About the PhD Project

Dr Amadoru won the ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Second Runner-up for her PhD thesis at the International Conference on Information Systems, Copenhagen, Denmark, 9-14 December 2022. The research of Dr Amadoru during her PhD candidature led to the following publications.

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• Amadoru, M., Fielt, E., and Kowalkiewicz, M. (2021) “Organizing Visions in the Digital World: The Case of the Blockchain Discourse on Twitter.” In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Information Systems, Texas, USA, December 12-15.
  https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/is_implement/is_implement/14

• Amadoru, M., Fielt, E., Kowalkiewicz, M., and Nayak, R. (2018) “Organizing visions in online social networks: The role of community heterogeneity and real-time engagement.” In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, USA, December 13-16.
  https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2018/implement/Presentations/22

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About the award winning thesis

Organizations are increasingly embracing digital technologies to seize new business opportunities. However, digital technologies encompass high uncertainty in their diffusion trajectories.  Therefore, recently information systems scholars called for new perspectives to model the dynamicity and socially embedded aspects of digital innovation. To better understand digital innovation, I adopted an institutional perspective through the lens of organizing vision theory. Organizing visions help organizations acquire the necessary knowledge about opportunities associated with new digital technologies, thereby reducing uncertainty.  These visions emerge through community discourse to provide interpretation, legitimation, and mobilization. The successful diffusion of digital innovation depends on how well an organizing vision is developed and sustained. However, due to the complexities arising from the unique characteristics of digital innovation, the institutional context is undergoing fundamental shifts requiring a renewed understanding of how organizing visions are produced and sustained. I examined the blockchain discourse on Twitter and in popular press articles using a computationally intensive theory construction approach. The research resulted in two process models: a life cycle model explaining the early organizing vision discourse and an evolutionary model explaining the generative mechanisms of how organizing visions evolve. In doing so, I extended the organizing vision theory for digital innovation. In addition, the unexpected encounter of social bots in the organizing vision discourse put forward another exploratory study to identify their role in the digital technology discourse. In this thesis, I highlight the role of social bots for organizing visions and call for further research. The computational approaches applied in this research contribute to the nascent methodological dialog on computationally intensive theory construction within the IS discipline. The findings can inform practitioners who are interested in innovations to tailor the discourse strategically.

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