Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Recent years have proven to be among the most challenging on record for organizations and society at large. A global multi-year pandemic, violence resulting from polemic political discourse, and social-justice movements borne from (deadly) racial inequality are but a few examples of the major events that have changed how we work and live. The pandemic has changed where we perform our work duties and how we collaborate across space and time using technology. The political discourse has given rise to new social media phenomena like fake news and deep fake videos. The social-justice movements have put issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion front and center for many organizations. At the same time, information systems and technology have seen accelerated changes as well. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a mainstream application for organizations and households. Social media applications keep evolving, changing how we share information, interact with each other, and form communities. Information systems (IS) professionals versed in analytics and data science have become one of the scarcest organizational resources. Together these societal challenges and technological advances have changed how organizations and individuals create, receive, interpret, analyze, and act on information. The essence of value creation in communities and organizations is shifting as we find new work structures, new technologyhuman relationships, and new analytical techniques to find insight and extract knowledge from huge amounts of information. This special issue presents advanced research studies that share insights on new approaches, new techniques, and new understandings of how communities, organizations, and individual use information and information systems to create value The first paper focuses on a design method: “Act and Reflect: Integrating Reflection into Design Thinking,” by Thorsten Schoormann, Maren Stadtländer, and Ralf Knackstedt, demonstrates the criticality of adding a reflection lens to development methods. Specifically, the authors report on a multi-method study that includes a literature review, semi-structured interviews, a case study, and a software prototype, to develop prescriptive design knowledge on how to integrate reflection into design thinking. Their contribution to the Design Thinking discourse is significant as it accommodates and structures teams that experience divergent values, knowledge, and preferences to actively learn from their experiences and inform future design efforts. The next paper, “Formation and Action of a Learning Community with Collaborative Learning Software,” by Evren Eryilmaz, Brian Thoms, Zafor Ahmed, and Howard Lee presents a mixed-methods field study that is grounded in group cognition, knowledge building, and learning analytics to demonstrate how learning community development can be facilitated by specialized asynchronous online discussion (AOD) tools. The authors show participants operate in different community layers—central, intermediate, and peripheral layers—when they engage in a discourse to co-create knowledge based on the JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2023, VOL. 40, NO. 1, 3–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2172768