Magnus Mähring

Recent advancements on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have resurfaced utopian and dystopian narratives on the future of work. The uniqueness of the AI technologies is their potential to supplement, substitute and amplify practically all tasks currently performed by humans. Hence, they hold the potential to rapidly reshape the nature of work and our economies (Frank et al., 2019). “How?” is the question. Optimists focus on its technological possibilities and postulate that AI will free humans from boring, repetitive tasks - allowing the creation of higher quality jobs - and emphasize new opportunities for organizations to create a competitive advantage. Skeptics, on the other side, highlight the possibility of increased unemployment or work degradation as human deskilling occurs due to an increased degree of decision and knowledge work delegation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2018, held in San Francisco, CA, USA, in December 2018.The 11 revised full papers presented together with one short paper and 2 keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: setting the stage; social implications of algorithmic phenomena; hybrid agency and the performativity of technology; and living with monsters.

Most previous research on ISD project control conceptualizes control activities in terms of control modes and focuses on performance effects at the project level. This seems to oversimplify the way controls 'work' by neglecting the multidimensionality of control activities and their effects at the individual level. In this paper, we adopt an expanded view of ISD project control, employing data from 92 ISD projects to analyze how different control modes (what?) and control styles (how?) relate to controllee task performance and job satisfaction. Importantly, our results suggest that control style is more important than control modes in explaining individual-level control effects. Moreover, as hypothesized, formal and informal controls positively affect task performance, while only informal controls have a positive effect on job satisfaction. Finally, we find significant interaction effects between control style and formal controls, suggesting a complex non-linear relationship between the two, which opens interesting avenues for future research.