Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates different drivers of negative eWOM and the response approaches that firms use to engage in and disengage from online conversations with complaining customers. A text-mining study of negative eWOM demonstrates distinct impacts of high- and low-arousal emotions, structural tie strength, and linguistic style match (between sender and brand community) on firestorm potential. The firm’s response must be tailored to the intensity of arousal in the negative eWOM to limit the virality of potential online firestorms. The impact of initiated firestorms can be mitigated by distinct firm responses over time, and the effectiveness of different disengagement approaches also varies with their timing. For managers, these insights provide guidance on how to detect and reduce the virality of online firestorms.

Wearables paired with data analytics and machine learning algorithms that measure physiological (and other) parameters are slowly finding their way into our workplace. Several studies have reported positive effects from using such “physiolytics” devices and purported the notion that it may lead to significant workplace safety improvements or to increased awareness among employees concerning unhealthy work practices and other job‐related health and well‐being issues. At the same time, physiolytics may cause an overdependency on technology and create new constraints on privacy, individuality, and personal freedom. While it is easy to understand why organizations are implementing physiolytics, it remains unclear what employees think about using wearables at their workplace. Using an affordance theory lens, we, therefore, explore the mental models of employees who are faced with the introduction of physiolytics as part of corporate wellness or security programs. We identify five distinct user types each of which characterizes a specific viewpoint on physiolytics at the workplace: the freedom loving, the individualist, the cynical, the tech independent, and the balancer. Our findings allow for better understanding the wider implications and possible user responses to the introduction of wearable technologies in occupational settings and address the need for opening up the “user black box” in IS use research.

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Information technology service management (ITSM) has become the prevalent management approach to the provision of IT services worldwide. Researchers and practitioners, however, still lack an understanding regarding through which mechanisms and in which strategic contexts an ITSM capability contributes most to information systems (IS) effectiveness. Grounded in a service-dominant logic, we hypothesize that ITSM capability contributes to IS effectiveness through sustaining the alignment of the IS function with the business and contingent upon organizational IS strategic conservativeness. Data collected from 256 organizations confirms that direct effects from ITSM capability are mediated by ISbusiness alignment and strengthened by IS strategic conservativeness. Our findings provide evidence for a co-occurrence of value co-creation and value facilitation mechanisms in internal IT service relationships and for a greater value of ITSM capability in stable strategic contexts. Overall, our results contribute a novel understanding to the service literature of the distinct mechanisms and the facilitating contextual contingencies of value creation in IT service relationships.

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