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Service alignment between health service provider and patient is changing. Instead of placing responsibilities into the hands of a provider, new forms of co-operation are emerging in which patients are regarded as a resource and a partner. In order to see this vision come to life, mechanisms that: first, support patient’s health decision making; and second, integrate matters of health into a wider ensemble that is health space; the overarching state of health-related affairs, are needed. In the following, these kinds of mechanisms are investigated and their applicability is discussed in relation to a national project. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The work is exploratory and conceptual, focussing more on people than on technology. In the work, findings related to a concept of a health navigator; an artefact of personal health decision support, are assembled into a framework that bases on key sociological theories. The empirical elements focus on observations made on applicability of the concept, and the underlying framework of citizen-centric electronic health services.

The authors argue that the discussed concept, when applied to personal health decision making according to the underlying framework, has a potential to change health service provisioning. In addition to stimulating new kind of co-operation between the health service provider and the citizen, the concept gives form to, somewhat idealized, notions of patient choice and empowerment.

The work described here is exploratory and forward-looking. Even though the concept and the framework are tested to a degree in a national project, more practice-oriented work is needed in terms of real-world applicability. It follows from this that the work is a conceptual elaboration on the future of personal health decision making.

The findings, including the discussed challenges and needs, stem from real-world observations; from the needs of citizens. As such, they indicate a direction into which the development of personal health records and health decision support aids should go.

This discussion paper focuses on a notion of information and communication technology (ICT) that is good, clean and fair that the authors call Slow Tech. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Slow Tech approach in order to explain how to create a suitable bridge between business ethics and computer ethics.

The paper’s approach is discursive. It provides a viewpoint. Its arguments are based in an examination of literature relevant to both business ethics and computer ethics. Justification is produced for the use of Slow Tech approach. A number of potential future research and application issues still to be investigated are also provided.

Slow Tech can be proposed, and used, as a bridging mechanism between companies’ strategies regarding computer ethics and business ethics. Three case studies illustrate the kind of challenges that companies have to tackle when trying to implement Slow Tech in concrete business context. Further study need to be undertaken to make progress on Slow Tech in applied, corporate settings.

ICT companies need to look for innovative, new approaches to producing, selling and recycling their services and products. A Slow Tech approach can provide such insights.

Today’s challenges to the production and use of good, clean, and fair ICT, both conceptual and concrete, can act as incentives for action: they can further applied research or encourage social activism. Encouraging the study, and the application, of Slow Tech provides a first step in the potential improvement of a society in which information technology is totally embedded.

The value of this paper in not only for academics and researchers, but also for practitioners: especially for personnel working in ICT companies and for those involved with designing, developing and applying codes of conduct at both European and globally.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how public policies may influence the way members of virtual communities linked with social movements perceive the legitimacy of their leaders and governance structures.

This paper is based on qualitative research (in‐depth interviews) with three Brazilian environmental education virtual communities. It adopts an interpretive approach, grounding the analysis in institutional theory.

The paper shows that a public policy of funding the studied communities has reinforced the legitimacy of some leaders and legitimated more centralised decision‐making structures. The influence of the funding has endured even after the end of the respective contracts.

Although the paper is limited to three virtual communities in a very specific context, its conclusions may inform other studies on the institutional instruments (sanctions mechanisms) governments may appropriate to influence the virtual interactions among members of social movements and civil society organisations and which impact their offline interactions as well.

The paper calls attention to the need to discuss public policies with stakeholders, especially to permit social movements and civil society organisations to have a say in policies that may affect their social structures.

The paper contributes to understanding how public policies impact interactions in virtual environments and in a broader sense, and the relevance of considering the influence of institutions in online interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of internet filtering, and its impact on marginalized groups including non‐governmental organizations, female activists, ethnic, and religious minorities, the younger generation and the increase of the digital divide in Iran.

The paper raises two main questions: to what extent do information and communications technologies (ICTs) and in particular, the internet, promote freedom of speech, and gender equality in Iran? What is the impact of state censorship and ICT filtering on these activities? To answer these research questions, the author uses narratives of the internet's usage along with a comparison study with other Middle Eastern countries to analyze the impact of ICTs on citizen's freedom of expression.

The paper argues that restrictions imposed on ICT tools and services by the Government of Iran which has been claimed to protect country's national security against the corruption and immorality imposed by Western countries not only affect the expansion of ICTs negatively but also civil liberties – thus increasing the digital divide internally, regionally, as well as on a global scale.

Albeit this research is limited to the case study of Iran, the author believes that lessens learned from the Iran's case study can be applied to other Islamic countries and in particular countries located in the Middle East region.

ICT tools and services such as the internet and short message service are effective emancipatory media for citizens' participation and mobilization in democratic processes.

This paper contributes to the existing knowledge and understanding of the impact of ICTs on freedom and democracy.

Originating in the USA and Northern Europe, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) found on the internet its fertile environment. In more recent years, FOSS is becoming an increasingly important element in strategies for development and implementation of information and communication technologies also in developing countries. Mainstream research on FOSS has catered to the underlying principles or freedom, open organizational forms, and on its economical aspects. The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the actual consequences of FOSS, often left in the background.

The paper examines where FOSS principles' assumptions are likely to be more evident: in contexts of developing countries, which are geographically and organizationally far from the original environment of FOSS. A mixed methodology characterizes this work: quantitative and qualitative methods bring readers' attention to unusual empirical settings and downplayed organizational processes of information technology (IT) implementation and adoption.

The consequences of FOSS on IT implementation and actual use are ambivalent. It is argued that FOSS adoption does not happen spontaneously, neither by decree, and that the relevance of open technologies as public goods remains in the different role of local actual technical and organizational capabilities, and environment conditions.

Such a focus complements existing studies on the economical relevance of FOSS, which are not the focus of this paper.

Through an evaluation of the information technology (IT) adoption and diffusion models and the free and/or open source policy of the South African Government, the underlying assumption is that the developmental divide between those with and those without access to technology is purely technical. This paper aims to illustrate that if Free and/or Open Source Software is to be used as a building block to bridge the “digital divide” a more social and environmental perspective, which embraces the philosophy behind the software, needs to complement the technical perspective. The human environmental model is presented as a useful alternative which, if embraced, can inform more holistic information and communication technology (ICT) policies.

Through a review of diffusion of innovations models an alternative diffusion framework is described and applied to an interpretive open source case study in South Africa.

Contemporary diffusion and innovation models are narrowly focused on IT as a purely technological linear phenomenon. This perspective also underlies many ICT policies. A more socio‐technical adoption model can assist in providing a more holistic approach to ICT policy development.

The application of a new innovation model, the human environmental model, to ICT policy provides a holistic framework in which the complexity of the innovation process can be reflected in policy. Such an approach to ICT policy formulation will assist with broadening the perspective of policy makers from IT as a technical solution to IT as part of a socio‐technical solution and recognise the duality of the innovation process.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of information and communication technology (ICT) for promoting environmental sustainability in a changing society. Isolated studies exist, but few take a holistic view. Derived from a Marxian tradition, the authors propose Ecological World Systems Theory (WST) as a holistic framework to assess the environmental impact of ICT. The theory is adapted responding to theoretical critiques of absence of change, namely state-centrism and structuralism.

Theoretical study. Empirical examples derived from already published literature.

Ecological WST focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental degradation, sees technological development as a zero-sum game rather than cornucopia and holds that technology is often seen as a fetish in today ' s society. The findings are that popular discourses on ICT and sustainability are since the 1990s becoming increasingly cornucopian, while conditions in the ICT value chain are less cornucopian.

Theoretical contributions to Marxian critiques of ICT, with more environmental focus than earlier Marxian critiques, for example Fuchs’ work. Develop a theoretical framework for ICT and sustainability which could be compared with works of e.g. Hilty, Patrignani and Whitehouse. The work is mostly based on existing empirical studies, which is a limitation.

This theoretical framework implies that unequal environmental degradation in different parts of the world should be taken into account when assessing environmental impact, for example by means of LCA.

The framework brings together questions of environmental effects of ICT and global justice.

The authors apply a rarely discussed theoretical framework to ICT and environmental sustainability. By doing this the authors suggest how the discourses and the value chain of ICT is intrinsically tied to the world system.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the discourses on migrant acculturation and migrants’ mobile phone communication, in order to examine the inclusiveness of communication-acculturation research in the recent years.

The paper draws on from 102 qualitative interviews (48 Malayali, 26 Bangla, 17 Tamil and 11 Telugu) for a larger research project that investigated the role of mobile phones in migrant acculturation in Singapore. Respondents were selected using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling methods. The respondents had been in Singapore for varying amount of time: from one month to 19 years.

The analysis of the discourses on migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication revealed that labor migrants were excluded on the basis of their temporary status and apprehensions on work productivity. The mobile usage prohibitions that existed in work sites were hinged on similar discourses that stereotyped the labor migrants. The emancipatory metaphor that has been at the center of research on migrants’ mobile phone usage and acculturation needs to be replaced with a critical discourse perspective.

The data were originally collected for a research project that approached the phenomena of acculturation and mobile phone appropriation from a positivist perspective, whereas this paper analyzed the data to critically examine the discourses that supported the premise of the project itself. Due to this, the findings presented in this paper have limited scope for generalization.

The paper critiques the research trends in migrant acculturation and mobile phone communication and suggests a possible alternative that goes beyond the “transcendental teleology” that underpins discourse and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to create a conceptual framework, based on a structured literature review, to analyze the digital disability divide and help find solutions for it. A digital disability divide exists between people with impairments and those without impairments. Multiple studies have shown that people without impairments are less likely to own a computer or have an Internet connection than are people with impairments. However, the digital disability divide is seen in relation not only to access but also to accessibility and use. For people with impairments, new technological innovations offer solutions for everyday challenges, such as finding information, communicating with others and using electronic services.

For this study, 4,778 conference and journal publications were systematically analyzed.

A number of key findings emerged. This field is relatively new, and the literature is highly focused on the technological and social aspects of the digital disability divide, with technology and societal attributes being the core sub-attributes for a comprehensive model. The previous literature did not significantly study the consequences of the financial situation of individuals; rather, the predominant focus was on the have-nots and countries with low income potentials. Furthermore, motivation reveals a compelling case within the digital disability divide subset.

The review provides a consolidated view of past research on the general topic of the digital disability divide and the attributes that affect it.

Consumers’ lifestyle and financial decision-making affects their overall well-being. This paper aims to explore the factors that motivate consumers to pursue the goal of financial independence and retiring early (FIRE).

Qualitative netnography was used to analyze FIRE-related discussions by FIRE-specific online communities. The findings were triangulated using inputs from in-depth interviews with 13 financial advisors.

Using conservation of resources as a theoretical lens, two factors were found to be the primary motivators driving FIRE attitude and subsequent adoption of FIRE behavior – “escapism & freedom from the current workplace & life space” and “concern for physical & mental well-being.” Four factors were found to influence the adoption of FIRE attitude and behavior: “individual characteristics” [do-it-yourself (DIY) and proactive attitude, the capability of frugal living and ability to plan, track, and review], “well-paying job,” “support from spouse” and “resistance from social groups.”

Due to the nature of netnography, demographic details of the sample cannot be completely ascertained.

The findings suggest marketing strategies primarily to wealth managers for: shifting to need-based segmentation of FIRE participants, modifying offerings to involve co-creation and low-touch products, innovating pricing models, increasing distribution reach through digitization and increasing sales and lead generation through engagement.

This is one of the first studies to explore the factors driving the adoption of FIRE by general FIRE consumers and presents a conceptual model.