Isam Faik is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Ivey Business School, Western University. His research focuses on the relationship between digital transformation and institutional change, including studies on the changing nature of work, digital inequality, and online social movements. His research contexts include healthcare, agriculture, sharing economy platforms, government, and FinTech. Isam's research is published in leading Information Systems journals including MIS Quarterly, Journal of the AIS, Information & Organization, and Information Systems Journal. He is a Senior Editor at Information & Organization.
Isam received his Ph.D. in Management Studies as a Gates scholar from the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He completed his master’s and bachelor's degrees in Engineering from McGill University. Prior to joining the Ivey Business School, he held faculty positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Southampton.
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Faik, I.; Sengupta, A.; Deng, Y., 2024, "Inclusion by Design: Requirements Elicitation with Digitally Marginalized Communities", MIS Quarterly, March 48(1): 219 - 244.
Abstract: A more equal and sustainable digital future depends on the inclusion of digitally marginalized communities in the socioeconomic opportunities created by digital technologies. Digital inclusion is a complex process that involves all stages of digital innovation, including development, adoption, use, and maintenance. However, past research has largely approached digital inclusion as an adoption and use challenge. In this paper, we develop a view of digital inclusion as a design challenge. We focus on the activities of requirements elicitation (RE) as a critical element of the design process and draw on a design-based interpretive study involving the design of two mobile apps for agricultural communities in India and China. We analyze how the conditions of digital inequality underlying the digital marginalization of these communities affect their sensemaking as they participate in RE activities. We conceptualize these challenges as limitations on the emergence of technology affordances. Our findings reveal various shifts, or translations, in the emerging affordances, which enabled the RE activities to be more generative and consequently more inclusive. These affordance translations manifested along three main dimensions: specificity, temporality, and collectivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for the inclusion of marginalized communities in the design of new technologies.
Link(s) to publication:
https://misq.umn.edu/inclusion-by-design-requirements-elicitation-with-digitally-marginalized-communities.html
http://dx.doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2023/17225
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Kuk, G.; Faik, I.; Janssen, M., 2023, "Editorial Technology Assessment for Addressing Grand Societal Challenges", IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, March 70(3): 1055 - 1060.
Abstract: Emerging technologies are both a cause of many grand societal challenges (GSCs) facing twenty-first-century societies and an integral part of some of their most promising solutions. As an element of the GSCs, technology becomes intertwined with several interrelated issues that constitute the GSCs. This calls for approaches to Technology Assessment (TA) that account for the paradoxical role of technology in the GSCs, and the imperative and complexity of pointing technological innovation toward addressing the GSCs. In this introduction to the special issue, we identify three major streams in TA research and practice, namely TA as a policy instrument, a deliberation process, and an issue field. These streams highlight tensions between relying on experts and on the inclusion of various stakeholders in TA processes, and between a TA framing around the intersection of technology and critical issues around critical issues, such as those constituting the GSCs. We discuss the advantages and challenges of each stream. We also outline and discuss key principles for conducting TA in the context of GSCs. We end by introducing the four papers that constitute this special issue.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2022.3233460
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Abubakre, M.; Faik, I.; Mkansi, M., 2021, "Digital entrepreneurship and indigenous value systems: An Ubuntu perspective", Information Systems Journal, November 31(6): 838 - 862.
Abstract: This paper investigates the embeddedness of digital entrepreneurship in the entrepreneurs' indigenous value system by examining the influence of ‘Ubuntu’ on digital entrepreneurship activities in the South African context. We do so through an interpretive field study of two innovation clusters in South Africa. Our findings reveal Ubuntu as the basis of a community orientation to digital entrepreneurship that offers an alternative to the prevalent heroic view in which digital entrepreneurship narratives are centred around the individual entrepreneur(s). They also highlight the tensions faced by digital entrepreneurs as they attempt to uphold the Ubuntu values of humility, reciprocity, and benevolence while operating in a competitive and fast-paced environment. In addition, our study indicates that the way entrepreneurs draw on their indigenous value system is dynamic, giving rise to what we call digital Ubuntu, reflecting a reworking of Ubuntu values into their increasingly digital reality. The concept of digital Ubuntu brings to light how indigenous values can become entangled with the capabilities of digital technologies and highlights the need for indigenous perspectives to advance our understanding of the diversity of digital phenomena, such as digital entrepreneurship, across cultural contexts.
Link(s) to publication:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/isj.12343
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/isj.12343
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Leong, C.; Faik, I.; Tan, F. T. C.; Tan, B.; Khoo, Y. H., 2020, "Digital organizing of a global social movement: From connective to collective action", Information And Organization, December 30(4): 100324 - 100324.
Abstract: Social media are increasingly credited with the emergence and rapid scaling of social movements. Consequently, many studies have explored the role of social media and other forms of Information and Communication Technology in enabling collective action beyond formal organizations. The focus in these studies has been on connective actions that emerge from the individualized but interdependent uses of social media in the pursuit of a movement's objectives. However, few studies have examined how social movements go beyond connective actions to build organizing capacity that can support effective and sustainable mobilization. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the shift from connective action to a more organized, concerted form of action is particularly important in the light of significant differences in lifespan and outcomes among social media-enabled movements. To advance our conceptualization of these mechanisms, we studied the case of Bersih movement, a transnational coalition and social media-enabled social movement that pushed for clean and fair elections in Malaysia. The case highlights two types of emergence, clustering and structuring emergence, that enabled the movement to evolve across three different phases: dispersed individuals, dispersed groups, and networked group. Our analysis of the case reveals that each of these two types of emergence exhibits different dynamics between the environmental, cognitive, and relational mechanisms that underlie the evolution of social movements. Our findings also present both the enabling and constraining roles of social media in clustering and structuring emergence.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2020.100324
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Faik, I.; Barrett, M.; Oborn, E., 2020, "How information technology matters in societal change: An affordance-based institutional logics perspective", MIS Quarterly: Management Information Systems, August 44(3): 1359 - 1390.
Abstract: While there has been much work on the relationship between information technology (IT) and organizational change, there has been limited research that theorizes the relationship between IT and societal change. This paper draws on institutional theory, in particular institutional logics, to develop a model of IT and societal change, which we argue is critical in an era of large-scale digital transformation. Our approach is based on a view of society as an interinstitutional system, reflecting the multiplicity of logics at the societal level. We conceptualize societal change as shifts in the multiplicity of logics, with a focus on changes in the levels of centrality and compatibility. Our model relates these changes to the materiality of technology through the concept of IT affordances. We propose three mechanisms (sensegiving, translating, and decoupling) through which IT affordances become elements of societal change. We identify three corresponding carriers through which IT affordances gain scale and stability (objects, networks, and platforms). We discuss the implications of our theoretical developments for future research on IT and societal change.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2020/15291
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Faik, I.; Thompson, M.; Walsham, G., 2019, "Designing for ICT-enabled openness in bureaucratic organizations: Problematizing, shifting, and augmenting boundary work", Journal of the Association for Information Systems, January 20(6): 681 - 701.
Abstract: There is a growing focus on achieving “openness” in the design and transformation of organizations, in which the enabling role of ICTs is considered increasingly central. However, bureaucratic organizations with rigid structures continue to face significant challenges in moving towards more open forms of organizing. In this paper, we contribute to our understanding of these challenges by building on existing conceptualizations of openness as a form of boundary work that transforms by challenging both internal and external organizational boundaries. In particular, we draw on a performative view derived from actor-network theory to analyze a case study of ICT-based administrative reforms in a judicial system. Building on our case analysis, we develop a typology of the various roles that ICTs can play in both enabling and constraining ongoing boundary work within the context of their implementation. We thus present a view of ICT-enabled open organizing as a process where ICTs contribute to problematizing, shifting, and augmenting ongoing boundary work. This view highlights the inherently equivocal nature of the role of ICTs in transformations towards higher levels of openness.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00548
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Faik, I.; Walsham, G., 2013, "Modernisation through ICTs: Towards a network ontology of technological change", Information Systems Journal, July 23(4): 351 - 370.
Abstract: This article is concerned with modernisation as a prevalent discourse of association between technological change on the one hand and social, economic and political changes on the other. We discuss modernisation as a concept that spans several domains of change including national development, organisational change and epistemological shift. These domains are often categorised into stacked levels, namely the national, the organisational and the individual, or divided into a domain of action and an overarching context. We argue in this paper that an assumption of embeddedness underlies many of these dominant approaches and we identify three issues with this assumption, namely reductionism, unidirectional causality and marginalisation. We draw from the ontological and methodological principles of actor-network theory to suggest a shift towards a more fluid view of the dynamics between the different domains of change. We support our discussion by a case study of the modernisation of the justice system in Morocco, including a national computerisation project of case processing in the courts. © 2012 Wiley Publishing Ltd.
Link(s) to publication:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/isj.12001
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