Charities and ICTs: Can IS-enabled Innovation in Business Critical Activities Be Delivered?

This article looks at the ways in which a number of charities are leading the United Kingdom’s ‘Third Sector’ in their use of ICT/IS capabilities to deliver innovations in a range of business critical activities. It shows that new ICT/IS capabilities afforded opportunities within different types of charities to deliver change. In the older charities established in the ‘pre-Internet’ era, these shifts tend to work with and reflect the existing ‘enterprise logic’ or established ‘ways of doing’. In the younger ‘Net generation’ organisations, the shifts tend to be more fluid in nature, enabling the delivery of new ways of doing and denoting the more flexible model of organisation upon which they were founded. Our research also shows that, in all of the charities, information and data capture and interrogation are intensifying.

[1]  M. Castells.  The rise of the network society , 1996 .

[2]  Martyn Hammersley,et al.  Case Study and Generalization , 2009 .

[3]  Andrew J. Flanagin,et al.  Institutional and Noninstitutional Influences on Information and Communication Technology Adoption and Use Among Nonprofit Organizations , 2010 .

[4]  Peter Frumkin,et al.  Institutional Isomorphism and Public Sector Organizations , 2004 .

[5]  P. D. Hall,et al.  National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) , 2010 .

[6]  Walter W. Powell,et al.  The Nonprofit Sector , 1987 .

[7]  L. Salamon,et al.  The Emerging Sector: An Overview , 1994 .

[8]  Paul M. Leonardi,et al.  When Flexible Routines Meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies , 2011, MIS Q..

[9]  K. Jehn,et al.  Using triangulation to validate themes in qualitative studies , 2009 .

[10]  E. Burt,et al.  Information and Communication Technologies: Reshaping Voluntary Organizations? , 2000 .

[11]  Martin Dyke,et al.  Understanding and Using Technological Affordances: A Response to Boyle and Cook , 2004 .

[12]  S. Llewellyn,et al.  The “singular view” in management case studies , 2007 .

[13]  D. North.  Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance: Economic performance , 1990 .

[14]  E. Goldsmith,et al.  The Support Economy , 2003 .

[15]  J. Kendall.  The mainstreaming of the third sector into public policy in England in the late 1990s: whys and wherefores , 2000 .

[16]  G. Salomon.  Distributed cognitions : psychological and educational considerations , 1997 .

[17]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Charitable technologies: opportunities for collaborative computing in nonprofit fundraising , 2008, CSCW.

[18]  W. Powell,et al.  The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields , 1983 .

[19]  Kirk L. Kroeker.  Engineering the web's third decade , 2010, CACM.

[20]  J. Schofield.  Increasing the generalizability of qualitative research. , 1993 .

[21]  Lara C. Stache,et al.  Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age , 2012, Rhetoric and Public Affairs.