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The objective of this paper is to document and analyze the organizational activities of faculty members using a personal information management (PIM) framework developed by Jacques (2016).

Interviews were carried out with seven faculty members, focusing on their personal information organization practices as they relate to their academic activities. These interviews took the form of a guided tour of informants' digital workspaces.

Analyses focused on PIM activities make it possible to identify the different strategies adopted by faculty members to organize their academic personal information. This qualitative approach highlights four activities involved in the organization of personal information: inclusion, exclusion, apprehension and implementation. It also reveals differences in the ability of faculty members to analyze their own practices. Finally, the relationship to time and memory of PIM practices is examined through the lens of the concepts of virtualization and actualization.

This research provides a more nuanced understanding of PIM practices, specifically of organizational activities, by considering the meaning of these practices for individuals as part of their daily lives. It aims to foster literacy by facilitating the interactions of individuals with their personal information through educational activities.

Informed learning can be enlivened through explicit and persistent attention to using information to learn during collaborative design activities. The resulting information experiences and accompanying information practices in the workplace, when combined with systems principles, can produce transferable individual and group (and, ultimately, organizational) capacity to advance knowledge in ever expanding professional contexts.

In development in North America since 2003, the Informed Systems Approach incorporates principles of systems thinking and informed learning though an inclusive, participatory design process that fosters information exchange, reflective dialogue, knowledge creation, and conceptual change in workplace organizations. It also furthers expression of collaborative information practices that enrich information experiences by simultaneously advancing both situated domain knowledge and transferable learning capacity. Integrated design activities support participants’ developing awareness of the conceptions of information experience and informed learning, in a cyclical and iterative fashion that promotes and sustains continuous learning.

A shared learning focus evolves through intentional use of information to learn, including collective reflection on information sources, collaborative practices, and systems functionalities, which further participants’ topical understandings and enrich their information experiences. In addition, an action-oriented intention and inclusive participatory disposition ensures improvements of real world situations.

Purpose – This research examines the nexus of two important phenomena: established information practices and the uptake of social media tools to facilitate or extend these practices. It aims to provide a conceptual account of how social media is embedded in the practices of the information sector.

Methodology – The research design is based on qualitative multiple case studies and grounded theory following Eisenhardt (1989). It uses an information practice as a unit of analysis and collects data as written and spoken descriptions of practice.

Findings – Existing knowledge and expertise in the use of social media is nascent and disparate and often available only as anecdote. As a result of this research, it is captured and conceptualized and a theoretical frame for social media use in information work emerges – a deeper understanding ensues.

Originality/value – This research uses a practice perspective to focus on the activity involved in social media adoption to support information work. In theorising across multiple descriptions of information practices, this research provides a steadying influence in information environments that may feel obligation to embrace the global phenomena of social media. Clarifying guidance for purposeful information work will benefit the information profession and advance its various practices.

Humans tend to rely on beliefs, assumptions and cognitive rules‐of‐thumb for making judgments and are biased against taking more uncertain alternatives. Such inertia has implications for client organizations' decision making about innovations, which are inherently more uncertain than conventional alternatives. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to furthering the understanding of barriers to overcoming inertia in client decision making in new‐build.

A descriptive behavioural decision‐making perspective is combined with an organizational information‐processing perspective. To identify and discuss individual and organizational barriers that potentially distort clients' decision making on innovation, the analysis addresses aggregated data from four studies. The analysis focuses on inferences and interpretations made by decision makers in Swedish client organizations, their information‐processing practices and the subsequent impacts on perceived meanings and judgments about industrialized multi‐storey, timber‐framed building innovations, which are perceived by Swedish clients as new and different building alternatives.

Cognitive and organizational barriers maintain status‐quo decisions. Clients are inclined to make biased judgments about industrialized‐building alternatives because non‐applicable cognitive rules‐of‐thumb, based on their experiences of conventional‐building alternatives, are used. Furthermore, client organizations' information‐processing practices do not allow different meanings to surface, interact and potentially suggest different conclusions, at odds with established beliefs.

The paper's conclusions highlight how inertia is sustained in client decision making in new‐build. They illustrate the limitations of a common engineering approach, i.e. supporting decision making about innovations by focusing on providing more information to the decision maker in order to reduce uncertainty, as well as managing multiple meanings by reductionism.

Given widespread digital transformations in all sorts of organizations, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the role of digital technologies in institutional change. In this essay, we characterize existing scholarship in terms of whether it emphasizes how digital technologies are either “triggers” or “carriers” of institutional change. As triggers, digital technologies serve as catalysts that afford novel structuring as they are enacted in practice. As carriers, digital technologies can shape those practices in ways that are consistent with the structuring of other fields. We propose a view of institutionally embedded affordances, where digital technologies are both triggers and carriers that afford institutional change. We conclude with a reflection on how digital technologies are implicated in the convergence of previously distinct industrial fields.

As traditional organizations using their websites for eCommerce transactions are increasing at an exponential rate, privacy concerns of users are also on the rise. To gain an insight into these concerns, existing policies and legislation, we conducted the research reported in this paper, in 2003. To augment the literature synthesis, a multiple case study analysis was conducted, based on six large organisations in Australia. Our research findings suggested that in the Australian context, an online privacy policy (OPP) on the website which complies with the Privacy Act, supported by few best practices are reasonably able to address online privacy concerns. However, these findings are restricted in time frame, indicative and relevant in the Australian context. Nevertheless, we hope to stimulate academic research enquiry and discussion forums through this research.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

To take full advantage of the unprecedented availability of information on networks and digital systems, professionals need to be comfortable finding information relevant to the tasks at hand. This study was conducted at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research to investigate scientists’ personal information management (PIM) practices.

A qualitative research approach was used. Critical incidents were collected to probe information about PIM activities. The PIM-related critical incidents were gathered through extended conversations in the form of semi-structured interviews.

Extended conversations revealed that scientists were aware of the importance of information organization and management. They collected and received information from various sources regarding their tasks and saved part of the information for future use. Scientists organized saved information into named folders using the categories of projects, clients and planning. The files were updated by regular deletion and cleaning. Different strategies were used to retrieve the information. These included searching by keywords and file names, and browsing using the folder structure. Scientists have used various PIM tools. They reported that time pressure, information overload and anxiety due to information fragmentation were major challenges in PIM.

This study recommends a compilation of guidelines to assist scientists in the efficient management of personal information. As there are only a few studies currently available in the literature on scientists’ PIM, this study makes a valuable contribution to the relevant professional literature.

This paper focuses on the links between information culture and the perception of the information overload on the example of higher education institutions in Estonia. The aim of this study is to understand how different types of information culture affect coping with information overload.

Two focus-group interviews with 14 participants and 17 semi-structured interviews with representatives of four HEIs were conducted. First, the questions on the values, norms and assumptions as well as information related practices were discussed to assess the dominant components of the information culture. Second, the perception of information overload was explored. Further, the strategies for coping with information overload were examined. Constant comparative analysis was used to analyse the interview data.

The results of the study suggest that the construct of information culture is valuable in understanding information environments and their relation to the perception of information overload. The participants representing the open information culture prefer informal information sharing and are more vulnerable to perceive information overload than the participants representing the integrated information culture. Organisational information management is the key to effective coping with information overload.

The current study sheds light on the perception of information overload in connection with information culture.