THE GENERATIVE EFFECT OF EXPERTISE AND ARTICULATION WORK IN ORGANIC ICT BASED COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE
Open Access
- Author:
- Hellmann, Daniel Evan
- Graduate Program:
- Information Sciences and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 15, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Carleen Frances Maitland, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Carleen Frances Maitland, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Andrea H Tapia, Committee Member
Frederico T Fonseca, Committee Member
Gary J Adler Jr., Outside Member - Keywords:
- ICT
Information and Communication Technologies
Collaboration
Institutions
Proto-institutions
Community Emergence
Digital Humanitarians
Generative Phenomena
Period of Genesis
Cyber Infrastructure - Abstract:
- Organic inter-organizational collaborations typical of an increasingly interconnected and dynamic world powered through information and communications technologies (ICTs) are rapidly becoming a common approach to coordinating society’s most productive social movements. However, the advent of more open and transparent digital interaction spaces has complicated theoretical approaches to studying how an ICT based interorganizational collaboration forms and evolves toward productive ends. This dissertation addresses the topic of organic interorganizational ICT based collaboration by focusing the lenses of institutional theory along with theories of work to better understand factors contributing to institutional emergence. Adopting the perspective that work phenomena occur within a digital space which can be studied as an institution, I seek to understand how organizations negotiate organic inter-organizational collaboration schemes. Specifically, what kinds of phenomena contribute to and persist as features of a recognizable emergent institution (a proto-institution)? To achieve these ends, the ICT based communications archive from an emergent institution of online humanitarian aid activists is analyzed using interpretive qualitative methods. The goal is to discern between two types organizational actors (referent organizations vs. domain stakeholders) and analyze the nature of their generative articulation work. Additionally, the role of stakeholder expertise is investigated to understand how expertise influences the evolution of problem centric collaboration at the domain level. The results of this research inform the description of a stratified system which describes how digital humanitarians coalesce around difficult data centric problems based upon their respective expertise.