[AISWorld] SECOND CALL: ECIS 2016 CFP for Track on Information Systems and Positive Organizational Scholarship

[Sutirtha Chatterjee]

*Apologies for cross posting*
Deadline: November 27, 2015

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

Details regarding ECIS 2016 can be found at http://www.ecis2016.eu/en/

Sincerely,

The Track Chairs



*Suranjan Chakraborty, Towson UniversitySutirtha Chatterjee, University of
Nevada, Las VegasKevin Fulk, Tarleton State University*