Most Popular Books by Paul Benjamin

Spider-Man juggles his life in high school with battling such enemies as Arcade, Spider-Woman, and Sandman.

"While interpersonal, local, and regional contexts are critical to the analysis of witch-hunting in early New England, this book shows that a full understanding of the Puritan colonies' battle against black magic can only be achieved by placing it in a trans-Atlantic perspective"--

Researchers and practitioners have long believed that information technology (IT) is a key tool for fostering innovation. However, there is a certain inconsistency in the literature, which makes it challenging for researchers to figure out exactly how and why IT plays such a pivotal, strategic organizational role. The motivation for this research is the multiple contradictory results reported by studies investigating the influence of information technology (IT) on organizational innovation. This study utilizes a fit-based perspective in an attempt to disentangle these contradictions. Using Venkatraman's (1989) seminal paper on fit, we conceive of two critical fit-based concepts: harmonious IT affordance in an organization (HITA) and a subsequent fit between HITA and organizational courage. HITA reflects a covariance fit (coalignment) between the three major IT affordances in an organization -- collaborative affordance, organizational memory affordance, and process management affordance. Organizational courage reflects the boldness (risk-taking ability) of the organization. Finally, HITA and organizational courage represent a matching fit (reflected as actualized HITA) that influences two kinds of innovation: exploratory and exploitative. Two studies, conducted in the US and Chinese contexts, provide support for this theory. The main contribution of the paper is in showing that IT can lead to innovation if a) organizational IT affordances harmoniously co-align (as HITA); b) and, organizational courage acts as a powerful contingency that actualizes HITA, and this actualized HITA influences innovation.

Protecting organizational information is a top priority for most firms. This reality, coupled with the fact that organizational insiders control much of their organizations' valuable information, has led both researchers and practitioners to acknowledge the importance of insiders' behavior for information security (InfoSec). Until recently, researchers have employed only a few theories to understand these influences, and this has generated calls for a broadened theoretical repertoire. Given this opportunity, we incorporate the framework of emotions developed in the information systems (IS) discipline by Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2010) and add the broaden-and-build theory (BBT) to understand the influence of discrete positive and negative emotions on insiders' precaution-taking activities. Our findings demonstrate that the relationship between both positive and negative emotions and precaution taking is mediated by insiders' (1) psychological capital (PsyCap), a higher-order, work-related construct of positive psychological resource capabilities, and (2) psychological distancing, a coping mechanism characterized by insiders' attempts to detach themselves psychologically from a situation. By considering these factors, our model explains 32 percent of the variance in insiders' precaution taking in organizations. Researchers and practitioners can use these findings to develop effective insider InfoSec training, including emotional appeals that increase insiders' precaution taking.

This study examines the potential of RFID technology to increase the agility of supply-chain e-commerce systems by mitigating the bullwhip effect. The bullwhip effect is a supply-chain phenomenon that reveals a lack of business agility characterized by the amplification of inventory variance. This study employs an experiment involving a modified Beer Distribution Game to simulate an RFID-enabled supply chain. The results provide empirical evidence that RFID technology can increase a supply chain's agility and reduce the bullwhip effect by reducing inventory holding costs, stockout costs, and inventory-level variances. The results are all the more important when applied to interorganizational e-commerce systems.

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) typically face resource and capability constraints that inhibit their innovation activities. One way SMEs can overcome these constraints is by complementing internal resources and capabilities with external knowledge, referred to as open innovation. With the proliferation of the Internet, SMEs have added social media to their traditional marketing activities. However, they rarely embrace the analytical capabilities of social media for innovation. Hence, we propose the semantic learning-based innovation framework (SLBIF) to guide SMEs in using the analytical capabilities of social media to innovate their products or services. Our framework includes three consecutive stages innovators should follow -- idea selection, idea refinement, and idea diffusion -- and which explain how to analyze customer preferences through semantic analysis of customer posts and identify lead users and opinion leaders using user-directed social network analysis.

RFID (Radio frequency identification) is an emerging technology that attracts much attention of supply chain participants recently. However, most Chinese supply chain participants just adopt this innovation without making further steps to fully utilize its benefits. Extant IS research on this technology only focuses on factors that impact its organizational adoption. According to assimilation theory, most information technologies exhibit an “assimilation gap” which means widespread usage tends to lag behind their adoption. However, a technology can only achieve its greatest benefits through full-scale deeper diffusion into the organization's daily operations besides physical adoption. Drawing upon TOE framework, we propose a stage-based model to investigate factors that influence the assimilation of RFID into an organization in China. Moreover, we investigate these factors' changing effect across different assimilation stages in the Chinese context that is addressed little in the existing literature.

The debate on the benefits of trust or distrust in groups has generated a substantial amount of research that points to the positive aspects of trust in groups, and generally characterizes distrust as a negative group phenomenon. Therefore, many researchers and practitioners assume that trust is inherently good and distrust is inherently bad. However, recent counterintuitive evidence obtained from face-to-face (FtF) groups indicates that the opposite might be true; trust can prove detrimental, and distrust instrumental, to decision-making in groups. By extending this argument to virtual teams (VTs), we examined the value of distrust for VTs completing routine and non-routine decision tasks, and showed that the benefits of distrust can extend to short-term VTs. Specifically, VTs seeded with distrust significantly outperformed all control groups in a non-routine decision-making task. In addition, we present quantitative evidence to show that the decision task itself can significantly affect the overall levels of trust/distrust within VTs. In addition to its practical and research implications, the theoretical contribution of our study is that it extends to a group level, and then to a VT setting, a theory of distrust previously tested in the psychology literature in the context of completing non-routine and routine decision tasks at an individual level.

RFID technology is an emerging technology that attracts attention of supply chain participants. However, most Chinese supply chain participants just adopt this new innovation without making further steps to fully utilize its benefits. Extant IS research on this technology also only focuses on factors that will impact its organizational adoption. Assimilation theories suggest that most information technologies exhibit an “assimilation gap” which means the widespread usage tends to lag behind their adoption. But a technology can only achieve its greatest benefits through full-scale deeper diffusion into the organization's daily operations besides physical adoption. Drawing upon TOE framework, we use a stage-based model to investigate factors that influence the assimilation of RFID into an organization. Moreover, we investigate these factors' changing effect across different assimilation stages in the Chinese context which is addressed little in the previous literature.

The Muppets, including Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and the rest of the gang, recount the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

The Physical Internet (PI) is a holistic Supply Chain Management (SCM) concept that merges many relevant areas of current SCM research, including sustainability, effectiveness and efficiency of global value chains, information flows, as well as horizontal and vertical collaboration. Given the increasing attention the PI is receiving from academics and practitioners -- evidenced by a steadily growing number of publications, dedicated conferences and substantial funding opportunities -- it is important to clearly define the domain, summarize current research and provide directions for future research. In this paper, we therefore present the state-of-the-art of the PI and highlight important research opportunities. The PI covers many different aspects of SCM, which can be seen as either a weakness or a strength of this concept. We believe that the latter is more pronounced and that valuable synergies can be achieved if SCM researchers keep the 'big picture' in mind, which in this case is the optimization of the total supply chain, including all participating companies, third parties and externalities. We conduct a systematic literature review and work out the most important components, performance indicators, goals, opportunities and challenges of the PI, which supports future incremental and rigorous research. We also provide several important directions for future research.

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