In recent years, software development outsourcing has become even more complex. Outsourcing partner have begun‘re-outsourcing’ components of their projects to other outsourcing companies to minimize cost and gain efficiencies, creating a multi-level hierarchy of outsourcing. This research in progress paper presents preliminary findings of a study designed to understand knowledge transfer effect...

The growth in end-user computing (EUC) in organizations and its implications for the degree of centralization of the information services function have led to the need for a theory that will assist in the management of this process. This paper employs microeconomics and, in particular, agency theory to describe the development of EUC in organizations. The results suggest that agency theory prov...

Since the 1980s, a number of frameworks have been proposed for understanding the concept of information system (IS) failure. Two approaches to IS failures seem particularly important: the concept of Expectation Failure and the concept of Termination Failure. We argue that there is an extra dimension to the problem that is not covered by those descriptive models, which we call the Outsourced IS ...

this paper assumes the cell formation problem as a distributed decision network. it proposes an approach based on application and extension of information theory concepts, in order to analyze informational complexity in an agent- based system, due to interdependence between agents. based on this approach, new quantitative concepts and definitions are proposed in order to measure the amount of t...

In recent years there has seen an increased interest in software development outsourcing 1 (SDoutsourcing) in both academia and practice (Krishna et al. 2004; Rustagi et al. 2008; Wanjin et al. 2007). Countries like India, Sri Lanka and Philippines have gained a reputation of receiving software development outsourcing projects, mostly from western nations (Heeks 1999; Ramingwong and Sanjeev 200...

The present research investigates cultural variation in grounding principles for inferring agency in order to address an important theoretical debate: does cultural diversity in agency concepts reflect an animistic overextension of (universal) folkpsychology, as many have argued, or an alternative theory of folkcommunication based on relational principles? In two experiments, mind perception me...

The purpose of this work is to systematically develop a micro-level understanding of endogenous agency in a highly institutionalized, stable setting as a basis for a general institutional theory of action. Using an ethnographic account of Cambridge’s 2007 season preparations for the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race we examine endogenous agency in an environment where extant institutional t...

This paper sets out an approach to Social Machines (SMs), their description and analysis, based on a development of social constructionist theoretical principles adapted for Web Science. We argue that currently the search for the primitives of SMs, or appropriate units of analysis to describe them, tends to favour either the technology or sociality. We suggest an approach that favours distribut...