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The paper posits that the enforced work from home (WFH) arrangement due to Covid-19 provides a unique setting for the study of trust in changing contexts. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine to what extent Covid-19 WFH changed trust relationships among remote employees, their managers and organisations and how this has taken place.

The study used semi-structured interviews with employees and managers from different organisations across different sectors. Interviews were supported with image prompts as suggested by the storyboarding method, and took place between November 2020 and February 2021. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

The findings identified factors that contribute to trust disruption and factors that led to trust preservation within the changing workspace landscape enforced by WFH environment. Employees reported trust in their organisations, feeling as though their organisations proven resilient at the time of the crisis caused by the pandemic. Interestingly, managers reported trust in employees to remain productive but also anxieties due to the possible presence of others in the household.

The study identified factors that affect intra-organisational trust that have not been previously recognised, exposing tensions and challenges that may disrupt trust relations between managers and employees whilst also identifying evidence of trust preservation in the Covid-19 WFH context. The study has implications for workplace learning within the remote, WFH context, which are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors that enable work engagement to develop when asynchronous communication is used in virtual team (VT) projects.

Using a qualitative approach, a longitudinal study of an eight-month long VT project was carried out. Data collected included an extensive e-mail archive, project documentation, observation of team meetings and interviews with project members and leaders.

The findings show that VT leaders can actively promote work engagement through the effective use of resources along with appropriate practices that foster its development. They can also sustain and nourish work engagement throughout the different phases of the VT lifecycle project.

The study has examined work engagement in asynchronous mediated settings. Future work should involve studying the effect of synchronous communications on work engagement within VTs.

Organizations that are interested in promoting effective virtual work practices need to train VT managers on how to keep VT members engaged throughout the various phases of the VT project.

It is posited that developing work engagement is not a one-off practice, but instead, requires ongoing effort that should be evident and supported across the different phases of the VT lifecycle.

This paper forwards an important debate on work engagement in alternative, non-permanent, work settings.

As part of the growing necessity for inter-organisational and multi-disciplinary interaction to facilitate complex innovation in digital security, there needs to be greater engagement with regulation in the innovation process. This is particularly true in the case of security technologies that are embedded within wider systems and that are largely invisible to most of the users of that system. This paper aims to describe stakeholders’ perspectives on regulation in the digital security innovation process and evaluates the implications of these perspectives on anticipatory regulation in digital security.

Using a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured expert interviews and ethnographic participant observation, the study draws on the authors’ involvement in a formally organised programme of academia–industry–government collaboration called Digital Security by Design (DSbD).

The study highlights a relational dimension to establishing regulatory responsibilities that is enabled through interdisciplinary dialogue. The study contributes to understanding the multifaceted roles of regulation in digital security innovation across organisations and areas of expertise. It does so by identifying four themes in how regulation is perceived in the DSbD programme: ethical imperative, adding value, adoption lever and passive compliance.

Incorporating regulatory responsibilities through dialogue early in the innovation process, rather than only once a security technology’s deleterious effects are noticeable, which could make digital innovation and transformation safer and better regulated. It can also make regulation successfully adopted, rather than an exercise in damage control or an adversarial process between regulators and organisations.

This paper presents original empirical research on how regulation is considered by stakeholders in a novel multi-disciplinary digital security innovation process. It then uses these findings as a basis to evaluate the implications for establishing regulatory responsibilities for a class of security technologies that are embedded within wider systems and that are largely invisible to most of the users of those wider systems.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how different age groups construct and enact normality within social networking sites (SNS) and consequently extend theory in the area of online interactions.

The chosen research site was Facebook and research design involved focus groups across three different age groups: teenagers, young adults and the middle-aged. In total, there were 78 participants. The focus groups explored the metaphoric images of Facebook interactions. In doing so, participants were asked to draw a picture to represent their metaphor and following this, to position themselves and other characters within the picture. The drawings as well as the facilitators’ records provided the main data set for the study.

Connective and protective encounters were found to be used by different age groups when constructing and enacting normality on SNS. Further, it emerged that the interpretation and enactment of normality across the different age groups significantly varied. The metaphorical images have transpired as being a resourceful way of unpacking these differences.

The study relied on focus groups in order to capture metaphorical images across generations. It did not include interviews with individual participants to elicit the extent to which they agreed with the group metaphor or whether there was anything else they might have presented in the drawings. This could be on the agenda for future research.

The findings of the study suggest that SNS managers and designers should sympathise with the view that users of different ages engage in different ways with SNS and as a result, user interfaces should be customised according to the age of the user.

The study has implications for those interested in cross- and inter-generational research.

This is the first study in which the concept of normality has been adopted as a theoretical lens for understanding the interactions on SNS. Further, this work adds to the limited body of research on SNS use across different generations whilst it expands on the range of methodologies used within the information systems field.

The paper uses the dramaturgical perspective for conceptualising trust development within temporary virtual teams. The underlying assumption is that temporary teams do not have the luxury of time that, according to the traditional trust theories, enables familiarity among team members and promotes trust development. Yet, in these teams, trust needs to develop quickly and it is important that it lasts throughout the short duration of the project lifecycle. Using the metaphor of a theatre, a dramaturgical perspective on trust relationships is adopted and is used to present actors, co‐actors and audience as all playing a key role in scripting, staging and performing virtual plays. The dramaturgical perspective provides an illustrative approach for uncovering the interactions between key players. As it is argued, these interactions elicit the process of trust development within the temporary setting of virtual teams, constituting a type of trust relationship that is mutually negotiated and jointly constructed. This type of trust is called “situated” and emerges from the scripted, pre‐scripted, co‐scripted, re‐scripted and unscripted computer‐mediated interactions of virtual players. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

In this paper, the aim is to study virtual presence in travel blogs. The paper seeks to argue that though some conceptualization of virtual presence has been made in the literature, this only took account of one's presence among a community of “known” others. Increasingly, however, in blogging and other online communities, users do not necessarily know the “others” but they nevertheless interact with them and develop friendships and lasting relationships. This stresses the multidimensional character of the study; one which sees presence as the core topic by considering different perspectives to it.

An exploratory case study is conducted with a backpackers' blogging site, its members and audience; a setting that was considered suitable for finding answers to the research questions. The data are analysed qualitatively following a thematic analysis approach.

It was found that the invisible and unknown audience has an important role to play in backpackers' presence online. In particular, the study highlights the role played by the audience in shaping the blogging experience and the sense of presence that this experience develops.

The exploratory case study carries a number of limitations. The findings are based on: reflections and views shared with the researchers by the bloggers, through interviews; a discussion forum; and on an enacted audience through their reflections.

For practitioners, the study has implications in the areas of attracting and keeping audiences' interest and also in how to develop and support shared identity among independent travellers.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of online communities and virtual social networks in general by showing how virtual worlds reshape social space and social interactions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of “return to work” schemes by examining their perceived usefulness and their impact on beneficiaries' attempt to return to employment.

The evaluation, which was based on the TAM principles, incorporated feedback questionnaires, observations, focus groups, logbooks, documentation and informal interviews.

It was found that the provision of diverse schemes that were delivered both individually and collectively through multiple forms, allied with the opportunities to explore, interact and share experiences, concerns and ideas, have helped to empower participants and increase their opportunities for return to work.

Although the study was limited to those women who wanted to return to employment, it nevertheless found that there is an interconnected web of impacts which participants experience, in order to develop themselves and achieve a return to employment.

The study can be used by employers, government and industry associations to influence socially‐responsible and ethically aware practices that would advance women's employment in high‐tech jobs.

Using a mixture of data collection methods, the research not only captured women returners' experiences, but also enabled them to “speak for themselves”, ensuring a balance in the discussion and a justification of the interpretations.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.