[AISWorld] CFP for track on Information Systems and Positive Organizational Scholarship - ECIS2016

[Chakraborty, Suranjan]

We are pleased to announce the CFP for the track on Information Systems and Positive Organizational Scholarship - ECIS2016. Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) has gained significant momentum in recent management and organizational research (Baker and Bulkley 2014; Cameron and McNaughtan 2014; Cameron et al. 2011; Cameron and Caza 2004; Caza and Caza 2008). POS focuses on "what is positive, flourishing, and life-giving in organizations" (Cameron and Caza 2004, p. 731) and can be understood as investigating ideas such as compassion, virtuousness, wisdom, humility, respect, vitality, relationship quality, employee personal growth, and empowering aspects of positive leadership in organizational contexts (Cameron et al 2003; Sonenshein et al. 2012; Stephens et al. 2013; Walumbwa et al. 2011). The "...explosion of interest" in issues related to POS (Karakas and Sarigollu 2013, p. 665) in management and organizational research is exemplified by its coverage in multiple leading journals and conferences such as Academy of Management Review, Organizational Dynamics, Journal of Business Ethics, and the 2010 Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

While there have been sporadic investigations of the roles of Information Technology (IT) within the POS research stream, this has remained, by and large, an unexplored area in Information Systems (IS) research. There is evidence that IT supports the practice and propagation of positive organizing in cases of temporal and spatial dispersion (Vallor 2010; Madianou 2013). For example, social media have often been used to express sorrow or compassion in natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake (Oh et al. 2010), and have been argued to be perfect conduits to display positive feelings and emotions (Veil et al. 2011). Further, IT-enabled communication helps in the practice and sustenance of positive feelings (such as empathy) in technology-mediated interactions, such as those in virtual teams (Akgün et al. 2015). Such observations suggest a salience of IT for POS issues. Given the recent blossoming of such research in related disciplines such as management and organizational theory, we contend that POS should also receive greater attention in IS research.

The aim of this track is to facilitate IS research on POS, and to draw the attention of the IS academic community to this promising research area. We intend to blend theoretical and empirical approaches in these two fields so as to enrich our IS discipline. For example, the concept of affordances provided by IT (Markus and Silver 2008; Strong et al. 2014) could be an appropriate theoretical lens to investigate the link between IT and core aspects of key POS phenomena, such as organizational compassion. Arguably, IT can develop organizational positivity through multiple affordances such as IT-enabled communicativeness. By capturing the ability of IT to facilitate organizational communication through inscribing symbols, encoding rules, and implementing communication structures (Pentland and Feldman 2007, Orlikowski and Yates 1994), this affordance likely affects positive organizing by facilitating human communication. One can similarly argue for other affordances identified by research that can engender and sustain positive organizations.

Another possible, appropriate line of research could examine IT's roles in POS phenomena using the lens of organizational ethics. This is an intuitive idea, particularly because an abiding theme on POS research is the concept of ethics or morality (e.g. Solomon 1998; Goetz et al. 2010; Cameron et al. 2004). For example, the concept of human flourishing in an IT-enabled world rests upon important notions propounded in Aristotle's virtue ethics (Bynum 2006). It should be noted that recent work on sociomateriality, which focuses on the consequences of entanglements of human and material agencies, has pointed to the need for future sociomaterial research to address issues of ethics (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014), and by extension, to POS.

These are but only two possible directions in this extremely promising research landscape. We contend that interest in the greater business literature on POS issues has created a critical mass in terms of an emerging research program, which the IS discipline can benefit from. Therefore, this is an appropriate time to nurture IS research in the area of POS. We hope this track will provide a starting point to stimulate IS researchers to engage more in the understanding of POS. All methodological approaches, including quantitative and qualitative approaches, as well as theoretical papers and essays are welcome. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
1. Individual humility in the networked world.
2. Practicing respect in virtual teams.
3. Technological challenges to, and opportunities for, fostering human flourishing.
4. Harnessing organizational wisdom using IT.
5. IT as a source of organizational vitality.
6. The influence of expressing care and concern using IT on quality of relationships with organizational stakeholders.
7. Building positive organizations using IT.
8. IT affordances' roles in positive leaders' empowerment of employees.
9. Does IT influence the generation and practice of organizational virtues?
10. Sociomaterial conceptions of ethical organizing.

The complete track description may also be found at http://www.ecis2016.eu/files/downloads/Tracks/T13.pdf

Suranjan Chakraborty, Towson University
Sutirtha Chatterjee, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Kevin Fulk, Tarleton State University


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Suranjan Chakraborty
Associate Professor
Graduate Program Director, AIT
YR424
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Towson University
Phone: 410-704-4769
E-mail: schakraborty at towson.edu<mailto:schakraborty at towson.edu>
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