Abstract. Through this paper we make two contributions to social informatics: the interdisciplinary study of the design, development, uses and consequences of information and communication technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts. Our first contribution is to make a connection from social informatics to general principles of sociotechnical theories. We do this to both connect social informatics scholarship more directly to the large and growing literature(s) that engage socio-technical theorizing and to advance these principles more directly through social informatics. Our second contribution to social informatics is to engage two contemporary theoretical approaches that draw on social informatics principles: socio-technical interaction networks and principles of social actors and apply them to current practice. We do so to demonstrate that these analytic approaches are the needed tools to help scholars and reflective professionals in practice engage social informatics analyses. By doing this we highlight the potential of social informatics while honouring Rob Kling's legacy in helping to establish this transdiscipline.
In this article we offer visual depictions and analysis of contextual factors relative to the presence of public safety networks (PSNs) in the United States (US). A PSN combines shared technological infrastructures for supporting information sharing, computing interoperability and interagency interactions involving policing, criminal justice, and emergency response. The broad research objective is to explain the formation of PSNs based upon factors derived from rational choice and institutional theories. To do so we develop maps to represent our data analysis. This analysis suggests that our approach is promising for generating insights about PSNs and, by extension, about other types of inter-organizational collaborations focusing on using information and communication technologies to enable information-sharing.
The work reported here contributes to our understanding of organizational identity regarding its influence on organizational action related to the development of information and communications technologies (ICT). The empirical basis of this work comes from case studies of integrated criminal justice information systems (IJIS). IJIS are organizational and technological ensembles created to facilitate inter-organizational information sharing among criminal justice agencies. The focus of these case studies was to examine how organizational identity shapes organizational ICT. This research found that organizational identity shapes an organization's ICT-related processes and is reflected in the material configurations of an organization's ICT; and that organizations with different identities exhibit those differences in their ICT. Three implications of this research are that organizational identity serves as both an enabler and constraint on organizational ICT development; organizational identity commitments will likely serve as a barrier to large-scale integration of different organizations' systems; organizational identity is relatively static and difficult to change.
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