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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

The study is positioned at the crossroads of transformative social marketing and social innovation literature through the lens of participatory design (PD). This exploratory study aims to explore how social enterprises in India engage economically marginalized people in transformative social marketing and innovation for sustainable development through PD.

The study includes a case study with a matched pairs analysis approach. The data analysis reports three themes depicting the role of PD in different stages of the social innovation process (codiscovery, codesign and scaling-up), the challenges faced in the process and the outcomes of the PD process.

The authors propose that social enterprises can act as sustainable development catalysts for more inclusive sustainable development through their proactive and creative uses of PD. Still, PD also has limitations for addressing the challenges stemming from marginalized contexts, which requires effective social marketing strategies to overcome.

The study contributes to the emerging dialogue on PD with marginalized users and widens the scope of studies on transformative social marketing and innovation. The findings also provide practical insights for PD practitioners on how designers can learn from diverse PD practices in the context of economically marginalized people.

This study aims to examine how three types of information technology (IT) capability (supplier technological capability, customer technology-sensing capability and relatedness of IT infrastructure) facilitate knowledge acquisition by the customer when the supplier is dominant in the supplier-customer relationship.

The unit of analysis was project. The authors designed two different questionnaires that were responded by the project manager of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software supplier and the contact person of the customer organization in the same project, respectively. The two questionnaires were matched by means of project name. The final sample included a total of 136 projects. The authors used ordinary least squares to test the research hypotheses.

The authors found that supplier power advantage negatively influenced knowledge acquisition by the customer. The three types of IT capability did not have direct impacts on knowledge acquisition. The moderating effect of customer technology-sensing capability was not significant either. However, supplier technological capability and relatedness of IT infrastructure attenuated the negative effect of supplier power advantage on knowledge acquisition, indicating that both factors promoted knowledge acquisition.

Knowledge acquisition is important for the success of software implementation in the supplier-customer relationship. There is limited evidence in the literature on how to apply externally oriented IT capability to enhance knowledge management, improve knowledge acquisition and manage the business relationship that is typically dominated by the software supplier. The authors provide evidence to examine related issues.