Fatuma Namisango

The role of information systems (IS) in sustainability has increased, and so has the demand for sustainability skills and competencies as organisations and people pursue sustainable ways of operating and living for the planet, the plants, the people, and the profit. Educational institutions are critical in enabling sustainable development as they provide learning environments for sustainability education (SE). Universities worldwide are integrating SE into curricula to enable learners to develop essential sustainability competencies for various industries.

The IS curricula need a clear agenda for integrating SE to develop the essential skills and competencies for sustainable design and use of IS. Yet, the IS discipline lays the foundation for rethinking diverse information technologies (IT) in organisations and the everyday lives of individuals and groups.

We propose a critical investigation of how IS academics integrate SE into the current IS curricula. The study will reveal how the integrations are mapped to the Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs), the economic, social and governance (ESG) framework, and the external curricular bodies such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The investigation will reveal the targeted sustainability competencies essential for IS practice. The anticipated outcomes are intended to guide the integration of SE in IS curricula in universities and develop critical sustainability competencies for enduring IS practice.

Social media offers many opportunities or possibilities to its users conditioned by the user’s goals and effort. Existing literature on social media opportunities, also known as social media affordances, has widely reported the action-oriented possibilities (known as the functional affordances) possibly because they are easily observable. Other types of technology affordances remain unexplored. Technology affordances, besides the real or physical affordances that are directly revealed by the structural features, can also emerge to users as cognitive, affect (emotional), and sensory. This paper attempts to develop an inventory of social media affordances (SMA) and proposes the emerging categories of the affect, cognitive, sensory, functional, and control affordances of social media. The paper concludes with propositions on categorizing affordances and the relationships between different social media affordances.

This paper presents the relationship between organizational generativity, nonprofits' use of social media, and the co-creation of nonprofit services. While anchoring to the sociomaterialism perspective, we analyze social media interactions of nonprofits by identifying social media affordances and symbolic expressions. To explain the hypothesized relationships, we conduct a survey of nonprofits using social media to co-create services. We applied structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to generate measurement models and test our hypotheses. Our findings indicate that organizational generativity is positively related to social media affordances for nonprofits, the symbolic expressions of social media to nonprofits and service co-creation. We generally observe that organizations have to build the capacity to operate in new ways as a means of exploring the opportunities and possibilities offered by social media as well as leveraging social media interactions for service co-creation.

In contemporary business environment, the formulation of an effective strategy aimed at driving and sustaining value requires effective management of the intellectual resources as a basis for achieving strategic advantage. Given the paradigm shift in the factors of productivity within the knowledge landscape, it's crucial for the Professional Service Firms (PSFs) to be mindful of their Intellectual Capital (IC) potential as a basis for the competitive advantage and value-creation. Drawing upon Resource-Based-View of the firm, this research attempts to revisit value-creation concept and investigate how IC resources can be integrated and utilized to achieve broader value outcomes for various organizational stakeholders. In view of that, the proposed research aims to develop a methodological value-creation framework in the service firms by epistemologically reflecting on the IC-derived value outcomes in the multi-stakeholder context.

While previous research explores the use of social media in nonprofits, the key emerging event(s) (or outcome) and mechanisms capable of producing these events remain insufficiently explained. We observe that the growing use of social media in nonprofits is intended to attract public involvement, participation, and engagement in the provision of nonprofit services. This paper, therefore, identifies co-creation of nonprofit services as a key event in nonprofit use of social media, and the structure of social media in nonprofits (i.e., affordances, symbolic expressions, and privacy preferences) offers the mechanisms producing this event. Social media supports organization-public relationships (OPR) in nonprofits as a key mechanism; however, such relationships remain unexplored. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we propose organizational generativity as a promising capability for the actualization of social media structure, OPR to realize service co-creation. This paper argues, hypothetically, that organization generativity is positively related to the structure of social media in nonprofits, OPR, and service co-creation as an overall outcome.

The increasing use of social media in nonprofits hasattracted significant attention from researchers in various fields.As this body of literature expands, no comprehensive review integrates anddiscussesthe extent of social media use in nonprofits. This paper reviews, analyses and presents findings of the literature onsocial media in nonprofits, particularly, its functions, enablers, and inhibitors. The paper discusses the findings of 84 research articleson social media in nonprofits published between January 2010 and March 2018. Overall, our study identifies seven (7) functions of social media in nonprofits including relationships, informationexchange, conversation and interaction, co-creation and innovation, community building, collective action, and reputation and legitimacy. This paper also discussesthe enablers and inhibitors of social media in nonprofits.The extant literature presented in this paper offers an extended look into social media usewhile providing direction for future research.

Despite the strategic role of social media for nonprofit organizations (NPOs), these organisations continue to struggle for enduring and productive organization-community interactions on social media. This paper operationalizes organization-community interactions into two aspects – i.e. organization-community relationships (OCR) and co-creation the associated outcome. This paper suggests that NPOs’ interaction with the community on social media enable the organization and the community to jointly assess, develop and deliver social services and value through the process co-creation. Hypothetically, the paper suggests that social media affordances for NPOs, its symbolic expressions to NPOs and the organization’s privacy concerns on social media influence OCR and multiple forms of co-creation that occur in a social media environment. Particularly, the type and structure of OCR are significant underlying factors that explain the relationship between social media use in a NPO and the associated forms of co-creation.

Given the increasing role of financial inclusion in Africa, a number of stakeholders are advocating for pathways to sustainable financial inclusion mechanisms among the formal and informal sectors. With the current technology supported strategies, the mobile money service has become utterly popular across all sectors of the Ugandan social structure as well as economic structures. A number of studies have indicated overwhelming adoption of the mobile money service in sub- Saharan Africa. The study sought to apply the DeLone and McLean IS Success Model to explain the success of mobile money services in enabling financial inclusion in Africa. It may be necessary to investigate, test and understand the factors behind the growth of this service in selected cases in Africa e.g. Uganda so as to lay platform and advocacy for its sustainability and successful transfer of such technology innovation to other societies. It was found that factors such as information quality, system quality, service quality and net benefits obtained positively correlate to mobile money service use and user satisfaction. However, these factors moderately explain the variations in the use and user satisfaction of mobile money service.

Creating new knowledge is a core process in knowledge management and in social networks. The dynamic nature of social technologies and the social nature of knowledge attracts research into knowledge flow in social networks. Social technologies provides present a less costly but yet collaborative and diverse platforms for social networking, creating new knowledge and leveraging individual knowledge. However, prior research focuses on knowledge sharing rather than joint creation of knowledge in social networks. Building a knowing firm extends beyond knowledge sharing. Therefore, this paper explores and presents suggestions into joint creation of knowledge “knowledge co-creation”. The paper demonstrates how the theoretical ideas in the co-creation paradigm can be useful in exploring knowledge co-creation. The discussion introduces the relevance and scope of knowledge co-creation owing to the growth of online social networks. We derive a typology of knowledge co-creation that suggests pathways and conjectural propositions into exploring co-creation of knowledge in social networks.