Search results

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the significance of safeguards in digital ecosystems and their role in generating trust among participants. This paper argues that the right mix and number of safeguards are crucial for an ecosystem’s growth and success. It offers ecosystem orchestrators concrete guidelines for how to implement and monitor safeguards.

This research is based on both consulting experience and publicly available information on several digital ecosystems.

This research conceptualizes safeguards as precautionary mechanisms that mandate or promote desirable behavior in an effort to engender trust among ecosystem participants. Safeguards can take various forms, including passwords, escrow, user privacy controls, ratings and reviews and policies and contracts. Striking the right balance of safeguards – neither too few nor too many – is crucial for ecosystem orchestrators. This paper identifies the factors that determine the optimal mix of safeguards, including the power asymmetry between sellers and buyers, the sophistication of participants, the nature of transactions, the cost of negative outcomes and the cost-benefit tradeoff.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to illuminate the relationship between safeguards and trust in the context of digital ecosystem. It is also one of the few attempts to provide managerial guidance for ecosystem designers trying to structure their platform for trust.

In this chapter, the authors weave together a set of ideas that lead us closer to a more general institutional theory – one that embraces multiple levels of analysis, including the micro-level. The authors build on the roots of micro-institutional thought – including phenomenological and ethnomethodological underpinnings – as well as very active, social-psychological research areas that address key mechanisms in institutionalization. Among these, the authors discuss the important roles of legitimacy, trust, social influence, and routines. There is great promise for micro-institutional inquiry to make an integral contribution to institutional theory by bringing processes and people back in.

This double volume presents the state of the art in research on the microfoundations of institutions. In this introductory chapter, we develop an overview of where the emerging microfoundational agenda in institutional theory stands and in which direction it is moving. We discuss the questions of what microfoundations of institutions are, what the “micro” in microfoundations represents, why we use the plural form (microfoundations vs microfoundation), why microfoundations of institutions are needed, and how microfoundations can be studied. Specifically, we highlight that there are several traditions of microfoundational research, and we outline a cognitive, a communicative and a behavioral perspective. In addition, we explain that scholars tend to think of microfoundations in terms of an agency, levels, or mechanisms argument. We delineate key challenges and opportunities for future research and explain why we believe that the debate on microfoundations will become a defining element in the further development of institutional theory.

Although scholars increasingly use institutional logics to explain macro-level phenomena, we still know little about the micro-level psychological mechanisms by which institutional logics shape individual action. In this paper, we propose that individuals internalize institutional logics as an associative network of schemas that shapes individual actions through a process we call institutional frame switching. Specifically, we conduct two novel experiments that demonstrate how one particularly important schema associated with institutional logics – the implicit theory – can drive individual action. This work further develops the psychological underpinnings of the institutional logics perspective by connecting macro-level cultural understandings with micro-level situational behavior.

Organizational legitimacy is a central concept in institutional theory and in the more recent stream of communicative institutionalism. Within this scholarship, there exists an elaborated understanding of how macro-level actors, such as news media, influence individual judgments at the micro-level through a top-down communication process. However, little is known about the upward process by which individual propriety judgments influence validity judgments of news media at the macro-level. In this paper, we propose that this upward process of the legitimacy loop is facilitated by the degree to which expressed propriety judgments by individuals create thematic broadness, which bridges stand-alone conversations. Through a study investigating a post-scandal phase in the financial sector, we show how propriety judgments in social media become pre-validated at the meso-level prior to their validation by news media at the macro-level. The presented theoretical framework and empirical insights based on time-series regression analysis provide new knowledge about the multilevel process of organizational legitimacy formation in a digital age and extend our understanding of how a consensus is revealed at the meso-level.

The available literature suggest that the research on radio frequency identification (RFID)-related issues is largely concentrated on technical, organizational and implementation aspects, and comparatively lesser attention has been invested in understanding the use aspect of such library management systems. The purpose of this paper is to gain an understanding into the factors that influence the use of RFID systems in the library context by empirically testing the relevant constructs from the extended technology acceptance model (TAM).

A questionnaire-based survey approach was employed for collecting the relevant data from 197 respondents. The respondents were the active users of a RFID-based library system.

Findings from this study suggested that perceived usefulness and system quality positively influence the user attitude, and user attitude and system quality significantly influence the use of the RFID services. The paper concludes with outlining the salient points, limitations, and future research directions.

The paper evaluates the role of a set of innovation attributes on the acceptance of RFID integrated systems in libraries. Owing to the scant literature availability in empirical investigations on adoption of RFID systems in libraries, the findings from this paper add value to the existing literature in this field, and also to the literature on the TAM model, with the empirical findings being of use to the aspirant libraries looking toward integrating RFID enabled systems.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a quantitative model to help managers diagnose what dynamic capabilities a firm needs to address the demands of a rapidly changing environment.

A two-firm model based on the VRIO framework is built using quantitative techniques to assist top management in formulating and implementing strategies regarding when and how to develop a firm’s dynamic capabilities for achieving a competitive advantage. This model is developed by considering both internal and external competences, with the former measured by the features of the organizational capabilities of the focal firm and latter evaluated by comparing the relative utilities of the dynamic capabilities of the two competing firms.

Three resource allocation strategies are introduced to guide a firm to leverage dynamic capability that generates strong organizational performance. The first two strategies are, respectively, synergy oriented, focussing on acquiring various knowledge or experiences of a capability, and uniqueness oriented, emphasizing the depth of knowledge and technology of the capabilities. The third one is a hybrid of the first two strategies.

The proposed model is useful to help top management determine how and when to renew, bundle, and leverage resources and capabilities in a dynamic environment. It enables decision makers to detect changes in the competitive environment and take corrective action in a timely and appropriate manner.