Although organizational innovation with information technology is often carefully considered, bandwagon phenomena indicate that much innovative behavior may nevertheless be of the “me too” variety. In this essay, we explore such differences in innovative behavior. Adopting a perspective that is both institutional and cognitive, we introduce the notion of mindful innovation with IT. A mindful firm attends to an IT innovation with reasoning 1 Jane Webster was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Swanson & Ramiller/Innovating Mindfully with IT RESEARCH ARTICLE grounded in its own organizational facts and specifics. We contrast this with mindless innovation, where a firm’s actions betray an absence of such attention and grounding. We develop these concepts by drawing on the recent appearance of the idea of mindfulness in the organizational literature, and adapting it for application to IT innovation. We then bring mindfulness and mindlessness together in a larger theoretical synthesis in which these apparent opposites are seen to interact in ways that help to shape the overall landscape of opportunity for organizational innovation with IT. We conclude by suggesting several promising new research directions.

Abstract This article challenges the tendency of the information systems literature to subsume IT innovation in processes of organizational change, either with the role of ``enabler' ' of organizational objectives, or as an instrument appropriated by situated organizational actors. Using institutionalist theory, the relationship between information systems development and organizational transformation is studied as the interaction of two institutionalization processes: the increasing momentum and legitimation of IT innovation; and the organizational efforts for the substitution of established structures and activities with new ones which often do not command adequate legitimacy. Such analysis suggests that IT innovation in organizations is to a large extent sustainable by its own institutional forces, irrespective of contribution to the processes of organizational change. This perspective is demonstrated with the case study of the Mexican oil company, Pemex, where IT projects have played a large part in its transformation from a stateowned to private enterprise.

Based on ethnographic studies of two business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce (EC) marketplaces and a review of interorganizational relationship literature, this paper proposes a model explaining why organizations form alliances to create and why organizations join B2B EC marketplaces. This paper proposes viewing B2B EC marketplaces as a public good. The paper uses public good theory as an umbrella integrating transaction cost and resource dependency perspectives with Oliver’s [1990] determinants of interorganizational relationships.

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What will it take for social informatics to transition from a thriving social movement to become an institutionalized approach to the study of computing? The premise of social informatics is that information and communications technologies (ICT) are both socio-technical and thus socially-shaped. The commonsensical nature of this premise belies the difficulties faced by scholars who have pursued this line of thinking to engage others in the findings and constructs that reflect a socio-technical view of ICT. In this essay we frame social informatics as a social movement. We make the case that, as a social movement, social informatics has the potential to institutionalize as one of the established perspectives from which to study computing. To do this, however, requires attention to developing the institutional structures needed to maintain long term viability. This includes: (1) Increasing the attention to developing and sharing analytic models and theory-building as a means of supporting the research tool kits of adherents and others. (2) Making clear that there is a distributed and active leadership via visible schools, programs and centers of vibrant social informatics work. (3) Engaging new scholars in conducting this work, (4) Connecting and contrasting the findings and theories of other perspectives with those of social informatics and (5) Finding support for conducting social informatics research and vehicles for its

One would think that the enactment of the HIPAA, with its mandates on data security and privacy, would have brought a major shift in the security management practices within the US healthcare. Unfortunately, recent industry reports indicate low levels of regulatory compliance, thus raising security concerns for the US health IT infrastructure. This research develops a regulatory compliance model by drawing insights from the institutional theory literature to identify the key drivers influencing HIPAA compliance, both institutional and market forces (e.g., variability in state-level privacy laws comprehensiveness, interdependency between privacy and security rules, pressure from compliance leaders in the region, compliance officer‟s functional background, and the consumer concern for privacy). We validate the model using a national sample of acute-care hospitals and find partial support. The primary contribution of this research lies in the novel application of institutional theory to explain the variability in regulatory

Thomas Kuhn's analysis leaves organization science, a multidiscipline field, as "prescientific." This essay suggests the use of coevolutionary dynamics to integrate several disciplines into a single paradigm. It uses a concept, macro-leadership---a micro macroperspective---to show how CEOs can improve rent generating probabilities in their firms. Coevolutionary theory suggests a firm may best enhance its adaptation to a rapidly changing competitive context by speeding up its microcoevolutionary processes, that is, the coevolution of agents (whether process events, people, or units). The optimal mix, D, of human and social capital development is then discussed in the context of increasing distributed intelligence (DI) in firms as the basis of more adaptive rent generation---suggesting a new theory of the firm: ) , , ( D L K f Y = . While New Science advocates still see leadership as crucially important in a rapidly changing nonlinear world, many writers also see a disconnect between a vision-led command-and-control hierarchy and the kinds of human and social capital appreciation most apt to give rise to sustainable rents. A review of current multilevel leadership theories shows that charismatic visionary CEOs more often than not create conditions likely to inhibit the develop of DI. Alternatively, a strict constructionist discussion of complexity science shows that adaptive tension dynamics may be used to influence the rate of adaptive DI appreciation. The optimal region for rapidly improving adaptive fitness occurs "at the edge of chaos." This region---in which emergent self-organization occurs---exists between the 1st critical values of adaptive tension. Below the 1st value there is little change; above the 2nd value the system becomes chaotic and dysfunctional. Variou...

Through this essay we develop an argument for supporting the growth of I-Schools by building on the literature and concepts of institutions. We first argue that I-Schools, and the I-School movement, can be seen as engaging in a process of institutionalization. That is, they are seeking each and collectively to become self-sustaining and enduring social units. To support this argument we draw on the literatures regarding institutions and institutionalization. We do so to help clarify what those involved in the I-School movement might need to do to encourage the process of I-Schools becoming become enduring and self-replicating forms of organization in the contemporary university milieu. The literature on institutions and institutionalizing is vast, active, and multi-threaded. In this essay we draw from, but do not summarize or extend this work. We draw on concepts from institutional theory to frame our thesis: what can those involved in I-Schools do to encourage the growth and legitimization of these scholarly institutions? On becoming an institution An institution is a representation of a social order or pattern, continually reproduced, which owes its continued existence to relatively self-activating or automatic social processes (Scott, 1994a,

This paper proposes a survey of the recent theoretical literature concerning the analysis of the capabilities of firms and organizational learning. In a first part we examine the contributions of three approaches: the strategic management literature, the theories of organizational learning in the field of organization theory, and the evolutionary theory. In a second part we consider some major issues and open questions around four themes: the implications of analyses focused on knowledge instead of information; the meaning of organizational learning and capabilities; the problems of classification of capabilities and of definition of core capabilities; we shall then propose a few overtures on what we deem essential in order to further the comprehension of these problems: i.e. the taking into account of political and institutional dimensions of individual and collective learning process. This paper has been produced within the DYNACOM research project, funded by Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) Area 1.1, under the Fourth Framework Programme, European Commission (Contract n. SOE1 – CT97-1078). Benjamin Coriat and Giovanni Dosi have helped us to improve and focus the final draft of our research. 1

1.1.1 The industry level.....................................................................................................................4