2026-09-05
Laurie Giddens et al.
Consumers are seeking to reduce the impact of their consumption on social, environmental, and economic welfare by purchasing ethically sourced products, a practice known as ethical consumption. Digital technologies, in the form of ethical consumption apps (ECAs), have emerged as a means to facilitate ethical consumption practices, which are recognized as key to sustainability efforts. We conducted a qualitative study of ECA users to examine how digital technologies shape the processes through which sustainability information is interpreted and acted upon. Drawing on Archer’s theory of reflexivity, we develop a model of reflexive engagement with ECAs that explains how they mediate the process of internal self-talk and the movement from concern to project and practice. We find that ECAs engage an individual’s reflexivity process in three distinct ways: as a trusted other that socially anchors ethical concerns through socially visible cues, as an information provider that supports efficient, value-aligned decisions, and as a challenging other that prompts critical reflection on the feasibility and efficacy of ethical consumption. These pathways are associated with divergent outcomes, including social norming, decision alignment, and principled (in)action. Our findings extend reflexivity theory in information systems by illustrating how digital systems can participate in ethical deliberations and offer design insights for digital sustainability technologies that support heterogeneous forms of reflexivity and engagement.
2026-09-05
Ziqing Yuan et al.
The rapid evolution of mobile technology has transformed how businesses engage with consumers, making mobile apps a critical component of modern business strategies. Despite their potential benefits, the necessity and value of mobile apps for firms remain uncertain. This study aims to address this uncertainty by evaluating the impact of mobile app initiatives on firm market value. Drawing on the resource-based view with a market-driven perspective, we analyzed data from 761 public firms’ first mobile app releases between 2008 and 2017 using event study methodology. Our results show that, on average, these firms experienced a negative abnormal stock return on the day they released their first mobile app, and the short-term value creation process was highly contingent on the firm’s market position and IT capabilities. Additionally, the positive relationship between the number of active users and long-term abnormal returns suggests that mobile app adoption and engagement are crucial for sustained market value. This research contributes to IT valuation literature by integrating external and internal resource perspectives and underscores the challenges and potential of mobile app initiatives.
2026-09-05
Eric Monteiro et al.
Sustainability policies in the European Union (and elsewhere) are increasingly data driven: Data are collected and monitored for performance, with compliance subject to auditing by third-party entities. By analyzing the work practices, methods, and technologies used to produce sustainability reports, we make three contributions. Analytically, we contribute two interrelated processes of sustainability reporting: (1) embedding work , i.e., the integration of practices related the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), with a range of systems, routines, classification schemes, and digital tools that were not originally designed for CSRD compliance, and (2) interpretation work , i.e., the considerable and often underestimated effort required to address, deliberate, and navigate the ambiguities and uncertainties surrounding what regulatory compliance truly entails. Empirically, we contribute a rich account of how sustainability reporting is conducted from a practice-oriented perspective, drawing on our 18-month longitudinal investigation of a Scandinavian-based renewable energy company. We conclude by outlining future research avenues for digital sustainability.
2026-09-05
Katharina Kneissel et al.
Assistive digital technologies (ADTs) hold significant potential to advance the social dimension of digital sustainability by fostering the participation of individuals with accessibility constraints. However, prior research and high abandonment rates indicate that their impact is still limited. To achieve systemic, long-term impact that will sustain social sustainability, socially inclusive design knowledge must address an underlying design tension: While users require constraint-specific individualization, providers aim for impact-oriented generalization. If not addressed, this design tension can lead to ADTs that are either overly individualized, limiting broader applicability, or overly generalized, lacking personal relevance. To address this challenge, we followed a design science research approach, conducting four design cycles informed by 44 interviews with experts, users, and providers, as well as 55 real-world examples. This revealed six competing design requirements, forming three specific design tensions between users and providers. We propose six constraint-agnostic, tension-aware design principles for ADTs that include mechanisms to mitigate design tensions at the artifact level. Our work contributes to socially inclusive design knowledge regarding both design outcomes and the design process and offers important guidance for providers of ADTs.
2026-09-05
Anika Schroder et al.
The agri-food industry is one of the largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. However, making progress toward “greener pastures” requires actors to coordinate emissions reduction across interdependent resources and activities organized in value chains of sequential production and exchange. Therefore, moving forward produces frictions when large-scale sustainability goals introduce new coordination demands that exceed what existing industry configurations can readily support. While information systems (IS) research increasingly highlights the promise of digital sustainability as the use of digital resources to improve environmental, social, and economic welfare, existing literature offers limited explanation of how this can be achieved at the industry level. Drawing on an interpretive case study of the European agri-food industry, we examine how digital resources are orchestrated in response to frictions between sustainability demands and industry coordination. We identify three pathways of digital sustainability: Substitution makes distributed expertise recombinable in the development of low-carbon alternatives, optimization synchronizes action across interdependent resource-intensive activities, and redistribution makes verified sustainability contributions visible and available for downstream compensation. We theorize digital sustainability as pathways of orchestrated response through which digital resources are configured to recombine knowledge, synchronize activity, and reallocate value, stabilizing coordination architectures for sustainability at the industry level that operate alongside existing value chains.
2026-09-05
Julia Kotlarsky et al.
As digital technologies increasingly shape efforts to address the planet’s most pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges, information systems (IS) scholars are well positioned to advance a holistic sustainability agenda. This special issue editorial revisits the digital sustainability research landscape two years after the original call for papers, reviewing recent contributions in leading IS journals and finding that, despite growing interest, the literature has not evolved much thematically beyond an environmental focus. To build an integrative conceptualization of digital sustainability, we draw on two salient developments in the IS field: the rapid reconfiguration of IS through emerging technologies and the expanding scale and time horizon of sustainability challenges. These two developments define the two dimensions of the digital sustainability research framework —the ontological role played by digital technologies in relation to physical and social realities, and the temporal scope encompassed by the sustainability concern at hand—and give rise to four domains of digital sustainability research: optimizing for the present, adapting for the future, transforming the present, and reimagining the future. The framework is illustrated with examples from the healthcare, energy, and culture and heritage sectors. Then, the four papers of this special issue are situated within the four domains, exposing an important gap in the reimagining the future domain. The editorial concludes by suggesting that IS research needs to shift its focus from how digital technologies can make existing systems more sustainable towards how societies can collectively imagine and build futures that remain viable across generations.
2026-09-05
Nick Lüthi et al.
The use of digital goods can lead to manifold ethical issues, such as biased data processing, a lack of explainability for decisions, or missing accountability. These ethical issues have led to new regulations and increased pressure on firms. To ensure that digital goods meet corporate ethical guidelines, many firms have employed digital ethics governance. Although some of these efforts can be attributed to ethics bluewashing, firms have limited guidance on implementing digital governance across organizational levels. Thus, firms face substantial difficulties when translating ethical guidelines into operational practice. Existing research still lacks a solid understanding of the forms of digital ethics governance and how they impact the development of digital goods. We drew on the meta-ethical theory “CARE” (claims, affronts, responses, and equilibrium) and operationalized it to connect digital ethics governance forms to their operational-level effects. We collected evidence on organizational practices by interviewing strategic- and operational-level representatives from 11 firms. This allowed us to identify three forms of digital ethics governance and determine their specific characteristics and effects on the development of digital goods, further establishing that the relational mechanism of ethical discourse is critical for operationalizing ethical principles independent of the chosen governance form. We developed digital ethics governance theory (DEGT), which details an iterative organizational lifecycle on how firms can approach digital ethics governance and resolve dignity disequilibrium. Our work enhances research by theorizing organizational digital ethics practices; additionally, it offers practitioners a pathway to align digital ethics governance with their business objectives and ethical missions.
2026-09-05
Jingyi Sun
Despite much scholarly interest in team collaboration in virtual worlds, limited attention has been paid to the risks posed by member mobility cascades and to identifying key members who play a critical role in sustaining team resilience under such conditions. This study proposes that key members can be identified through their consistent interpersonal network-building preferences across social roles. Relational event models traced 6,114 individuals who joined or left 3,056 teams over three years on a large gaming platform. The results show that during inbound mobility cascades, where prior member attraction increases subsequent inbound mobility and reduces outbound mobility, collaboration-prone individuals tend to follow this trend because of their preference for integrating disconnected members and seeking recognition for prosocial contributions. Conversely, in outbound mobility cascades, where prior attrition triggers further outbound mobility and suppresses inbound mobility, arbitration-prone individuals tend to deviate from this trend because of their preference to pursue a vision of converging diverse resources and maintaining control over resource flows.
2026-07-03
Nan Zhang et al.
Livestreaming shopping, in which streamers showcase products in real time and viewers interact with peers through bullet comments, has transformed the online shopping experience. Despite its rapid growth, the industry faces persistently high product return rates driven by consumers’ unrealistic expectations, indicating inadequate product diagnosticity. Drawing on signaling theory, this research conceptualizes product demonstrations and bullet comments as two salient signals in the livestreaming shopping context and examines how they individually and interactively influence consumer perceptions of product diagnosticity. Across three randomized experiments, we found that product demonstrations positively affect product diagnosticity. The presence of bullet comments enhances perceived diagnosticity but weakens the positive impact of product demonstrations on diagnosticity. Similarly, the relevance of bullet comments improves diagnosticity while also attenuating the effect of product demonstrations. This study extends signaling theory to the livestreaming shopping domain by introducing a descriptive-demonstrative signaling framework. Moreover, it is the first to theorize bullet comments as signals and to propose a “signal cannibalization” effect arising from multiple, simultaneous signals. The findings offer practical implications for platform managers and streamers on how to strategically integrate product presentations and bullet comments to enhance the effectiveness of livestreaming commerce and the shopping experience of consumers.
2026-07-03
Gerald C. Kane et al.
2026-07-03
Stefan Morana et al.
Despite rapid progress in the field of deep learning, image labeling remains a core requirement for any organization looking to use machine learning for image recognition and generation to solve real-world business problems. Domain-specific training data often needs to be provided by human data contributors who are tasked with manually providing labels. Unfortunately, there is limited research on the design of image labeling systems that emphasize the perspective of data contributors, who are essential to achieving high-quality training data. Drawing on the theory of interactive media effects, we performed a comprehensive design science research project following the design explanatory design theory genre: We derived four design requirements for interactive image labeling systems that support interactivity-based improvements in label quality. We evaluated our proposed design in two evaluation episodes and demonstrated its positive impact on label quality in a real-world context with crowdworkers. In addition to these design requirements, we propose two theoretically grounded and empirically evaluated design principles for interactive image labeling systems, which address the issue of poorly designed data collection systems that do not support data contributors in delivering high-quality data. Notably, the study contributes to existing research by providing a solution to the critical challenge of collecting high-quality labels for artificial intelligence-based information systems. Furthermore, we illustrate how the genre of explanatory design theory can bridge the gap between design science research and empirical research. On this basis, our research offers a blueprint for embedding empirical findings into explanatory design theory to generate prescriptive knowledge.
2026-07-03
Kofi Arhin et al.
Online platforms used in human resources generate extensive trace data, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly rely on such data to support hiring tasks, including screening and scoring applicants. As the use of these systems in organizational decision environments has increased, concerns about fairness and equity have likewise intensified, raising questions about how algorithmic bias emerges and how it can be effectively addressed without undermining predictive performance. We propose a layered needs-affordances-features framework for the design of fair AI systems. The framework conceptualizes fairness interventions across two interrelated stages. In the discovery stage, theory is used to identify mechanisms of discrimination embedded in digital trace data. In the utilization stage, these insights are translated into targeted design interventions that seek to improve fairness while preserving accuracy. Applying this framework to a real-world dataset of 2,506 applicants’ interview responses and historical hiring decisions, we identify (1) language-based discrimination and (2) interview question structure as key mechanisms shaping algorithmic fairness. We further demonstrate that modifying linguistic features and increasing interview structure can reduce subgroup disparities, with the strongest fairness improvements observed when these interventions are jointly applied. This study contributes to the information systems literature by offering a theoretically grounded and empirically validated framework that can aid fairness-aware AI system design.
2026-07-03
Dicle Yagmur Ozdemir et al.
While prior work has examined the impact of several review and reviewer characteristics, the impact of review dissimilarity on economic outcomes has not been studied, nor is it well understood. Consumers may value dissimilar reviews when making decisions, as such reviews help reduce uncertainty. The effect of review dissimilarity on consumer choices also depends on review volume, a readily observable heuristic cue that can also affect the uncertainty regarding a product or service. We used a dataset from Yelp that provides reviews and related information for restaurants to investigate whether review dissimilarity impacts a restaurant’s economic outcomes, as measured by check-ins. We further examined whether the influence of review dissimilarity on restaurant check-ins changes with review volume. We found that review dissimilarity in the aggregate positively impacts restaurant check-ins. This impact decreases with review volume, which serves as an easily observable heuristic cue to the reader. When accounting for positive and negative dissimilar reviews separately, we found that both review dissimilarities had a positive impact on check-ins when review volume was low. As review volume increased, this impact diminished for both dissimilarities. Further, the impact of negative review dissimilarity on check-ins became negative at high levels of review volume. Our findings have useful implications for review sites (platforms), businesses, and contributors (reviewers).
2026-07-03
Yinan Yu et al.
Online review platforms use voting systems to identify and promote helpful reviews, aiming to alleviate information overload for potential consumers. Existing research has primarily focused on how review and reviewer characteristics affect review helpfulness but has largely overlooked the role of voters. Drawing on cognitive consistency theories, we propose that review voters cast votes in ways that align with their historical content-related activities, perceptions of review context, and social relationships with reviewers. Using a unique, fine-grained vote-level dataset, we find that voter-related factors have a more pronounced impact on review helpfulness than review or reviewer characteristics do. These findings suggest that past research examining antecedents of review helpfulness may have overestimated the effects of review and reviewer characteristics and that more attention to voters is warranted.
2026-07-03
Xinwei Wang et al.
The increasing complexity of websites poses significant challenges for engaging users and supporting effective information search. It is therefore essential for online businesses to organize and present rich content in ways that align with users’ cognitive styles, ensuring that their experiences are not compromised by website complexity. This research examines how individuals’ culturally grounded holistic and analytic cognitive styles influence their performance, perceptions, and satisfaction as website complexity increases along two dimensions: component complexity and coordinative complexity. Across three studies, we find that individuals with an analytic cognitive style perceive websites with high component complexity as more complex and take longer to locate target information than individuals with a holistic cognitive style. Conversely, individuals with a holistic cognitive style perceive websites with high coordinative complexity as more complex and require more time to find target information than analytic individuals. Moreover, cognitive style interacts with website complexity to shape user satisfaction, with perceived complexity mediating this effect. These findings are observed using both participants’ chronic cognitive styles, proxied by their country of origin, and experimentally activated cognitive styles via priming in bicultural participants. Overall, this research provides a robust theoretical foundation for website acculturation strategies and actionable insights for practitioners aiming to optimize website design for international audiences.
2026-07-03
Yiqun Zhang et al.
Collaborative content creation (co-creation) has become a prevalent strategy for driving innovation and monetization in the creator economy. Unlike open collaboration among participants with limited interaction, co-creation among socially connected creators introduces external social capital through peer networks while simultaneously reshaping internal social capital as shifts in content style transform follower relationships. This reallocation of social capital complicates value creation and capture, making the impact of co-creation on creator performance difficult to predict. Drawing on value co-creation and social capital theories, this study examines how co-creation affects creators’ content- and account-level performance. We conceptualize value creation as occurring across two stages—content production and consumption—and investigate the moderating roles of network embeddedness and collaborator diversity. Using data from BiliBili, a leading Chinese creator platform, we find that greater engagement in co-creation enhances content-level performance but reduces follower growth. Network embeddedness intensifies both effects, whereas collaborator diversity weakens them. These findings reveal the inherent value trade-offs within co-creation and highlight the need to balance content innovation with a distinct personal identity in creator strategies.
2026-05-05
Swanand J. Deodhar et al.
Prior work has advocated blockchain as a promising tool for organizations across sectors. However, given the ecosystem nature of the technology, blockchain’s benefits may not be fully realized unless it encompasses stakeholders in the focal organization’s value chain. As a result, examining how organizations orchestrate blockchain ecosystems is crucial for organizational research on blockchain. Our study addresses this question by drawing on the existing literature on ecosystem orchestration. For primary data, we relied on in-depth interviews with senior decision makers from blockchain technology vendors who were directly involved in these use cases. We inductively analyzed these data and developed visual maps of eight distinct blockchain ecosystems, spanning as many sectors. Our findings can be categorized into two groups. First, our visual maps revealed four distinct archetypes (collation, representation, replacement, and extension) of the intended benefits of blockchain ecosystems. These benefits, we argue, captured the business logic for the stakeholders to engage in a blockchain ecosystem. Our analysis further revealed a hierarchy between these artifacts. Interestingly, we found that organizations seek these intended benefits through multiple pathways. Second, our study elaborates key decisions in orchestrating blockchain ecosystems. These decisions pertain to (1) adding a stakeholder in the ecosystem, (2) designing the blockchain artifact acting as the digital hub of the ecosystem, and (3) formulating the governance rules between the stakeholders. Collectively, these insights advance the current theoretical and practical understanding of how blockchain ecosystems are orchestrated.
2026-05-05
Varun Grover et al.
This editorial essay examines how contemporary artificial intelligence is reshaping the intellectual terrain of behavioral Information Systems (IS) research. We argue that AI gives rise to three interrelated shifts that warrant systematic attention: an agentic shift, in which action, delegation, autonomy, and accountability are redistributed across human-AI ensembles; an epistemic shift, in which knowledge and judgment increasingly operate under conditions of opacity and probabilistic performance; and a cognitive shift, in which human thought is progressively recomposed through repeated interaction with systems that generate, frame, and refine thought-like outputs. We outline a research agenda comprising several research problems within each shift that IS researchers need to address. We also discuss broader implications of these shifts for theory, methods, and society. Taken together, these shifts challenge several assumptions that have long underpinned behavioral IS research, including treating technology as a bounded artifact, expecting intelligible causal pathways, and assuming the relative stability of the relationship between human cognition and its support by IS.
2026-05-05
Maylis Saigot et al.
The recent shift toward digital workplaces and online collaboration highlighted the important yet often overlooked implications of affective processes among digitally connected team members. To understand and empathize with one another, team members must often find a way to improve their “affective alignment”—that is, the degree to which each team member’s affective state is responsive to the affective states of others in the team. In this article, we propose a new theoretical framework: media affectivity, which posits that a medium’s affective channels, affective representations, and affective inflection enable and constrain the emergence of affective alignment in teams. Media affectivity helps to understand why teams may feel more or less connected when using different digital media, even when the communicated information is complete, accurate, and mutually understood. Media affectivity further challenges some of our existing assumptions about digital media, including what it means to be “co-located,” what it means to be “synchronous,” and what it means for media to be “embodied.” At a deeper level, media affectivity highlights the need to consider how digital media impact team members’ affective alignment, not only to explain cognition and decision-making but because affective alignment is itself a valuable outcome
2026-05-05
Hui Hao et al.
Digital labor platforms (DLPs) digitally connect human workers with consumers and arrange for payment in a type of work known as digital platform work. DLPs face challenges due to the complexity of control in digital platform work: controlling a large number of workers, high flexibility of work, and aggravated worker resistance. Accordingly, they execute algorithmic control, which, however, presents problematic scenarios, such as a lack of autonomy and fairness and low worker well-being. Problematizing control executed solely by DLPs and using only algorithms, we address the research question: How are workers in digital platform work controlled by (multiple) algorithmic and human controllers? We conducted a study of digital platform work in the context of one of the world’s largest app-based food delivery DLPs. We investigated different control mechanisms and how they were executed. Based on 28 interviews with workers and managers, our findings revealed three themes—controllers, control functions, and control means. Analyzing the themes, we developed a “partitioning model” for control in digital platform work. We theorize the distribution of control in digital platform work between multiple controllers (i.e., the DLP, third-party intermediaries, and customers) and between algorithmic and non-algorithmic control mechanisms. Control partitioning provides a novel theoretical perspective that brings the human back into the loop of control, in contrast to existing studies, which suggest that DLPs are the only controllers and algorithmic control is the exclusive control means. Our study furthers the IS literature on DLPs and the control literature by highlighting and addressing the complexity of control in digital platform work and the problems associated with its algorithmic control.
2026-03-05
Hind Benbya et al.
Given its sociotechnical focus, information systems research has the potential to generate diverse forms of impact and advance society’s grand challenges. But producing research impact beyond academia remains a difficult endeavor. In this editorial, we discuss the multifaceted nature of IS research impact and offer a framework and guidelines for researchers to plan, deliver, measure, and communicate research impact across academia, business, and society, while considering the research context.
2026-03-05
Joschka Andreas Hüllmann et al.
Datafication technologies increasingly impact today’s workplaces, as employees’ behavioral data are collected and analyzed for organizational purposes. While datafication technologies can increase organizational efficiency, they come with the risk of employee surveillance and discrimination. As a result, their implementation is surrounded by controversy. Understanding the different perceptions and assumptions about these technologies from individuals with diverse functional roles is crucial to successfully implementing datafication technologies. Based on 43 interviews, we first investigated how individuals with different functional roles evaluate people analytics, as a manifestation of datafication technologies, using the well-known lens of affordances. Inconclusive results led us to explore further and investigate whether and how perceptions of datafication technologies, as well as affordance actualization, can be explained by data ideologies. Our findings from a critical realist analysis offer novel theoretical and empirical insights into the concept of data ideologies. Data ideologies offer a useful extension to affordance theory and help explain the relationship between varied stakeholders and datafication technologies along three mechanisms: moderation, confirmation, and modulation. The theorized mechanisms have implications for deploying datafication technologies in practice.
2026-01-02
Richard D. Johnson et al.
After more than 30 years of research into computer self-efficacy (CSE), the time has come to assess the progress made on this construct and whether we need to reconsider its conceptualization and nomological network. To do so, we used meta-analytic techniques to review 683 papers and aggregated results across 749 independent samples. Our results suggest that out of 30 variables suggested by Marakas et al. (1998) in their narrative review, only 7 were sufficiently examined to warrant inclusion in an empirical meta-analysis. At the same time, our analysis identifies 18 variables that had not been examined as part of CSE’s nomological network. Our research also indicates that relationships are robust and consistent across 11 potential categorical and continuous moderators, suggesting few moderators in a relationship with CSE. Evidence suggests that national culture and the setting where a study is conducted can moderate the relationship between CSE and such variables. Although these findings are consistent with current theory, much work remains if we wish to systematically test a theoretical understanding of how CSE is formed and influences performance. Our work confirms CSE’s continuing relevance in managing contemporary work environments and offers directions for future research.
2026-01-02
Bingqing Song et al.
Ties between users play a fundamental role in the operation of social commerce, allowing product information to diffuse from sellers to (indirectly connected) customers. However, social commerce ties are mainly formed based on customers’ interests in products, rendering them fragile. This study investigates the impacts of sellers’ promotional activities on the decay of ties in social commerce. Drawing on utility theory, we posit an inverted U-shaped relationship between the alignment of sellers’ promotions with customers’ interests and tie strength due to customers’ trade-off between surprise and fit in their consumption of product information. Moreover, we argue that the interest alignment effect is reinforced by multiple promotions (i.e., promotion count), flattening the nonlinearity of the inverted U-shaped impact and pushing the turning point to the right. We confirm these arguments via dyadic empirical analyses of a large Chinese social commerce website. The results inform social commerce practitioners of what is central to success and offer significant theoretical implications.
2026-01-02
Mohammad Soltani Delgosha et al.
The delegation of managerial functions such as job allocations, performance appraisals, and disciplining work behaviors to automated, intelligent algorithms has transformed various aspects of workplace dynamics. Despite the increasing prevalence of algorithmic management in today’s workplaces, its implications for work outcomes remain underspecified. Given the contextual novelty of this research, we adopted a mixed methods approach to theorize an algorithmic management resource model and investigate its configural relationships with crowdworkers’ engagement and burnout. This was achieved by analyzing online crowdworker community narratives and subsequently developing nuanced insights into the resources that algorithmic management offers or impedes. In Phase 1, drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory tenets, we utilized computational text analysis to explore resource gains and losses associated with algorithmic management. Then, using configurational analysis over two studies ( N = 322), we identified and empirically examined the interrelationships among resource passageways and work outcomes, specifically engagement and burnout. Our results support a theoretical understanding of the algorithmic management resource model and shed greater light on several configurations of algorithmic resource passageways, sufficiently explaining crowdworkers’ engagement and burnout in distributed, dispatched work settings such as online labor platforms.
2026-01-02
Karen Stendal et al.
While technology can magnify existing inequalities by excluding marginalized groups in society, paradoxically, it can also serve as a means for them to move from isolation to inclusion. In this paper, we report a study illustrating how individuals belonging to one marginalized group—people with lifelong disabilities (PWLD)—used technology to navigate this path. Our study was part of an initiative by the Norwegian government exploring how PWLD can attain social inclusion (SI) through the use of virtual worlds (VW), specifically Second Life. Using a conceptualization of SI specific to PWLD, which consists of two interrelated domains—interpersonal relations and community participation—we trace how the actualization of affordances in VW enabled PWLD to achieve SI. This outcome was built upon the realization of five interrelated affordances: communicability, mobility, personalizability, engageability, and self-actualizability. Based on these insights, we demonstrate the role of VW affordances in achieving SI and propose a model titled the affordance-based pathway model of social inclusion. We contribute to the discourse on the theory of affordances by extending the role of facilitating conditions. Specifically, the outcomes achieved by the actualization of certain affordances can serve as facilitating conditions that support the perception and eventual actualization of other affordances.
2026-01-02
Kai Li et al.
As search engines are leading revenue growth in online marketing, search marketing has become a popular area of academic research. Although search engine advertising has interested researchers for decades and much has been learned, one thing that puzzles scholars is why search engine optimization companies are tolerated rather than excluded from the market, even though they capture a significant share of the advertising market. In this paper, we shed light on this phenomenon and establish an analytical model based on organic search quality. Through analysis of the model, we were able to draw several intriguing conclusions. First, there is no strictly positive correlation between advertisers’ willingness to pay and the click price of paid search marketing. In other words, the click price may decrease as advertisers’ willingness to pay increases. Secondly, improving the effectiveness of a search engine has the potential to attract more searchers, but it may also result in a decline in the search engine’s profits. Finally, a search engine may achieve higher profits by allowing search engine optimization firms to remain in the market rather than driving them out. We discuss our contribution to search engine marketing and provide implications for search engines, search engine optimization firms, and advertisers.