CoB associate professor has article selected for publication by prestigious journal
By Bill Studenc
An article co-authored by H. Kevin Fulk, associate professor of computer information systems in the College of Business at Western Carolina University, has been selected for publication by a prestigious and highly selective academic journal.
Titled “The Role of Dissonant Relational Multiplexity in Information System Implementation Failures: Insights from a Grounded Theory Approach,” the article will appear in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems.
AJ Grube, dean of WCU’s College of Business, said the publication of Fulk’s article in a top-ranked, A-level journal is a testament to the quality of research conducted by Fulk and other faculty members in the college that she leads.
“The Journal of the Association for Information Systems is actually an A* journal, which is the highest rating for peer-reviewed publications,” Grube said. “It has a 10% acceptance rate and is considered one of the best journals in his field.”
As part of the process of accreditation of the College of Business by the AACSB, formerly known as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, faculty members at accredited institutions are required to publish research in peer-reviewed journals.
“The Australian Business Dean’s Council list is one of the resources we use to measure the quality of these publications and to determine if the journal is peer-reviewed. It’s commonly used by colleges of business worldwide,” she said.
The ABDC has compiled a journal quality list that rates academic business journals, with those rated “A*” in the highest quality category, representing the top 5 to 7% of the journals assigned to an individual field of research. Journals rated “A” comprise the second highest quality category, representing the next 15 to 25% of the journals representing a field of research.
“Being published in an ‘A*’ journal is a big deal in our world, and now Kevin has two,” Grube said.
H. Kevin Fulk
Fulk previously co-authored an article titled “Building a Compassionate Workplace Using Information Technology: Considerations for Information Systems Research” that appeared in the February 2021 edition of the International Journal of Information Management.
In the forthcoming article in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Fulk and his co-authors investigated the failure of information system failures by leveraging a novel construct – dissonant relational multiplexity – to develop a unique perspective of these failures.
“Dissonant relational multiplexity, or RM, exists when two organizational stakeholders have multiple types of relationships that are in conflict. To investigate the salience of dissonant RM in information system failures, we used a case study combined with the analysis procedures of the grounded theory methodology to examine a major failure in information systems planning implementation,” Fulk said.
The researchers’ analysis and theorization highlight that relational multiplexity became increasingly dissonant in the relationships between key organizational stakeholders because of a shift in technological frames, which represent cognitive perceptions about technology, he said.
“Further, a key insight from our findings is that the move to dissonant relational multiplexity occurred through a process that we term relational unbalancing. In addition, we also find evidence of an opposing relational balancing process that was used by stakeholders to address dissonant relational multiplexity. Such stakeholder efforts were often undermined by inherent constraints in the implemented technology,” Fulk said.
Efforts to achieve relational balancing were not productive, and the dissonant relational multiplexity continued to exist, ultimately contributing to the failure of the implementation, he said.
“Our study shows that information systems failures are characterized by elements of both determinism and indeterminism, are sociotechnical in nature and are shaped by technological constraints and stakeholder perceptions of those constraints,” Fulk said. “From a practical standpoint, our study highlights the importance of managing multiplex stakeholder relationships in an information systems implementation process, especially when the multiplexity is shaped by the technology.”
The article is co-authored by Sutirtha Chatterjee from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Suranjan Chakraborty from Towson University; and Paul Benjamin Lowry from Virginia Tech.
