MIS Quarterly

Work interruptions have made significant inroads into the knowledge workers' nonwork domain, in large part due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile devices that blur the work–nonwork boundaries by enabling work interruptions anywhere and at any time. We ...

Certification mechanisms are often employed to assess and signal difficult-to-observe management practices and foster improvement. In the U.S. healthcare sector, a certification mechanism called meaningful-use attestation was recently adopted as part of ...

Corporate involvement in open source software (OSS) communities has increased substantially in recent years. Often this takes the form of company employees devoting their time to contribute code to the efforts of projects in these communities. Ideology ...

In this article, an evolutionary argument to explain how people comprehend graphs is put forth. A theory of evolutionary fit, which argues for the correspondence between information presentation and evolutionarily adaptive brain structures, is proposed. ...

In this paper, we study the economic impact of piracy on the supply chain of information goods. When information goods are sold to consumers via a retailer, in certain situations, a moderate level of piracy seems to have a surprising positive impact on ...

The diffusion of new information technology (IT) requires the development of an ecosystem of hardware and software producers, users, and other firms. It is widely believed that venture capitalists (VCs) can play a role in the development of such ...

This paper compares two modes for outsourcing the development of information services projects: single-sourcing (where one vendor handles all outsourced activities) and multisourcing (where multiple vendors handle those activities). We assess the ...

Cognitive research suggests that understanding the semantics, or the meaning, of representations involves both ascension from concrete concepts denoting specific observations (that is, extension) to abstract concepts denoting a number of observations (...

This paper examines how (1) a crowdfunding campaign's prosociality (the production of a public versus private good), (2) the social network structure (embeddedness) among individuals advocating for the campaign on social media, and (3) the volume of ...

IT governance describes the decision rights and accountability framework used to ensure the alignment of IT-related activities with the organization's strategy and objectives. Conversely, IT consumerization refers to the process whereby the changing ...

Whatever answer one gives to the question "Is information technology changing the world?," the answer contains reasoning about causality. Causal reasoning is central to IS theorizing. This paper focuses on the concept of causal structure, defined by ...

As the nature of information systems (IS) has evolved from primarily standalone, to enterprise, and distributed applications, the need for a better understanding of collective IS use has become a research and practical necessity. In view of contributing ...

Most information systems (IS) research develops theory for explanation and prediction based on a variance logical structure that assumes one-way, time invariant causal relationships. This approach largely misses the opportunity to extend theory from ...

Modern online retailing practices provide consumers with new types of real-time information that can potentially increase demand. In particular, showing sales information to a customer can increase certainty about product quality, inducing consumers to ...