Research on telework often focuses on the outcomes of telework, investigating if telework is ultimately a 'good' or a 'bad' thing for teleworkers and their organisations. However, findings across telework research studies are often inconclusive, requiring deeper engagement with potential explanations for contradictory and paradoxical results. This study uses virtual ethnography (netnography) to investigate naturally occurring data. By analysing online debates related to Yahoo!'s decision to ban telework for its employees, this study surfaces aspects currently overlooked by telework research. These findings suggest that the diversity of the nature of work undertaken by knowledge workers and perceived differences in the suitability of different tasks for telework are of critical importance for understanding telework from a practice perspective. However, deeper engagement with the different kinds of work activities of knowledge workers is currently missing in the telework research literature. This study therefore contributes to better understanding of telework and paradoxical findings in telework research.

Crowdsourcing (CS) by cultural and heritage institutions engage volunteers in online projects without monetary compensation. Uncertainty concerning online volunteer motivation has led to a growing body of academic research. This study contributes to that debate, by extending focus to CS volunteer work in nonprofit cultural institutions where no monetary benefit is offered to volunteers. This study examines motivations of high performing volunteers in a newspaper digitisation CS project, initiated by the National Library of Australia. Volunteers are motivated by personal, collective, and external factors, and these motivations change over time. Volunteers initially show intrinsic motivations, though both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations play a critical role in their continued participation. Volunteer contributions range from data shaping (e.g., correcting digitised optical character recognition data) to knowledge shaping (e.g., shaping historical data through tagging and commenting, but also through development of norms and social roles). The locus of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) also changes with different kinds of contributions. The distinction between data and knowledge shaping contributions, and the locus and focus of motivation behind these activities, has implications for the design of CS systems. Design for improved usability through cognitive and physical system affordances and development of social mechanisms for ongoing participation is discussed.

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This paper highlights systemic contextual differences and the unique IT Governance issues that might arise in public and private sector organizations. Public sector organizations constitute a significant component of economic activity in most countries. Like their private sector counterparts, many public sector agencies are struggling to cope with reduced or inadequate IT budgets and are continuously looking for ways to extract maximum value from IT resources. While both sectors face similar managerial-level IT issues and challenges, we argue that there are systemic differences between private and public sector organizations suggesting that a one size fits all approach to IT Governance may not apply.

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