Call for papers

Special Issue on ”E-services as social interaction”

The international journal Systems, Signs & Actions invites to a Special Issue on ”E-services as social interaction”. Submissions are welcome! Systems, Signs & Actions is an open journal with special emphasis on communication, information technology and work (www.sysiac.org).

Background

There is a rapid growth in the development and launching of new e-services. E-services are widely used both in the commercial and the public sector. What is special with an e-service compared with other IT resources? An e-service is often defined to be an electronically mediated service to customers outside the organisation that is providing the service. The customers (as external users) can be consumers in commercial settings or citizens in public settings.

An e-service implies important differences compared to human services. In e-services there is usually not any face-to-face meeting between the customer and the service provider. Instead of a direct human-to-human interaction there will be a human-artefact interaction. The customer will interact with an IT-based service artefact instead of interacting with humans. This important feature has sometimes concealed the genuinely social character of e-services. Even if human service providers are not present in the e-service meeting, they are participating in a distant way. The e-service artefact is a service agent representing the e-service provider. It is important that the use of e-services is not reduced to a limited human-computer interaction. The social character of the e-service use should be acknowledged. There is always a customer – service provider interaction that is mediated through the e-service. Many times the e-service will also be a mediator between different customers. Many e-services have features for interaction within customer communities.

Topics

Possible topics for this special issue:

·         Customers and suppliers interacting through commercial e-services

·         Citizens and public agencies interacting through public e-services

·         Interaction among customers (communities) through the use of e-services

·         The co-existence of different e-services

·         Service transformation through e-services

·         Understanding services in new ways through e-services

·         User-interfaces of e-services as communication media

·         E-services and different types of actor roles

Other related issues are also welcome.

Submissions

Submit your article to submissions@sysiac.org not later than May 15, 2011. We plan to publish this special issue before the end of 2011. If you submit earlier than May 15 we put your paper into a review process immediately.

Guest editor for this special issue is Karin Axelsson.

Enquiries concerning this Special Issue can be sent to

·         Chief editor Göran Goldkuhl (goran.goldkuhl@liu.se)

·         Guest editor Karin Axelsson (karin.axelsson@liu.se)

A Special Issue in honour of Göran Hultgren

This special issue is prepared in honour of Göran Hultgren who conducted research on e-services. He was very eager in arguing for a social interaction perspective when studying e-services. In 2007 he presented his PhD dissertation in Swedish on this subject. He did not, however, write so many papers in English on this subject. Two important papers written in English are:

Hultgren, G; Eriksson, O (2005) The Concept of e-Service from a Social Interaction Perspective, in Proc of Action in Language, Organisations and Information Systems ALOIS*2005, The 3rd International Conference, 15–16 March 2005, Limerick, Ireland; Available at http://www.vits.org/?pageId=10&pubId=493

Hultgren, G; Eriksson, O (2005) The User Interface as a Supplier of Intertwined e-Services, the 14th Intl Conf on Information Systems Development, Karlstad University 

Available at http://www.vits.org/?pageId=10&pubId=708

Göran Hultgren died suddenly in April 2009, only 49 years old. There are many research friends who miss him and his warm, friendly and humble personality.

Submissions to this Special Issue may refer to works by Göran Hultgren, but you are not obliged to do so.

Table of contents – latest issue of Systems, Signs & Actions

Volume 4 (1) of Systems, Signs & Actions has recently been published. It contains three articles:

Dynamic Trust in Implementation of Large Information Systems: Conceptualized by Features from Giddens’ Theory of Modernity by Bjarne Rerup Schlichter

Abstract: Trust is an important concept in the implementation of large information systems. Earlier research in this area has focused primarily on trust as either a static concept (‘what is trust’), on the consequences of a lack of trust (‘what happens if trust does not exist’), or on the different ways in which trust is created. This paper suggests a dynamic model, based on features of Anthony Giddens’ theory of modernity, to provide insight into how trust is created dynamically and how trust influences the implementation of Integrated Healthcare Information Systems in a Faroese healthcare case. The dynamic model is used to analyse a critical incident in the project to further illustrate the case. Suggestions for further research in the form of an interpretative case study are given.

Download from http://www.sysiac.org/uploads/Sysiac2010-schlichter.pdf

How to Design Things with Words – a Communicative Perspective on Design Research in Information Systems by Hans Weigand

Abstract: Design research is establishing itself as a research approach in Information System (IS). Topics of IS design research include system development methods and conceptual modeling languages that often find their way into CASE tools. However, there is also a lot of confusion about the differences between design and design research, the idea of “design science”, and the role of the IT artifact in IS. In this paper we critically examine some design science approaches, in particular the guidelines of Hevner, and propose an alternative approach in which design is viewed as communicative action and design research in IS is ultimately aimed at improving information and communication processes in organizations.

Download from http://www.sysiac.org/uploads/Sysiac2010-weigand.pdf

On the Potential of some Pragmatic Concepts for the Web

Jens Allwood and Mikael Lind

Abstract: Within the IS-field the notion of a speech act has been used as a point of departure by many scholars in the analysis of computer-mediated communication. This pragmatic concept has turned out to be very useful in the development of the field. However, the notion of speech acts is too restricted for continued exploration of the full potential of the pragmatic web. In this paper we examine some pragmatic concepts that we believe have potential in relation to three core activities of the IS-field; 1) description and understanding, 2) evaluation, and 3) design. The concepts that we will examine are “social activity”, “communicative act”, “sequences of communicative acts” or “exchange types”, “communicative feedback” and “turn management”. We describe the concepts and then exemplify how they can be used to analyze web services by examining e-mail and Wikipedia as two activities currently on the web. Our analysis leads to a partly new description of both IS-artifacts. It also leads to a number of open questions concerning the functionalities of both IS-artifacts.

Download from http://www.sysiac.org/uploads/Sysiac2010-Allwood-Lind.pdf