N.Levina, S.Tötemeyer and N.R.Stokes contributed equally to this workMechanosensitive channels are ubiquitous amongst bacterial cells and have been proposed to have major roles in the adaptation to osmotic stress, in particular in the management of transitions from high to low osmolarity environments. Electrophysiological measurements have identified multiple channels in Escherichia coli cells. One gene, mscL, encoding a large conductance channel has previously been described, but null mutants were without well-defined phenotypes. Here, we report the characterization of a new gene family required for MscS function, YggB and KefA, which has enabled a rigorous test of the role of the channels. The channel determined by KefA does not appear to have a major role in managing the transition from high to low osmolarity. In contrast, analysis of mutants of E.coli lacking YggB and MscL shows that mechanosensitive channels are designed to open at a pressure change just below that which would cause cell disruption leading to death.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. AbstractTo date, most research on information technology (IT) outsourcing concludes that firms decide to outsource IT services because they believe that outside vendors possess production cost advantages. Yet it is not clear whether vendors can provide production cost advantages, particularly to large firms who may be able to replicate vendors' production cost advantages in-house. Mixed outsourcing success in the past decade calls for a closer examination of the IT outsourcing vendor's value proposition. While the client's sourcing decisions and the client-vendor relationship have been examined in IT outsourcing literature, the vendor's perspective has hardly been explored. In this paper, we conduct a close examination of vendor strategy and practices in one long-term successful applications management outsourcing engagement. Our analysis indicates that the vendor's efficiency was based on the economic benefits derived from the ability to develop a complementary set of core competencies. This ability, in turn, was based on the centralization of decision rights from a variety and multitude of IT projects controlled by the vendor. The vendor was enticed to share the value with the client through formal and informal relationship management structures. We use the economic concept of Levina & Ross/The Vendor's Value Proposition in IT Outsourcing complementarity in organizational design, along with prior findings from studies of client-vendor relationships, to explain the IT vendors' value proposition. We further explain how vendors can offer benefits that cannot be readily replicated internally by client firms.Keywords: Outsourcing of IS, case study, complementarity in organizational design, IS core competencies, management of computing and IS, systems maintenance, IS staffing issues, IS project management Introduction Outsourcing is a phenomenon in which a user organization (client) transfers property or decision rights over information technology (IT) infrastructure to an external (vendor) organization (Loh and Venkatraman 1992b). The brief history of IT outsourcing includes episodes of both high hopes and bitter disappointment. Since Eastman Kodak's landmark outsourcing of its IT services (Applegateand Montealegre 1991), the outsourcing industry has been growing at a staggering rate of about 20 percent a year (Caldwell and McGee 1997). Worldwide spending on IT outsourcing services reached almost $64 billion in 2001; in 2000, IT outsourcing represented about 30 percent of IT budgets (Mason 2000). Despite these numbers, both vendors and their clients are struggling to understand the outsourcing value proposition: can vendors deliver economic and management benefits to their clients th...

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Growth of business-to-consumer (B2C) applications such as electronic storefronts, catalogues, and customer support websites has drawn a great number of diverse stakeholders into the IS Development (ISD) practice. Marketing, strategy, and graphic design specialists have joined a variety of technical professionals and business stakeholders in developing B2C applications. Oftentimes, these professionals work for different organizations with different histories, cultures, and reward structures. A longitudinal qualitative field study of a B2C application development project was undertaken in order to build an indepth understanding of the collaborative practices of diverse professionals in ISD projects. The paper proposes that the multi-party collaborative practice can be understood as a "collective reflection-in-action" cycle through which an IS design emerges as a result of agents producing, sharing, and reflecting upon material objects. Agents from diverse backgrounds exert different influences over emergent designs depending on their organization, profession, and project involvement-based power relations. These power relations shape whether collaborators "add to" "ignore," or "challenge" the work produced by others. In turn, agents' actions either reinforce or transform existing power relations depending on who gets to claim credit for and ownership of the emergent design. Implications for the study of boundary objects, team diversity, organizational learning, and contemporary ISD are drawn.

Grounded theory (GT) is taught in many doctoral schools across the world, and exemplified in most methodological books and publications in top tier journals, as a qualitative research method. This limited view of GT does not allow full use of possible resources and restrains researchers' creativity and capabilities. Thus, it blocks some innovative possibilities and the emergence of valuable theories, which are badly needed. Therefore, understanding the full reach and scope of GT is becoming urgent and we brought together a panel of established grounded theory scholars to help us in this endeavor through a reflective conversation.3

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In today's global services outsourcing arena, increasing numbers of companies adopt "multisourcing," that is, they select and combine information technology (IT) and business services from multiple providers. The literature on IT outsourcing and supply chain management has identified critical tradeoffs involved in increasing the number of suppliers and has strongly recommended focusing on a handful of strategic partners to balance these tradeoffs. Committing to a few strategic partners, however, may prevent a firm from discovering new suppliers, or even supply regions. Such missed opportunities may be particularly limiting in the context of offshoring professional services, which has exhibited rapid changes in supplier markets in the last decade. Thus, firms may want to engage in a more intensive multisourcing in services. If they do so, their success will depend on a global sourcing process that effectively addresses the critical tradeoffs involved. To explore how a global sourcing process can support multisourcing, we conducted a qualitative longitudinal case study of a large financial services institution that developed a varied global supply base to obtain offshore professional services. Our analysis results in a theory that emphasizes (i) advantages of a multiple provider strategy in rapidly changing global supply markets; (ii) the critical role of middle managers in enabling continuous innovation in the supplier structure; and (iii) the importance of the global sourcing process combining top-down and bottom-up decision making in multisourcing.