This paper provides a summary of studies of user resistance to Information Technology (IT) and identifies workaround activity as an understudied and distinct, but related, phenomenon. Previous categorizations of resistance have largely failed to address the relationships between the motivations for divergences from procedure and the associated workaround activity. This paper develops a composite model of resistance/workaround derived from two case study sites. We find four key antecedent conditions derived from both positive and negative resistance rationales and identify associations and links to various resultant workaround behaviours and provide supporting Chains of Evidence from two case studies.

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Online market research communities are dependent upon their members' participation, which in turn provides market intelligence for community operators. However, people join these communities for different reasons. The selection process for market research community members and the moderation process of these communities have a number of pitfalls, which can result in misleading interpretations of intelligence and flawed decisions based on their contributions. Using social capital theory in conjunction with research on different motivational types of participant, this paper focuses on lessons from commercially operated, closed online market research communities; it provides us with insights on membership selection and community moderation methods. The practical finding is that the ideal participant of such communities would be attracted by activities and rewards, which do not directly or obviously relate to the specific objective of an online market research community.

The move towards technological ubiquity is allowing a more idiosyncratic and dynamic working environment to emerge that may result in the restructuring of information communication technologies, and changes in their use through different user groups’ actions. Taking a ‘practice’ lens to human agency, we explore the evolving roles of, and relationships between these user groups and their appropriation of emergent technologies by drawing upon Lamb and Kling's social actor framework. To illustrate our argument, we draw upon a study of a UK Fire Brigade that has introduced a variety of technologies in an attempt to move towards embracing mobile and ubiquitous computing. Our analysis of the enactment of such technologies reveals that Bystanders, a group yet to be taken as the central unit of analysis in information systems research, or considered in practice, are emerging as important actors. The research implications of our work relate to the need to further consider Bystanders in deployments other than those that are mobile and ubiquitous. For practice, we suggest that Bystanders require consideration in the systems development life cycle, particularly in terms of design and education in processes of use.