A broad range of activities are often included in volunteering. The motivations for volunteering are also many-faceted. Volunteers form most of the workforce in India's non-profit sector, which is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors in the world. However, volunteering in India has hardly received any scholarly attention. Applying our understanding based on findings on volunteering has been warned against since volunteering does not even mean the same thing for different people living in different cultures and countries. This study thus attempts to understand the kind of people who are drawn to volunteering. Specifically, the role of personality traits, values, and self-efficacy beliefs of those who volunteer are explored. Volunteering activities, it is argued, can be of two types — help volunteering, leading to altruism and helping, and involvement volunteering, requiring personal involvement in the community. It is argued that values and self-efficacy beliefs mediate the role of traits in volunteering. A survey was administered to 228 postgraduate students studying in a professional college. Standardized scales for measuring volunteering do not allow the distinction between help and involvement volunteering. Therefore a scale was designed to measure the extent of volunteering based on the context of the college from which the students were sampled. Personality traits, self-efficacy beliefs, and values were measured using standardized scales. Data was analysed using PLS-SEM. It was found that agreeableness and extraversion traits, universalism values, and social self-efficacy beliefs were positively correlated with help volunteering. Extraversion trait, stimulation value, and social self-efficacy beliefs were positively correlated with involvement volunteering. Universalism fully mediated the effect of agreeableness on help volunteering. No support was found for the mediation of self-efficacy beliefs on help or involvement volunteering. The study demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between helping and involvement types of volunteering. The reasons and type of people who volunteer to help seem to be different from those who volunteer to get involved in the community or cause. Further investigation with larger and more diverse sample would help in contributing further to the understanding of volunteers and their motivations. The study has managerial implications mainly in terms of helping selection and retaining of volunteers for various types of activities and in promotion and branding of volunteering events and organizations. Communication for attracting volunteers that require help or involvement may be designed differently for helping kind of activities versus those that require involvement of people.
Institutional theory offers a very powerful lens to understand and explain societal phenomena. In the context of innovation and technology, this perspective provides insights that complement the understandings derived from a focus on just technology or economics. Adopting this standpoint, this paper examines the emergence of the organizational field of open source software as a response to the norms of propriety software that were unacceptable to many passionate software researchers and programmers.The context of software product development has some unique characteristics that separates it from other industries. First, software products are information goods. In general, information goods have very high fixed costs of development and low marginal costs of reproduction which often leads to market inefficiencies. Second, IP protection has the potential to exaggerate the problem of market inefficiencies. Third, software is an input and also an output of the production function and IP protection has the potential to make the cost of software products prohibitively high. Fourth, the Internet has created the potential for the larger society to participate in the production process. These features of the software industry influence the dynamics among software professionals and orgnizations creating a distinctive context which can be better understood through the lens of institutional theory.According to institution theory, organizations seek to obtain legitimacy, which goes beyond technological or economic performance, by conforming to institutional requirements in a context. There are three forms of legitimacy. Pragmatic legitimacy, based on regulative requirements, is acquired by complying with the legal and regulative rules in the organizational field. Moral legitimacy, based on normative requirements, is obtained by ensuring that the activities of an organization promote societal good or welfare. Finally, cognitive legitimacy is derived from the extent to which the activities of an organization mesh with the taken-for-granted norms in the larger context. While institutions are normally sustained for long, they do experience change. Institutional change is driven by institutional entrepreneurs who create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate, and challenge the boundaries that demarcate one field from another.The findings of this study capture the intricate dynamics and interactions among institutional requirements, software professionals and organizations that led to the norms of the institution of propriety software being challenged. It suggests that the process of institutional change can lead to the creation of a new alternate organizational field leaving the original field largely untouched. This paper contributes to the understanding of the software industry and suggests implications for other industries that produce information goods.
The 14-state
Abstract. The study analyzes the contextual factors impacting technology assimilation in an environment that is characterized by macro-economic changes, rapid technological innovations, emerging industry practices and shifting organizational contexts. Stones' strong structuration theory (SST), a refinement of Giddens' structuration theory, is used as the theoretical lens for studying the technology assimilation process. SST is used to analyze the structuration process at the micro-level and its impact on the structures at the meso/macrolevel. In addition, actor network theory (ANT) is used to analyze the role of heterogeneous actors in altering the structures as the actor network adapts to the technological innovations and changing contexts.Keywords: Structuration theory, Actor network theory, Technology diffusion, Technology assimilation. IntroductionStudies of technology in organizations can be classified into two broad streams of research. The first stream adopts the ontological stance of discrete entities; the primary mechanism of diffusion being the moderation effect or technology impact; the methodology being variance-based studies; and the key concepts studied being technological imperatives or contingency models (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Most of the early diffusion studies fall into such a positivist stream of research and attempt to understand the relation between technology and organizational context, and its impact on the innovation diffusion process. The second stream of research adopts an ontological stance that assumes technology and organizations being part of a mutually dependent ensemble; the primary mechanism of diffusion being the interaction effect of technology with the organizational context and human actors; the methodology being process-based studies; and the key concepts being the duality of technology with technology viewed as both a physical and a social object (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). A majority of the studies that fall into this stream of research focus on the interplay of technology and organization / human actors and the resultant impact on technology and organizational structures. While technology impact in organizations has attracted research approaches from both of these paradigms, technology adoption and diffusion studies has largely remained positivist in nature. Fichman (Fichman, 2000) points out the limitations of the
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