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Despite the constant stream of research investigating information technology (IT) business value, IT capabilities, and competitive advantage, researchers are calling for a more coherent understanding of the firm‐level impacts of IT, and how those firm‐level impacts can be measured. The purpose of this study is to investigate the multitude of organization‐level studies of the impact of IT.

Meta‐analysis of IS literature from 2001‐2009.

The findings are synthesized into an overarching framework of the impact of IT at the organization level. The framework categorizes measures of the impact of IT into productivity, profitability, and intangible benefits, while the antecedents of IT impact are categorized into IT resources, IT capabilities, IT/business alignment and external factors.

The research framework proposed provides a comprehensive snapshot of IS studies on organizational performance.

As social commerce migrates to the mobile platform, mobile social commerce (ms–commerce), an emerging way of conducting social commerce in the mobile environment, is gaining popularity among mobile users. Although impulse buying in social commerce has been the focus of scholars in recent years, individuals' impulse-buying behavior in ms–commerce has not been highlighted and therefore is worth investigating. This study addressed that gap by differentiating and monitoring the impacts that three key targets of social identification in ms–commerce exerted on impulse buying. Furthermore, previous studies had highlighted the importance of culture in impulse buying in other contexts, so the authors examined how the effects of the key identification targets differed across cultures, as a result of cultural diversity among the ms–commerce users. Finally, the authors drew upon the lens of information technology (IT) affordances to explore how different combinations of ms–commerce affordances influenced each target of identification.

This research first applied a qualitative methodology by using semi-structured interviews with 27 ms–commerce users to extract the relevant subdimensions of IT affordances in ms–commerce. Then, the authors tested their hypotheses with survey data collected from the United States and China.

The results clearly illustrate that three key targets of social identification had varying impacts on impulse buying in different cultural dimensions. In addition, nearly all of the proposed IT affordances in ms–commerce aided users in building multiple identifications, to various degrees.

This study extends social commerce research by examining the important role that social identification plays in impulse buying in the mobile environment. Moreover, unlike previous studies that mainly had focused on ordinary buying in social commerce across cultures, this study investigated the relative importance of the targets of social identification on impulse buying in different espoused cultural dimensions. Importantly, the authors used a technology affordance lens to also uncover the context-specific stimulators of separate identification targets, thus going beyond the existing body of knowledge that focused on general beliefs.