ISM SEMINAR SERIES
Summer Term 2013
Speaker:
Professor Natalia Levina, Warwick Business School
Title:
Dealing with newly tainted work in an occupational online community: A story of bankers
dealing with new moral taint following the financial crisis of 2008
Date:
24 April 2013
Venue:
E2.02
Time:
14.15 – 16.15
Abstract:
(Paper by Emmanuelle Vaast, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University and Natalia
Levina, Warwick Business School).
This paper investigates how members of an occupational online community deal with new
moral taint. Based upon the in-depth investigations of dynamics that took place in an online
community of bankers, an occupation that has experienced new moral taint during the recent
financial crisis, this research shows how participants relied upon specific affordances of the
online forums in order to deal with the new taint. It then builds a grounded theory for how
members of an occupational online community deal with new moral taint. We find that
participants experience the new taint as a loss of positive value of their professional identity
and collective appear to go through the stages of grief such as denial, anger, bargaining,
depression/detachment, and acceptance. The theory also highlights unique affordances of
online forums as compared to other settings in which occupational members usually deal with
taint such as work settings, family and friendship networks, and professional associations. This
paper adds to the literatures on tainted work by showing for the first time how an
occupational community deals with a new (as opposed to existing) taint as well as to IS
literature by elaborating how online communities can be used by professional groups not only
for knowledge sharing, but also for social support relating to stresses of the occupation as
well as how affordances of an online forum can help occupational members deal with new
taint beyond traditional mechanisms.
Biography:
Natalia Levina is an Associate Professor in the Information, Operations, and Management
Sciences department at the Stern School of Business, New York University and a Professor at
the Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, UK Prof Levina uses organizational
theories to understand strategic and operational complexities involved in managing multiparty collaborative relationships. She has been serving as a senior editor at Information
Systems Research, Senior Editor on a special issue of the European Journal of IS, Associate
Editor at special issues of MISQ and ISR, and an editorial board member of Information and
Organizations. She received her BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from Boston
University, MA in Mathematics from Boston University, and PhD in Information Technologies
from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management.
Contact:
Alison Solman, ISM Group
Alison.solman@wbs.ac.uk
024 7652 4101