The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement.

Social media and citizen engagement: A meta-analytic review

Artifacts, such as software systems, pervade organizations and society. In the field of information systems (IS) they form the core of research. The evaluation of IS artifacts thus represents a major issue. Although IS research paradigms are increasingly intertwined, building and evaluating artifacts has traditionally been the purview of design science research (DSR). DSR in IS has not reached maturity yet. This is particularly true of artifact evaluation. This paper investigates the “what” and the “how” of IS artifact evaluation: what are the objects and criteria of evaluation, the methods for evaluating the criteria, and the relationships between the “what” and the “how” of evaluation? To answer these questions, we develop a taxonomy of evaluation methods for IS artifacts. With this taxonomy, we analyze IS artifact evaluation practice, as reflected by ten years of DSR publications in the basket of journals of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). This research brings to light important ...

A Taxonomy of Evaluation Methods for Information Systems Artifacts

In financial markets it is common for companies and individuals to invest into foreign companies. To avoid the double taxation of investors on dividend payment – both in the country where the profit is generated as well as the country of residence – most governments have entered into bilateral double taxation treaties, whereby investors can claim a tax refund in the country where the profit is generated. Due to easily forgeable documents and insufficient international exchange of information between tax authorities, investors illegitimately apply for these tax returns causing an estimated damage of 1.8 billion USD, for example, in Denmark alone. This paper assesses the potential of a blockchain database to provide a feasible solution for overcoming this problem against the backdrop of recent advances in the public sector and the unique set of blockchain capacities. Towards this end, we develop and evaluate a blockchain-based prototype system aimed at eliminating this type of tax fraud and increasing transparency regarding the flow of dividends. While the prototype is based on the specific context of the Danish tax authority, we discuss how it can be generalized for tracking international and interorganizational transactions.

/pdf/a-blockchain-based-approach-towards-overcoming-financial-kbgzn268pt.pdf

A Blockchain-Based Approach Towards Overcoming Financial Fraud in Public Sector Services

Measuring the performance of business processes has become a central issue in both academia and business, since organizations are challenged to achieve effective and efficient results. Applying performance measurement models to this purpose ensures alignment with a business strategy, which implies that the choice of performance indicators is organization-dependent. Nonetheless, such measurement models generally suffer from a lack of guidance regarding the performance indicators that exist and how they can be concretized in practice. To fill this gap, we conducted a structured literature review to find patterns or trends in the research on business process performance measurement. The study also documents an extended list of 140 process-related performance indicators in a systematic manner by further categorizing them into 11 performance perspectives in order to gain a holistic view. Managers and scholars can consult the provided list to choose the indicators that are of interest to them, considering each perspective. The structured literature review concludes with avenues for further research.

/pdf/business-process-performance-measurement-a-structured-26psqz6bj1.pdf

Business process performance measurement: a structured literature review of indicators, measures and metrics

The consensus view is that the rigorous evaluation of design science (DS) artifacts is essential. There are many types of DS artifacts and many forms of evaluation; what is missing is guidance for how to perform the evaluation, more specifically, what evaluation methods to use with specific DS research outputs. Here we find and review 148 DS research articles published in a selected set of information systems (IS), computer science (CS) and engineering journals. We analyze the articles to develop taxonomies of DS artifact types and artifact evaluation methods; we apply these taxonomies to determine which evaluation methods are associated in the literature with particular artifacts. We show that there are several popular "artifact - evaluation method" combinations in the literature. The results inform DS researchers of usual and customary combinations of research artifacts and evaluation methods, potentially providing them with rationale and justification for an evaluation method selection.

Design science research evaluation

In recent years, we have been faced with a series of natural disasters causing a tremendous amount of financial, environmental and human losses. The unpredictable nature of natural disasters behavi...

Twitter speaks: A case of national disaster situational awareness:

User satisfaction with information systems (IS) is considered an important indicator of information systems success and has been the subject of numerous research studies since the field’s inception. In this paper, we review the user satisfaction research in the IS field. We discuss the roots of user satisfaction research as it pertains to satisfaction studies in marketing research and how these studies have been used to inform the IS context. We also discuss how the study of user satisfaction and use of the construct in IS research has evolved and matured over time. Finally, we discuss antecedents and outcomes of user satisfaction identified in IS research and provide suggestions for future research.

/pdf/user-satisfaction-research-in-information-systems-historical-az76tqr2ff.pdf

User Satisfaction Research in Information Systems: Historical Roots and Approaches

In recent years, we have been faced with a series of natural disasters causing a tremendous amount of financial, environmental, and human losses. The unpredictable nature of natural disasters' behavior makes it hard to have a comprehensive situational awareness (SA) to support disaster management. Using opinion surveys is a traditional approach to analyze public concerns during natural disasters; however, this approach is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. Luckily the advent of social media has provided scholars with an alternative means of analyzing public concerns. Social media enable users (people) to freely communicate their opinions and disperse information regarding current events including natural disasters. This research emphasizes the value of social media analysis and proposes an analytical framework: Twitter Situational Awareness (TwiSA). This framework uses text mining methods including sentiment analysis and topic modeling to create a better SA for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. TwiSA has also effectively deployed on a large number of tweets and tracks the negative concerns of people during the 2015 South Carolina flood.

Twitter Speaks: A Case of National Disaster Situational Awareness

The rapid use and application of blogs in diverse areas such as education, marketing, journalism, and human resource management in recent years underlines the need for a better understanding of the impact of this new technology on social capital. Social capital reflects the norm of reciprocity and the level of trust among individuals who connect, interact, and benefit from one another. Blog is expected to influence the extent and the scope of this interaction by providing new means of networking among people. This paper examines the relationship between blog use and social capital and reports on the results of an exploratory study that examines this relationship using survey data from 326 blog users. Results suggest a significant and positive impact of blog use on social capital and its components: social connections, reciprocity, and trust. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

/pdf/understanding-the-influence-of-blog-on-the-development-of-3743hspkqm.pdf

Reza Vaezi

Papers

Design science research evaluation

Twitter speaks: A case of national disaster situational awareness:

User Satisfaction Research in Information Systems: Historical Roots and Approaches

Twitter Speaks: A Case of National Disaster Situational Awareness

Understanding the influence of blog on the development of social capital