More from Desautels Research

Manufacturer’s 1-Up from Used Games: Insights from the Secondhand Market for Video Games

Authors: A. Kim, R.L. Saha, and Warut Khern-am-nuai

Publication: Information Systems Research, ForthcomingAbstract:

2020 SSHRC Insight Grants awarded

When Paying for Reviews Pays Off: The Case of Performance-Contingent Monetary Rewards

Authors: Y. Yu, Warut Khern-am-nuai and Alain PinsonneaultPublication: MIS Quarterly, ForthcomingAbstract:

In Sickness and in Debt: The COVID-19 Impact on Sovereign Credit Risk?

Authors: Patrick Augustin, V. Sokolovski, M.G. Subrahmanyam, and D. Tomio

Publication: Journal of Financial Economics, ForthcomingAbstract:

Scouting and Schmoozing: A Gender Difference in Networking During Job Search

Authors: Elena Obukhova and A.M. KleinbaumPublication: Academy of Management Discoveries, ForthcomingAbstract:

Learning Through Crowdfunding

Authors: G. Chemla and Katrin TinnPublication: Management Science, Volume 66, Issue 5, May 2020, Pages 1783-1801.Abstract:

The impact of an augmented reality game on local businesses: a study of Pokémon go on restaurants

Authors: V. Pamuru, Warut Khern-am-nuai, K. N. Kannan

Publication: Information Systems Research, ForthcomingAbstract:

The upside of financial fragility

In two recent studies, Professor David Schumacher charts the rise of large asset managers and examines their effect on financial market stability.

Professor Hewlin receives prestigious award nomination for paper on authenticity in the workplace

Congratulations to Professor Patricia Hewlin, Associate Professor in Organizational Behavior, for being selected as a finalist for the 2020 Academy of Management Annals Best Paper Award.

A Seat at the Table and a Room of Their Own: Interconnected processes of social media use at the intersection of gender and occupation

Author: Emmanuelle VaastPublication: Organization Studies, ForthcomingAbstract:

Inventory in Times of War

Authors: A. Jola-Sanchez, A. Pedraza Martinez and Juan Camilo SerpaPublication: Management Science, ForthcomingAbstract:

We study how armed conflicts affect inventory across firms’ production facilities. We track 38,916 production facilities—including plantations, livestock farms, and factories—in war-torn Colombian regions; we also collect the data of 5,138 attacks performed by the two rebel groups involved in Colombia’s civil war. To obtain exogenous variation in the conflict intensity, we use a difference-in-differences model that hinges on the peace process between the government and one of the guerrilla groups. We find that when the conflict intensity increases by one order of magnitude, inventory decreases by up to 10.38%. Firms, however, barely reduce finished inventory during war; they mainly reduce raw and work-in-process inventory. To offset this inventory reduction, firms increase their cash holdings—that is, they shift their working capital from physical inventory to liquid assets. The location of the facility moderates the effect of war: when a facility is close to a distribution center—hence, inventory travels short distances—the firm responds to violence by aggressively reducing inventory; when a facility is far from a distribution center, the firm reacts less aggressively to war.

Theorizing Process Dynamics with Directed Graphs: A Diachronic Analysis of Digital Trace Data

Authors: B. Pentland, Emmanuelle Vaast and J. Ryan WolfPublication: MIS Quarterly, ForthcomingAbstract:

The growing availability of digital trace data has generated unprecedented opportunities for analyzing, explaining, and predicting the dynamics of process change. While research on process organization studies theorizes about process and change, and research on process mining rigorously measures and models business processes, there has so far been limited research that measures and theorizes about process dynamics. This gap represents an opportunity for new Information Systems (IS) research. This research note lays the foundation for such an endeavor by demonstrating the use of process mining for diachronic analysis of process dynamics. We detail the definitions, assumptions, and mechanics of an approach that is based on representing processes as weighted, directed graphs. Using this representation, we offer a precise definition of process dynamics that focuses attention on describing and measuring changes in process structure over time. We analyze process structure over two years at four dermatology clinics. Our analysis reveals process changes that were invisible to the medical staff in the clinics. This approach offers empirical insights that are relevant to many theoretical perspectives on process dynamics.

Unveiling the relevance of academic research: A practice-based view

Authors: M. Marabelli, and Emmanuelle VaastPublication: Information and Organization, Volume 30, Issue 3, September 2020, 100314Abstract:

Losing Touch: An Embodiment Perspective on Coordination in Robotic Surgery

Authors: A.V. Sergeeva, Samer Faraj, and M. HuysmanPublication: Organization Science, Volume 31, Issue 5, October 2020, Pages 1248-1271.Abstract:

Because new technologies allow new performances, mediations, representations, and information flows, they are often associated with changes in how coordination is achieved. Current coordination research emphasizes its situated and emergent nature, but seldom accounts for the role of embodied action. Building on a 25-month field study of the da Vinci robot, an endoscopic system for minimally invasive surgery, we bring to the fore the role of the body in how coordination was reconfigured in response to a change in technological mediation. Using the robot, surgeons experienced both an augmentation and a reduction of what they can do with their bodies in terms of haptic, visual, and auditory perception and manipulative dexterity. These bodily augmentations and reductions affected joint task performance and led to coordinative adaptations (e.g., spatial relocating, redistributing tasks, accommodating novel perceptual dependencies, and mounting novel responses) that, over time, resulted in reconfiguration of roles, including expanded occupational knowledge, emergence of new specializations, and shifts in status and boundaries. By emphasizing the importance of the body in coordination, this paper suggests that an embodiment perspective is important for explaining how and why coordination evolves following the introduction of a new technology.

When Digital Technologies Enable and Threaten Occupational Identity: The Delicate Balancing Act of Data Scientists

Authors: Emmanuelle Vaast and Alain PinsonneaultPublication: MIS Quarterly, ForthcomingAbstract:

Occupations are increasingly embedded with and affected by digital technologies. These technologies both enable and threaten occupational identity and create two important tensions: they make the persistence of an occupation possible while also potentially rendering it obsolete and they bring about both similarity and distinctiveness of an occupation with regard to other occupations. Based on the critical case study of an online community dedicated to data science, we investigate longitudinally how data scientists address the two tensions of occupational identity associated with digital technologies and reach transient syntheses in terms of “optimal distinctiveness” and “persistent extinction.” We propose that identity work associated with digital technologies follows a composite life-cycle and dialectical process. We explain that people constantly need to adjust and redefine their occupational identity (i.e., how they define who they are and what they do). We contribute to scholarship on digital technologies and identity work by illuminating how people deal in an ongoing manner with digital technologies that simultaneously enable and threaten their occupational identity.