With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtual worlds. This study reports on an analysis of the written assessments of 59 business professionals who spent an extended period of time in Second Life, a popular virtual world, and discursively made sense of the organizational value of virtual worlds. Through a Toulminian analysis of the claims, grounds, and warrants used in the texts they generated, we identify 12 common patterns of sensemaking and indicate that themes of confirmation, open-ended rhetoric, demographics, and control are evident in the different types of claims that were addressed. Further, we assert that the Toulminian approach we employ is a useful methodology for the study of sensemaking and one that is not bound to any particular theoretical perspective.

Organizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near-synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IM during face-to-face, telephone, and computer-mediated team meetings, a practice we call "invisible whispering." We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into "front stage" and "backstage" exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio-spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.

The U.S. healthcare system has experienced rapid growth in the adoption and use of clinical health information technology, such as electronic health record (EHR) systems. In a field as complex and pluralistic as healthcare, the introduction of these sweeping information technology platforms is transforming the practices, roles, interdependencies, and communication mechanisms that connect a heterogeneous mix of stakeholders. In this study, we assess the impact of EHR adoption and use on the practices in the U.S. healthcare system and the diverse ways of thinking and acting that those practices reflect. Building on our field study of diverse healthcare stakeholders, we propose a mechanism for how information system (IS) use can influence the institutional dynamics of the healthcare system. We argue that this theoretical framework may be fruitfully applied to other national healthcare systems and other classes of enterprise IS. In addition, the study offers a number of practical insights for IS designers and policy makers as EHR system use expands and evolves in the coming years.

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