This is a careful and insightful case study of how the Toyota Production System manages the paradox of efficiency and flexibility, which arises periodically in connection with model changeovers. The authors detail the functioning of four organizational mechanisms—metaroutines, partitioning, switching, and ambidexterity. However, of particular interest is the contextual reinforcing role of training and trust in administrative structures, procedures, and rules.

Electronic mail and the world-wide web may be particularly helpful to university faculty members as they implement these technologies into their teaching. However, effective implementation depends on a host of social, technical, and historical factors. This study creates and tests a "climate for computer-mediated communication technology implementation " survey. This quantitative climate measure correlates specific department-level policies and practices with implementation success. The implementation climate at a large state university based on 420 faculty members representing 58 different academic departments suggests that a climate for computer-mediated communication (CMC) technology implementation does exist at the department level within the university. In addition, the climate for CMC technology implementation accounts for variance in implementation success over and above more traditional implementation correlates measured in prior MIS research (i.e., individual expectations, task urgency, technical expertise). The research results demonstrate the applicability of MIS research findings to educational settings and quantitatively confirm the existence of a department-level climate for implementation.

Human resource information systems (HRIS) and technology trust

Interaction Value Analysis is a modeling methodology originally intended to illustrate how full connectivity between members of an organization affects the shape of the organization. Technology is already transforming workplaces into fully-connected networks by providing instant access, subject only to the availability of the communication participants, as well as perfect knowledge of the abilities and needs of other organization members. As IVA developed, it became clear that some elements of contingency theories developed to guide existing organizations were similar to the recommendations that IVA would give to a fully-connected organization. This meant that the phenomenon captured in the theory was not dependent on the absence or weakness of certain links between members. Lately, it has been possible to correlate financial performance of existing organizations to degree of adherence to IVA recommendations in certain types of organizations, namely those that display low uncertainty. This makes it interesting to seek a modified IVA formulation that relaxes the assumption of perfect knowledge. Doing so would allow IVA to demonstrate that it can replicate and hence simplify the explanation of phenomena noted in the Contingency Theory literature concerning organizations that face uncertainty in their environments.

Despite a voluminous literature and widespread belief in the inherent value of innovation, our understanding of the innovation construct remains rudimentary. Extant research on innovation spans across a variety of disciplines and levels of analysis. Yet, the divergence in core assumptions and methodologies across disciplines, coupled with few systematic efforts to integrate findings, have seriously hampered the crossfertilization of research ideas in the field of innovation. The motivation for this work stems from the fragmentary nature of innovation research and the need for a more holistic, ecumenical outlook on innovation. We believe that this paper takes a step toward overcoming disciplinary myopia and a further step toward synthesizing the diverse innovation literature. In this paper, we provide a synopsis of the innovation literature, with an emphasis on how innovation may potentially be reframed to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the construct. To this end, the paper is structured as follows. First, we outline various semantic definitions of innovation and their lexical variants. We then briefly discuss three confluent, but distinct terms (creativity, invention and organizational change) often mistakenly perceived to be synonymous with innovation. Next, we delineate the levels of analysis associated with innovation research and describe exemplary research emerging from these domains. Finally, we identify a number of promising research directions and propose an integrative cross-level model of innovation to energize future innovation research. 3