue of them being affiliated with the Ministry of Health, either in formal or voluntary capacity. The ambivalence which they experience as they move back and forth between these two worlds of work is significantly now mediated through ICTs. The paper analyzes these dynamics and identifies three key sets of ambivalence in identity work: (1) role embracing-institutional distancing; (2) conformist-resistant and (3) dramaturgical-transformative. The paper makes unique contributions to information systems (IS) and ICT for development (ICT4D) studies in that it focuses on a nonprofessional group, which plays a fundamental role in providing care to underserved populations and also conducts data work which provides the foundation of the national health information system. This contrasts with dominant research in the field which focuses on professional groups, largely based in Western business organizations.
Findings
The paper identifies identity related tensions that emerge with the mediation of digital technologies in the work world of CHWs. These include tensions of conformist-resistant; and (3) dramaturgical-transformative. These findings are relevant and unique to the field of IS and ICT4D studies in that it focuses on a nonprofessional group, which plays a fundamental role in providing care to underserved populations and also conducts data work which provides the foundation of the national health information system.
Research limitations/implications
While acknowledging identity construction and negotiation is a function of both work and social lives, in this paper we could only focus on the work lives.
Practical implications
As digital interventions in the health sector of low and middle income countries is becoming increasingly widespread, often the focus is more on the supply side (the supply of the technology) rather than on the demand side (users experiences and aspirations). Identity becomes a lens to understand these demand side dynamics, which helps provides practical guidance on implementation approaches to ensure that the technology adds value to user work processes and there is a seamless and not a disruptive transition.
Social implications
CHWs are the most neglected cadre in the health system of low and middle income countries, even though they provide the cutting edge in care provision work to the most marginalized populations, living in rural and underserved areas. By focusing on how technologies can be more effectively implemented to support these care processes, the paper provides important social implications both for practice and research.
Originality/value
Analysis of identity construction and negotiation of informal groups in the unorganized sector of low and middle income countries has not received adequate attention in IS research. The paper seeks to fill this important gap.
Details
Keywords
Jongsik Yu, Nancy Grace Baah, Seongseop (Sam) Kim, Hyoungeun Moon, Bee-Lia Chua and Heesup Han
This study aims to develop a robust theoretical framework to explain the impact of hotels’ green brand authenticity on guests’ perceptions of well-being, customer engagement and…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to develop a robust theoretical framework to explain the impact of hotels’ green brand authenticity on guests’ perceptions of well-being, customer engagement and approach behaviors toward green brands.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors examined the effect of green brand authenticity on perceptions of well-being, customer engagement and approach behaviors toward green brands. For the quantitative empirical analysis, 352 samples were used. Green brand authenticity integrates quality commitment, heritage, uniqueness and symbolism as high-dimensional factors.
Findings
The study conceptualizes green brand authenticity as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with four dimensions: quality commitment, heritage, uniqueness and symbolism. The results showed that green brand authenticity has a positive effect on hotel guests’ perceived well-being and behavioral intentions. Interestingly, environmental values did not have a statistically significant regulatory role, while green behavior in everyday life had a partial regulatory role.
Practical implications
This study aims to develop and empirically test a conceptual model that depicts the function of green authenticity in explaining customer responses to green brands. The results and the theoretical framework proposed in this study provide significant insights for researchers and practitioners in the hotel industry.
Originality/value
Further than evaluating brand authenticity generally, this study evaluates the authenticity of a brand's environmental protection efforts. As a result of the empirical analysis conducted in this study, the green brand authenticity of a hotel had a positive effect on customers’ emotional and behavioral aspects. This finding provided valuable and meaningful insights for green hotels and hotel brand-related research.
Details
Keywords
Sakura Yamamura and Paul Lassalle
This paper aims to shed new light on the contextual embeddedness of intersectional entrepreneurs, i.e. entrepreneurs situated at the intersection of multiple marginalized…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to shed new light on the contextual embeddedness of intersectional entrepreneurs, i.e. entrepreneurs situated at the intersection of multiple marginalized diversity attributes, beyond simply business strategies and decisions. Taking an emic perspective on everyday practices as intersectional entrepreneurs, it uncovers neglected dimensions of the contextuality of intersectional discriminations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study presents qualitative data analysis results of in-depth narrative interviews with six intersectional entrepreneurs, all LGBTIQA* entrepreneurs with further diversity dimensions. It provides an emic view of intersectional entrepreneurs, in their everyday lives and the contexts, in which they develop their businesses.
Findings
Intersectional entrepreneurs face different burdens induced by social structures along the entrepreneurial process. While access to the niche market is more difficult and they lack community support, their realization of intersectional discrimination is crucial for the development of business strategies. Simultaneously, intersectional entrepreneurs use their specific diversity attributes to develop their business, yet this proximity of their identity and the business contents has severe consequences for their mental state. Intersectional entrepreneurs adjust to the balance of opportunity and vulnerability.
Originality/value
As intersectional entrepreneurs are barred from conventional institutional support and also have limited access to resources from their respective social networks, there is an urgency to provide specific support for such entrepreneurs.
Details