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Over the past century, conscientiousness has become seen as the preeminent trait for predicting performance. This consensus is due in part to these employees' ability to work with traditional 20th-century technology. Such pairings balance the systematic nature of conscientious employees with the technology's need for user input and direction to perform tasks--resulting in a complementary match. However, the 21st century has seen the incorporation of intelligent machines (e.g., artificial intelligence, robots, and algorithms) into employees' jobs. Unlike traditional technology, these new machines are equipped with the capability to make decisions autonomously. Thus, their nature overlaps with the orderliness subdimension of conscientious employees--resulting in a non-complementary mismatch. This calls into question whether the consensus about conscientious employees' effectiveness with 20th-century technology applies to 21st-century jobs. Integrating complementarity and role theory, we refine this consensus. Across three studies using distinct samples (an experience sampling study, a field experiment, and an online experiment from working adults in Malaysia, Taiwan, and the United States), each focused on a different type of intelligent machine, we show not only that using intelligent machines has benefits and consequences, but, importantly, that conscientious (i.e., orderly) employees are less likely to benefit from working with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate how different discourses on frugal innovation are articulated, and how the dynamics between these different discourses have led to a certain dominant understanding of frugal innovation today. We analyse the dynamic interactions between three discourses on frugal innovation: (1) innovations for the poor, (2) grassroots innovations by the poor, and more recently (3) co-creating frugal innovations with the poor. We argue that this latter discourse is articulated as a hegemonic project as it is designed to accommodate demands from both business and poor communities. We draw on Laclau and Mouffe's concepts of 'chain of difference', 'empty signifier' and 'floating signifier' to explain the advent of the hegemonic discourse on co-creating innovations with the poor. We show how a floating signifier with radical potential, frugal innovation, has been hijacked and co-opted in a hegemonic project that has leveraged powerful ambiguous signifiers, with co-creation acting as an empty signifier. To clarify what is problematic in this hegemonic intervention, we expose how contemporary frugal innovation discourse contributes to a project of governing and exploiting rather than helping the poor, in ways that benefit formal economic actors while further worsening global inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene is built on complex technological systems that span the globe. Historians of science have done much to document the emergence of this "technosphere." Yet more interdisciplinary and regionally diverse approaches are needed to understand the complexity and unpredictability of the technosphere in our Anthropocene times. Rather than assuming a single planetary phenomenon, this essay emphasizes the widely varied lived experiences of the Anthropocene. Taking industrialized mining and oil drilling as examples of the technosphere, it examines three African localities of resource extraction—the Congolese Copperbelt, the South African Witwatersrand, and the Niger Delta in Nigeria—to ask why the environmental transformations of large-scale industry have caused violent protest in one locality but apparent acquiescence in others. The concept of the Anthropocene urges historians of science to connect questions about scientific knowledge and technology to issues of environmental change, economic organization, political power, social differentiation, and cultural imagination. This broad approach, the essay suggests, can prove extremely fruitful in explaining historical variations and contemporary responses to the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of smartphones has led to the creation of sport-related mobile applications in the areas of games, fitness, information, and events for sport consumers. The main purpose of this study was to examine why college students use sport-related mobile applications and what benefits they received from their usage. The study employed the Motivation Scale for Sport Online Consumption and the Technology Acceptance Model to understand this usage in more detail. Using a mixed-method approach, the study revealed that college students identified fanship, convenience, and information as primary motives for using their sport-related mobile applications. For college students who are sport fans, supporting their fanship through these applications represents an important aspect of their lifestyle. Sport managers and sport application developers will benefit from understanding users' intentions and motives as the market for sport-related applications continues to grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the threat posed by populism and technocracy to representative democracy. Topics include the argument that democracy fails the ideal of the people's government as the people lack the power that they should have; portrayal of voters as manipulable, emotional, irrational and irresponsible under populism; and the role of technological development in transforming public space and interactions among citizens and between them and the state.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of media and computer mediated communication on the expression, understanding, and transference of emotion. Given the exponential rise in the utilization of new technologies and the increasingly exponential rate at which new technologies are being produced, research concerning interpersonal communication amongst family members is difficult to conduct due to the amount of time it takes for research to be conducted versus the rate at which new technologies are being produced and utilized. The Expectancy Violation Theory and Coordinated Management of Meaning was used to explore the encoding/decoding processes associated with sending and receiving messages via new technologies in which meaning, and emotion can be misinterpreted, creating dissonance between the senders and receivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a growing literature explores occupational identity, or the overlap between “who we are” and “what we do,” this literature has not fully considered how occupational identity may interact with technological change. In this paper, we explore this interaction, asking how an occupation’s identity shapes and is shaped by its interactions with a new technology. We focus, specifically, on the relationship between librarians and Internet search. Drawing on an analysis of 22 years of articles from library journals, we demonstrate how and why librarians initially discounted Internet search and differentiated themselves from it. We argue that these responses were associated with a “paradox of expertise,” by which librarians missed innovation opportunities around one of the most important information technologies in history precisely, and ironically, because of their deep knowledge of non-Internet searching. Later, however, we demonstrate how librarians engaged with this same technology, drawing upon it to redefine their occupational identity. Our findings demonstrate how occupational identity conditions the interpretation of a technology, while also showing how these interpretations can change with ongoing interactions. We also illustrate how occupational identity itself can change in response to new technology. Finally, we elaborate upon why expert insiders may not actually be best positioned to pursue emerging technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention for the division of work between computers and humans is growing due to ever-increasing computer capabilities. Over the past decades, creativity support systems (CSSs) have gained ground as a means to enhance individual, group, and organizational creativity. Whereas prior research has focused primarily on the main effects of CSSs, we explore the interaction effects with the creative ability of the individual. In this paper, we investigate the use of the case-based reasoning (CBR) technology, which is based on the principle of analogical reasoning, to aid individuals in solving business problems creatively. The expectations as to why the CBR technology should enhance individual creativity, and under what conditions (i.e., the type and number of cases that are made available), are derived from creative cognition theory, and are tested empirically. In a series of studies, a CBR system loaded with a diverse set of cases was found to enhance the performance of individuals with lower creative ability, but it did not help the most creative individuals. Although the literature suggests that cases from remote problem domains should lead to more novel solutions, loading the CBR system only with cases closely related to the problem domain proved more effective than remote cases only. Finally, loading the CBR system with a larger set of diverse cases was found to positively influence the creativity of the solutions. These findings have the following implications for CSSs and creative cognition theory: (1) when considering the effectiveness of CSSs it is important to take into account the creative ability of the individual (i.e., "one size does not fit all"), (2) making a sufficiently large and diverse set of cases available is better for stimulating creativity, and (3) providing cases that are too remote may be counterproductive. On a practical note, organizations seeking to redesign their division of labor between individuals and machines can easily follow the CBR approach presented here using their own set of cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, scholars have developed undone science and inclusive innovation to explain knowledge silos, technology and development for marginalised communities. The undone science framework describes the systematic neglect of scientific issues that impact marginalised groups. The inclusive innovation framework emphasises the need to produce innovations that directly benefit marginalised groups. Despite the similar goals of the frameworks, the undone science and inclusive innovation theoretical communities have not interacted with each other, and as a result, the insights from each framework fail to help other disciplines improve opportunities for marginalised groups. This article compares the frameworks by examining nanotechnology policy and research in South Africa and shows how the frameworks help create better policies for marginalised groups. Because the frameworks emphasise different issues, policymakers should use both frameworks as opposed to over-relying on one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I theorize the coevolution of technology and design by integrating research on the evolution of technology with ideas from sociology, marketing, and psychology that explain the effects of design. Specifically, I apply work arguing that visible design attributes, such as color, shape, or texture, allow producers to explain what their products do and how best to use them, to excite users in a way that generates sales, and to extend the basic functionalities of their products by highlighting their symbolic meanings. I then theorize that the relevance of these three uses varies in the context of technological evolution such that affecting products' design-related attributes is a more central organizational process as product technologies emerge and when they are very mature, suggesting a U-shaped relationship between technological evolution and design. I also elaborate the moderators of this relationship: the frequency of successive product introductions, the social dynamics affecting consumption, the users' level of technological knowledge, and the volume of discourse attending to design. Thus, the article offers a holistic theory for understanding the strategic use of design in the context of technological production and, as such, advances recent work positioning design as a primary strategic challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational innovation, its persistence, its relationship with technological innovation, and their influence on firm performance remain under-researched. These issues are investigated using an integrated firm-level data set obtained from two recent waves of the Norwegian Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3 and 4) and firms’ financial accounts. A Heckman two-step estimation, to ensure against potential sample selection bias, was used to demonstrate that between 1999 and 2004 a number of Norwegian firms were persistent in organizational innovation, and this persistence raised the (positive) effects of organizational innovation on their performance. The results also reveal that many firms undertook, and benefited from, different types of organizational innovation, and such benefits were increased by the combinative effect of organizational and technological innovation. The study also found that older and larger firms are more inclined to attempt organizational change, while smaller firms are more able to benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses his history course on "the history of future technology." He cites the essay "The Principles of Communism," by 19th century philosophers Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, explores the notion of technofuturism, and examines the relationships between past, present, and the imagined future.

The importance of innovation for economic performance and competitiveness, whatever the level of analysis adopted, is uncontroversial. Yet little is known about the relationship between innovation and (subjective) wellbeing. This paper empirically studies this issue in a spatial perspective by arguing that the expected positive link between innovation and wellbeing can be even more complex than might be thought, and by testing the expectation that this relationship varies according to the different types of innovation and spatial setting considered. The analysis takes advantage of regionalised data sets at the EU level on wellbeing derived from various waves of Eurobarometer surveys in the period 2007–2011, and on regionalised patents and trademarks, thus merging individual and regional data. The results indicate that different types of innovation have different impacts on wellbeing across space. Technology-intensive innovation, such as patents, yields its benefits only in the most urbanised regions, while the impact of less technology-intensive innovation, such as trademarks, is undifferentiated across space. Spatial spillover effects also play an important role for individual wellbeing, regardless of the type of innovation and the degree of urbanisation of a region. Some reflections on regional innovation policies are finally proposed and discussed with reference to the current debate on place-based regional policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The aim of this study is to describe the characteristics of a crowd innovation network and its cooperation obstacles. Methods: This study constructs a reputation‐based public goods game model, uses the maximum utility of neighbors as the standard in order to update strategies, and analyzes the cooperative, evolutionary effect toward reputation of a crowd innovation network. Results: The introduction of a reputation mechanism in the PGG can significantly promote the level of group cooperation, and the increase of reputation heterogeneity and co‐factors can promote the evolution proportion of cooperators in the group. Conclusion: Reputation and its critical threshold have significant effect on cooperation under proper network scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little attention given to examining innovation under the conditions in which community sport organizations (CSO) operate. In this case study, the process under which one CSO undertook a technological innovation is explored. The purpose of this research was to classify the determinants that contributed to the innovation process, and identify at which particular stages of innovation those determinants were critical. Interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders were conducted during the innovation process. Observations were made at important points during the implementation of the innovation. Leadership commitment, pro-innovation characteristics, organizational capacity, simple organizational design, and involved and interested external parties were identified as determinants of this technological innovation. The findings illustrate multiple determinants of innovation at the managerial, organization, and environmental levels. Some of these span the entire innovation process, while others are critical only at particular stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory paper presents a conceptual model of the factors of governmental support and openness, business and technology investment, and socioeconomic level that are posited to influence technological utilization. The conceptual model and conjectures are developed inductively based on logic and prior research about the relationship among variables related to the factors. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to operationalize and test the model. The SEM analysis tests five points of investigation on a large sample of country data from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Findings indicate a critical pathway of associations between the factors of government support and openness, investment in business and technology, socioeconomic level, and technology utilization. The paper presents two country case examples of the model and suggests policy steps for national governments of developed and developing countries to prioritize information and communications technology, create openness, strengthen research and development and technology investment, and enhance education and information technology training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology (IT) innovations follow a diverse set of diffusion patterns. Early diffusion models explaining technology diffusion patterns assumed that there is a single homogeneous segment of potential adopters. It was later shown that a two-segment model considering two groups of adopters explains variations in diffusion patterns better than the existing one-segment models. While the two-segment model considers a group of adopters promoting adoption by exerting a positive influence on prospective adopters, it does not consider the members of society who aim to inhibit the adoption process by exerting a negative influence on prospective adopters. In fact, most IT innovations face opposition. Yet it is not clear how opposition affects the diffusion process. In this paper, we model the diffusion of an IT innovation through its target population with three types of actors: influentials, who are autonomous in adopting new technology and promote its adoption; opponents, who are opposed to the technology and inhibit its adoption; and imitators, who are information seekers, thus affected by both influentials and opponents. We show that opponents play a crucial role in determining the diffusion path of an innovation. The empirical tests using real as well as simulated data sets demonstrate the ability of our model to fit the data better and to identify the segments of adopters correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As technology advances, it becomes more feasible to load products with a large number of features, each of which individually might be perceived as useful. However, too many features can make a product overwhelming for consumers and difficult to use. Three studies examine how consumers balance their desires for capability and usability when they evaluate products and how these desires shift over time. Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before use than after use, they tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when they use them, resulting in “feature fatigue.” An analytical model based on these results provides additional insights into the feature fatigue effect. This model shows that choosing the number of features that maximizes initial choice results in the inclusion of too many features, potentially decreasing customer lifetime value. As the emphasis on future sales increases, the optimal number of features decreases. The results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the effect of product innovation strategy on the performance of new technology ventures in China, we found the innovation-performance link was contingent on both environmental factors, including environmental turbulence and institutional support, and the relationship-based strategies of the ventures, such as strategic alliances for product development and political networking. Our results suggest the need for simultaneous consideration of environment- and relationship-based strategy factors as moderators in the discourse on product innovation strategy among new technology ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How will the widespread diffusion of information technology change consumer research? I argue that information technology will profoundly change the way knowledge is generated and disseminated. In generating knowledge, consumer researchers will see the diminishing use of student subjects, an increase in the use of global samples, panels, secondary data, and information acquisition techniques. In disseminating knowledge, I suggest the possibility of self-organizing journals that would use the ratings of selected readers to determine the status of submitted research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This examination of Lemberg during the First World War uses newspapers, diaries, memoirs, official proclamations, and contemporary published statistical data to explore how the relationships between the citizens of Lemberg and modern technologies changed during the war years. The citizens of the city experienced two kinds of modern technology during the war. The first, titled here mundane, involved technologies that had only recently come to the city, but that had become essential to everyday life. These included electric trams, lighting (both electric and gas), and items such as cash registers, battery powered flashlights, and sewing machines. The second type of technology, the extraordinary, consisted of technologies that provided some level of spectacle prior to the war. These included motorized transportation, airplanes, and the cinema. This article argues that the relationship between both of these categories of technology and the populace changed during the war years. Mundane technologies became even more important in the daily lives of the citizenry, while the extraordinary technologies of cars, motorcycles, and airplanes became machines of war, while the cinema became both an escape from, and a transmitter of, the realities of the war happening nearby. The article also serves as a contrast to the experiences of citizens in other Polish-speaking cities during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article links metropolitan cultural life in Warsaw to the everyday economic and social realities of the First World War and to policy decisions of Russian imperial, German occupation, and municipal authorities. To do so, it examines different modes and sites of cultural consumption and expression, which were in turn challenged, reshaped, or created by various disruptions to prewar routines. Since the war affected practically everything, including and especially food supply but also transportation, street illumination, the consumption of alcohol, the availability of clothing and footwear, not to mention the city's demography, Warsaw's street life was essentially reconfigured by a seeming return to an earlier period, less mechanized and illuminated on the one hand, and by the formation of a modern urban entertainment industry and new forms of nightlife on the other. With the emergence of a thriving counterculture of cheap and popular entertainments in opposition to an elite emphasis on austerity, sobriety and propriety, anxious debates over cultural practices and behaviors appropriate to wartime reverberated in public discourse. Indeed, cultural conflict of all sorts exploded during the war years, between the occupier and the occupied, between men and women, but most ominously between Poles and Jews, with publicly-financed education, theaters, and parks as their main arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article features contributions from several scholars about the topic of the philosophy of technology and the social significance of communication and media technology in particular, including subjects such as how technological change alters or disrupts social relations, the unintended consequences of technological innovations, and the relationship between people and technology.

Recently, scholars have focused on a growing number of social movement consequences. However, one important type of intended outcome has been neglected: the development of new technologies. Connecting to key insights from Science and Technology Studies, the aim of this article is to contribute to the literature on the effects of activism in two specific ways. First, I present and discuss four causal mechanisms that show how activists trigger the development of new technologies. Second, I demonstrate how the development of new technologies is a highly contested goal among activists, leading to divisions within social movements. Based on novel empirical research, this paper analyzes a crucial and understudied case of a movement pushing for new technologies: the animal rights movement and its efforts to push for alternatives to animal experimentation. Methodologically, I rely on semistructured interviews with activists from different social movement organizations, publications of social movement organizations, and secondary literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly claimed that ubiquitous connectivity erodes the boundaries that once separated work from other aspects of life. Mobile devices in particular enable people to perform workrelated activities anytime anywhere. Surprisingly, however, we know little about how people nationwide organise their daily working time over a period that has witnessed rapid technological change. Using the United Kingdom Time Use Surveys 2000 and 2015, covering this period of technological change, we studied work extension practices, and the links between work extension, total work hours and subjective time pressure. We found a significant, though small, increase in work extension, and evidence that it was significantly associated with time pressure in 2015, but not in 2000. Additionally, work extension increased total work hours, which was concentrated entirely in time working with a mobile device. We discuss our results in light of some taken-forgranted narratives about mobile devices allowing work to colonise life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]