Communication, Digital Technology, and Organization CTO

Extended Submission Deadline: Friday, September 25, 2020

The Special Interest Group on the Adoption and Diffusion of Information Technology (SIG ADIT) is over 30 years old and will again host a pre-ICIS workshop for people interested in information technology adoption and diffusion (DIGIT). DIGIT will be held on Sunday December 13, 2020 as a virtual workshop.

For decades, IS research on adoption and diffusion has tracked and explained how individuals and organizations use technology. This has been a steady evolution from considering mandatory use contexts of IT within organizations (e.g., PC, ERP systems), to focusing on individual decisions to adopt and use technology in volitional contexts, to unpacking the complex situation of advice giving or recommender systems (Benbasat 2018). Yet, the beginning of 2020 has unveiled a new host of disruptions, including a global pandemic and powerful civil rights protests and political movements. These phenomena are still unfolding but IS is at the heart of many of our solutions to cope with these disruptions. Now, individuals, organizations, and whole ecosystems have been forced to innovatively use technology - from virtual meetings replacing in-person gatherings, to the rapid digitization of processes, to using smart devices to track individuals for contact tracing and disease prevention initiatives. These situations are ripe with individuals, organizations, and society using information technology in novel ways, and our understanding of them will likely benefit from the theoretical lenses used in adoption and diffusion research.

Like any extreme case, we believe there is a unique and expansive opportunity to discover important insights about IS innovation, adoption, use, and diffusion that may contribute back to our core body of knowledge. For example, the disruptions of the global pandemic have put pressures on the adoption, use, and diffusion of IS innovation different than we have seen before. It is a global phenomenon, affecting the wide breath of economies, politics, cultures, healthcare systems, etc., around the world, at nearly the same time. The activities of each industry, organization, and individual has likely been touched in complex and interesting ways, as new practices are adopted. Further, many of these practices had to be embraced nearly overnight as sweeping stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders were put into place. This has no doubt shifted the power between constituents (Markus 1983), generated new digital divides (Bussewitz & Olson, 2020; Ramsetty & Adams, 2020; Stewart, 2020), triggered nearly immediate changes in the utilization and benefits of IS investments (Gal et al. 2008; Yoo et al. 2010), and highlighted the importance of combined, real-time data sets in times of uncertainty (Brynjolfsson et al. 2016), as well as a plethora of other consequences to uncover.

The 2020 DIGIT workshop provides an opportunity for IS innovation researchers to come together and generate vibrant discussions and exchanges of ideas about disruptions and their impact in innovation, adoption, use, and diffusion of IS. While papers adhering to the disruption theme are encouraged, research in other IT adoption and diffusion research domains will also be considered. Potential topic areas include, but are not exclusive to:

• Individual and collective IS innovation behavior, such as adaptation, coping, improvisation, and resilience, in the presence of disruptions
• Multi-level studies considering the rippling effects of disruptions and their implications for IS adoption and diffusion
• Process models studying adoption, diffusion, and abandonment before and after a disruption
• New theorization of how disruptions matter in IS innovation theories at the individual, organizational, interorganizational, and society levels
• New qualitative, quantitative, and design-led methodological approaches to examine the dynamics of IS innovation and adoption, including the use of big trace datasets
• IS innovation adoption, diffusion, and abandonment in the presence of various forms of societal events or social influence

Instructions for Contributors

• Full research papers (fourteen single-spaced pages)
• Research-in-progress papers (seven single-spaced pages)

Instructions for Submissions
The extended deadline for submission of papers is Friday, September 25, 2020.

All papers must conform to the instructions given in the DIGIT 2020 submission template. They must be single-spaced and submitted in Microsoft Word format. Papers, both full research and research-in-progress submissions, should include an abstract. Page counts exclude the title page, references and appendices. The title page should include the paper title and the authors' names, affiliations, and e-mail addresses. The main body of the paper should have a title, but no author identification. Please use the DIGIT 2020 submission template, which can be found online at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JxlwW_22ia7Bg1Za3dS8YPcrVxbbkpn2/view?usp=sharing

All paper submissions should be submitted using the submission system at
https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/DIGIT2020

Questions regarding paper submissions can be sent to the program co-chairs: Jean-Grégoire Bernard (jean-gregoire.bernard@vuw.ac.nz) or Jennifer Claggett (claggejl@wfu.edu)

Instructions for Participation
The workshop date will be held on Sunday, December 13, 2020 as a virtual event.  At least one author must register and attend the workshop to present the paper if the work is accepted.  A minimal workshop fee will be charged to employed academics ($20 USD) to cover operating costs.  Registration is free of charge for postgraduate students.

Workshop Committee

For information on SIGADIT and the DIGIT workshop, see https://www.sigadit.net/digit or please contact the 2020 workshop committee:

Jean-Grégoire Bernard
2020 DIGIT Program Co-Chair
jean-gregoire.bernard@vuw.ac.nz
Wellington School of Business & Government
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand

2020 DIGIT Program Co-Chair
claggejl@wfu.edu
School of Business
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Christian Maier
2020 DIGIT Workshop Chair
christian.maier@uni-bamberg.de
Department of Information Systems and Services
University of Bamberg
Bamberg, Germany

Christy M. K. Cheung
2020 SIGADIT Chair
ccheung@hkbu.edu.hk
School of Business
Hong Kong Baptist University
Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

References

Benbasat, I. 2018. Who's the Boss? From History to the Future of Implementation, Adoption, Diffusion Research in IS/IT Focusing on Individuals, Keynote Presentation presented at the DIGIT, San Francisco, CA, December 2018.
Brynjolfsson, E., Geva, T., and Reichman, S. 2016. "Crowd-Squared: Amplifying the Predictive Power of Search Trend Data," MIS Quarterly (40:4), pp. 941-+.
Bussewitz, C., and Olson, A. 2020. "Gig Workers Face Shifting Roles, Competition in Pandemic," Associated Press, July 5. (https://apnews.com/ebc223c6d783c49feca6ffb27af6264b, accessed July 16, 2020)
Gal, U., Lyytinen, K., and Yoo, Y. 2008. "The Dynamics of IT Boundary Objects, Information Infrastructures, and Organisational Identities: The Introduction of 3D Modelling Technologies into the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industry," European Journal of Information Systems (17:3), pp. 290–304.
Markus, M. L. 1983. "Power, Politics, and MIS Implementations," Communications of the ACM (26:6).
Ramsetty, A., and Adams, C. 2020. "Impact of the Digital Divide in the Age of COVID-19," Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (in press, ocaa078).
Stewart, E. 2020. "The Pandemic Job Divide: Those Who Can Stay Safe at Home, and Those Who Can't," Vox.com, June 12. (https://www.vox.com/covid-19-coronavirus-economy-recession-stock-market/2020/6/12/21283820/, accessed July 16, 2020)
Yoo, Y., Henfridsson, O., and Lyytinen, K. 2010. "Research Commentary-The New Organizing Logic of Digital Innovation: An Agenda for Information Systems Research," Information Systems Research (21:4), pp. 724–735.

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Jean-Grégoire Bernard, PhD
Senior Lecturer
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
jean-gregoire.bernard@vuw.ac.nz
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