Congratulations Malmi Amadoru for successfully completing the final examination of her thesis with no revisions. Both her examiners nominating her thesis for QUT Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. Her thesis titled “The Organizing Visions of Digital Innovations: The Case of Blockchain Using the Twitter Discourse” examines how digital innovations are constituted through discourse and subsequently facilitate the adoption and diffusion.
As social media has become a major means of a discursive channel, she analysed the Blockchain discourse on Twitter using both computational and qualitative methods. Her work on social bots is one of the earliest studies to acknowledge the role of social bots in the technology discourse. Overall, Malmi’s research contributes to the understanding of the diffusion of digital innovation from an institutional perspective.
Title: The Organizing Visions of Digital Innovations: The Case of Blockchain Using the Twitter Discourse
Abstract: Although new digital technologies create great opportunities for organizational innovation, at the same time they encompass high uncertainty, particularly during the early stage of their diffusion. While the primary focus of diffusion of innovation research has been on the economic rationalistic logic, this dominant paradigm is recently critiqued for its diminishing returns and overrationalized models. This research adopts an institutional view, in particular, organizing vision theory to study the diffusion of digital innovation. An organizing vision is a community idea developed through discourse about the application of an innovation. To understand how organizing visions of digital innovations evolve during the early stage, this research analysed the blockchain discourse on Twitter. Through pragmatist inquiry, utilizing both human and machine pattern recognition, this research presents two process models that explain the stages of the discourse and the possible underlying generative mechanism of how an organizing vision emerges and shifts forward in its development path facilitating the diffusion of the innovation. The unexpected encounter of social bots put forward another exploratory study to identify their role in the digital technology discourse. The thesis highlights the implications and calls for further research into social bots as they expect to become the norm in the social media near future.
Supervisory Team:
Dr Erwin Fielt (School of Information Systems)
Prof Marek Kowalkiewicz (QUT Business School)
Final Seminar Panel Members:
Dr Timothy Graham (QUT School of Communication)
Prof Shaila Miranda (University of Oklahoma)
Prof Kalle Lyytinen (Case Western Reserve University)
Malmi Amadoru is a PhD candidate at the School of Information Systems. She is interested in modeling socio-technical phenomena using computational approaches. Her current research interests are in the overlapping areas of digital innovation, social media, and computational social science. She has a computer science background and industry experience in agile software development. She has published in the premier IS conference ICIS and is a participant of ICIS Doctoral Consortium 2019.