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Championing is key to the success of an IT implementation. Recently, changes in the nature of technologies used in organizational contexts and changing organizational structures call for a renewed focus on IT championing in order to explain its distributed nature. Following an analytic induction approach and drawing from semi-structured interviews with 37 practitioners (physicians, residents, nurses, IT staff and administrators) in three healthcare-related settings, the study conceptualizes distributed IT championing as a process constituted of multiple individuals’ behaviors, unfolding over time, that proactively go beyond formal job requirements in support of an IT implementation. While multiple individuals may enact similar championing behaviors, the data indicates that multiple individuals may also enact distinct, yet complementary, championing behaviors over the course of the IT implementation. Overall, distributed IT championing evolves through cycles of distinct stages of bridging-in, bonding, and bridging-out, with each stage being shaped by different dimensions of social capital. Also, IT artifacts that are particularly generative appear more conducive to distributed IT championing than closed ones. This paper contributes to extant literature on IT championing by developing a process model of distributed IT championing in the context of an IT implementation.

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Addiction to hedonic information systems yields significant negative consequences for users. Although we know about the causes of addictions, particularly those related to individual differences, recent evidence suggests that addiction evolves gradually over time and is rooted in shared characteristics of users and technology. This paper provides a longitudinal perspective over how and why hedonic information systems (IS) use addiction develops. Based on our analysis, we break down this process into three phases characterized by different types of use, whether nominal, compulsive, or addicted. Each phase highlights salient psychological needs that motivate, technology features that enable, and affordances that are actualized into each type of use. We also provide a detailed account of individuals’ self-control mechanisms, explaining how deficiencies in sensing, comparing, or regulating behavior facilitate one’s transition toward addiction. These insights are applicable to other hedonic IS that are similar in terms of ubiquity and constant access through mobile apps. They point to heterogeneous (preventive or intervening) strategies that can be used to help people regain their control over use, depending on where they are in their trajectory toward addicted use. Our findings carry implications for the design of systems and features that can help reduce the likelihood of addiction development.

Free/open source software users were previously responsible for managing the challenges associated with their software themselves. Recently, a new generation of entrepreneurs seized this emerging market opportunity by positioning themselves as service providers for free/open source software users. Conceptualizing such providers as “institutional entrepreneurs,” we find that due to the nature of the free/open source software context, they exhibit a different set of legitimation actions compared with similar efforts in other contexts. Based on our empirical analysis of free/open source software service providers and drawing on prior theory, we identify two entrepreneurial actions aimed at gaining legitimacy specific to the free/open source software context, namely, product-based theorization actions and evangelization actions. We also demonstrate that institutional entrepreneurship is shaped by the nature of free/open source software products and the openness values at the core of the free/open source software movement. Our work hence underscores the importance of the context of institutional entrepreneurship.