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Power Issues in Knowledge Management
Hamid Ekbia & Rob Kling -2003
The Internet and Unrefereed
Scholarly Publishing
Rob Kling-2003
Academic Rewards for
Scholarly Research Communication
via Electronic Publishing
Rob Kling and Lisa Spector-2002
The Internet and
the Velocity of Scholarly Journal
Publishing
Rob Kling and Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh-2002
Subsequently published as:
Lamb, R. & Kling, R. (2003) Reconceptualizing users as social
actors in information systems research, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 27(2), pp.
197-235. 2003 MISQ Best Paper Award.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., & Courtright, C. (2004). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A socio-technical approach. In S. Barab, R. Kling & J. H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 91-119). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kling, R. & Courtright, C. (2003). Group behavior and learning in electronic forums: A sociotechnical approach. The Information Society 19(3), 221-235.
A revised version of this paper has been published as:
Shachaf, P., & Hara, N. (2005). Team effectiveness in virtual environments: An ecological approach. In S. P. Ferris & S. Godar (Eds.), Teaching and learning with virtual teams (pp. 81-106). Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.
Critical Professional Education
about
Information and Communications
Technologies and Social Life
Rob Kling -2002
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R. (2002). Critical professional discourses about information and communications technologies and social life in the u.S. In K. Brunnstein & J. Berleur (Eds.), Human choice and computers: Issues of choice and quality of life in the information society. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., & Hara, N. (2004). Informatics and distributed learning, In A. DiStefano, K. Rudestam, R. Silverman, & S. Taira (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Distributed Learning (pp.225-227). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Subsequently published as:
Herring, S.C., Job-Sluder, K., Scheckler, R., and Barab, S. (2002). Searching for Safety Online: Managing "Trolling" in a Feminist Forum. The Information Society, 18 (5), 371-384.
A revised version of this paper has been published as:
Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2002). Communities of practice with and without Information Technology. Proceedings of the 65th annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 39, 338-349.
Subsequently published as
Kling, R., Spector, L., & McKim, G. (2002). Locally controlled scholarly publishing via the internet: The guild model. Journal of Electronic Publishing, 8(1).
Subsequently published as:
Herring, S. C. (2003a). Gender and power in online communication. In J. Holmes & M. Meyerhoff (Eds.), The handbook of language and gender (pp. 202-228). Oxford: Blackwell.
Full version of the article is in:
Kling, R., & Callahan, E. (2003). Electronic journals, the internet, and scholarly communication. In B. Cronin & D. Shaw (Eds.), Annual review of information science and technology (Vol. 37, pp. 127-177). Medford, NJ: InformationToday, Inc.
The Remarkable Transformation of E-Biomed
into PubMed Central
Rob Kling, Joanna Fortuna and Adam King-2001
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., McKim, G., & King, A. (2003). A bit more to IT: Scholarly communication forums as socio-technical interaction networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 47-67.
Subsequently published as:
Meyer, E. T. (2000). Information Inequality and UCITA. Proceedings of
the 2000 American Society for Information Science Annual Meeting.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R. (2001). The internet and the strategic reconfiguration of libraries. Library Administration and Management, 15(3), 16-23.
Subsequently published as:
Sawhney, H. and Lee, S. (2005). Arenas of innovation: Understanding new configurational potentialities of communication technologies. Media, Culture & Society, 27(3), 391-414.
A revised (and shorter) version has been published in two places:
Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2000). Students' distress with a web-based distance education course. Information, Communication and Society, 3(4), 557-579.
Hara, N., & Kling, R. (2002). Students' Distress with a Web-based Distance Education Course: An Ethnographic Study of Participants' Experiences. In W. H. Dutton & B. D. Loader. (Eds.). Digital academe: New media in higher education and learning (pp.62-84). Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., & McKim, G. (2000). Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), 1306-1320.
Subsequently published as:
Snyder, H. and Rosenbaum, H., How Public is the Web?: Robots, Access, and Scholarly Communications,
Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 35, 453-462.
Subsequently published as:
Travica, B. (1999). Organizational aspects of the virtual library: A survey of academic libraries. Library and Information Science Research, 21(2), 173-203.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., & Star, L. (1997). Human centered systems in the perspective of organizational and social informatics (chapter 5). In T. Huang & J. Flanigan (Eds.), Human centered systems, for the National Science Foundation.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R. (1997). The Internet for sociologists. Contemporary Sociology-a Journal of Reviews, 26(4), 434-444.
Subsequently published as
Covi, L., & Kling, R. (1998). Shift or drift? A closer look at university decision-making concerning the transition from paper to digital libraries. In M. Wolf, P. Ensor & M. A. Thomas (Eds.), Information imagineering: Meeting at the interface: ALA Press.
Subsequently published as:
Rosenbaum, H. (1996), "Structure and action: a new concept of the information use environment", Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 33,152-6.
Subsequently published as:
Kling, R., & Lamb, R. (1998). Morceaux de villes. Comment les visions utopiques structurent le pouvoir social dans l'espace physique et dans le cyberespace. In E. Eveno (Ed.), Utopies urbaines. Presses Universitaires du Mirail.
Subsequently published as:
Mostafa, J., Mukhopadhyay, S., Palakal, M., & Lam, W. (1997). A multilevel approach to intelligent information filtering: model, system, and evaluation. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 15(4), p.368-399.
CSI Working Paper No. 03-02
Power Issues in Knowledge Management
Hamid Ekbia & Rob Kling
Knowledge management was advanced in the early 1990’s as a new managerial reform suited to the rapidly changing and globally vast business environment. These reformers encouraged managers to treat as a critical source their employees’ knowledge, of which they themselves had minimally articulated and varying conceptions. The major common feature among these conceptions was their generally cognitive, epistemological, and often individualistic approach to the question of knowledge, which dispossesses them of other important issues, most notably “power.” Adopting a sociological approach in this paper, will reexamine issues of knowledge management, especially as they relate to power relationships inside and outside organizations. We apply a refined version of Foucault’s notion of a “regime of truth” to show the institutionally-specific processes, procedures, and mechanisms that are usually at work in the creation of statements about the social world that function as true. As examples, we distinguish three regimes of truth that, we argue, are at work in the functioning of publicly traded businesses in the U.S. — the financial reporting, analysts’ research, and business press regimes of truth. A brief look at knowledge-management literature will further manifest a fourth regime of scholarly research. The close examination of these multiple regimes will lead us to the overall conclusion that power relationships can systematically influence the statements about the social world that function as true. In the latter part of the paper, we will study the implications of this observation for the theory and practice of knowledge management.
From Users to Social Actors:
Reconceptualizing Socially Rich Interaction
Through Information and Communication Technology
Roberta Lamb and Rob Kling-2002
A concept of "the user" is fundamental to much of the research and practice of information systems design, development and evaluation. User-centered information studies have relied on individualistic cognitive models to carefully examine the criteria that influence people’s selections of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In many ways, these studies have improved our understanding of how a good information resource fits the people who use it. However, research approaches based on an individualistic “user” concept are limited.In this paper, we examine the theoretical constructs that shape this “user” concept and contrast these with alternative views that help to reconceptualize "the user" as a social actor. Despite pervasive ICT use, social actors are not primarily “users” of ICTs. Moreover, such socially thin and somewhat pejorative conceptualizations limit our understanding of information selection, manipulation, communication and exchange within complex social contexts. Using analyses from a recent study of online information service use, we develop an institutionalist concept of a social actor whose everyday interactions are infused with ICT use. We then encourage a shift from "the user" concept to a concept of the social actor in IS research. We suggest that such a shift will sharpen perceptions of how organizational contexts shape ICT-related practices, and at the same time will help researchers more accurately portray the complex and multiple roles that people fulfill while adopting, adapting and using information systems.
Leveling the playing field, or expanding
the bleachers?
Socio-Technical Interaction Networks and
arXiv.org
Eric T. Meyer and Rob Kling
It is has been argued that the use of electronic forums for scientific communication has numerous positive consequences, including being an important means for increasing the participation of scientists who are in peripheral locations, such as less research-intensive universities. ArXiv.org, the electronic research manuscript repository for physics and related fields, is examined to understand the level-playing field story told about this kind of online resource. A random sample of research manuscript postings from 1993 and 1999 were coded and analyzed. We did not find evidence that arXiv.org has served as a leveling influence in the fields of theoretical high-energy physics, astrophysics and mathematics. As an alternative to the standard view of arXiv.org as a level playing field, the authors present a socio-technical interaction network model that better explains the roles of online scientific publishing within the matrix of resources that support the conduct of research.
Ecological approach to virtual team effectiveness
Pnina Shachaf and Noriko Hara- 2002
This paper attempts to address the need for more research on virtual team effectiveness, and outlines an ecological theoretical framework. Prior empirical studies on virtual team effectiveness used frameworks of traditional team effectiveness and mainly followed Hackman's normative model (input-process-output). We propose an ecological approach for virtual team effectiveness that accounts for team boundaries management, technology use, and external environment, properties which were previously either non-existent or contextual. The ecological framework suggests that three components, external environment, internal environment, and boundary management, reciprocally interact with effectiveness. The significance of the proposed framework is the holistic perspective that takes into account the complexity of the external and internal environment of the team.
Critical Professional Discourses about Information
and Communications Technologies and Social Life
in U.S.
Rob Kling -2002
Looking back over the 1990s, it is easy to see the widespread troubles of many ventures that depended upon advanced IT applications, including business process reengineering projects, enterprise systems, knowledge management projects, online distance education courses, and famously -- some of the dot-com businesses of the 1990s. These "troubles" vary from substantial underperformance (ie. projects that were much more costly and/or produced much less social or business value than most of the participating IT professionals anticipated) and many outright failures. Many of these 'troubles" could have been avoided (or at least ameliorated) if the participating IT professionals had much more reliable and critical understanding of the relationships between IT configurations, socio-technical interventions, social behavior of other participants in different roles, and the dynamics of organizational and social change. Social Informatics is the name for the field that studies and theorizes this topic, and I will discuss it in more detail below. The key issue addressed in this paper is who will produce social informatics research for IT professionals, and where will they learn about important findings, theories, design approaches, etc.? The paper examines the record of computer science in the U.S. as a major contributor to the relevant research and teaching. It also examines the possibilities for new kinds of academic programs -- sometimes called “information schools” and "IT Schools" -- that are being developed to expand beyond the self-imposed boundaries of computer science and to integrate some organizational and social research as sites for social informatics.
Formal and Informal Learning: