Search results

In highly digitalised countries such as Denmark, statistics show that one out of four employees has experienced high levels of stress. However, despite ample research evidence on the presence of technostress, the knowledge on this phenomenon is not yet part of the material and guidelines from official authorities. Previous research on technostress provides quantitative psychological and neurophysiological perspectives on technostress, focussing on the individual, the technology or the technological environment. The authors see this as a limited approach, as it leaves out the social environment in which technostress arises. The authors aim to expose the sociological mechanisms that contribute to technostress by using the sociological lens of obligation. The authors ask: ‘What is the knowledge that the sociological lens of obligation can bring to the theoretical understanding of technostress?’ To answer our research question, the authors employ an embedded case study in Denmark by looking into the existing political material and interviews with 14 employees across 6 organisations. The authors find that stress in practice is mostly addressed from a response perspective, which points to the individual. This view is inherent in how the individuals take responsibility for the technostress they experience. Another critical finding from our data is that technostress is socially constructed. The authors contribute to theory by using a new-to-IS theory and a qualitative approach to technostress research, which allows us to uncover how the social construction of obligation impacts the individual employee. Our theoretical contributions point to a need for practice to move in the direction of seeing technostress as a societal, rather than solely individual, responsibility.

The paper aims to investigate how customers may contribute to radical innovation in consultancy services and the conditions needed for customers to be involved in such radical service innovations.

The paper uses a qualitative case study approach including rich descriptions based primarily on interviews to investigate an extreme example of successful customer involvement in the development of radical service innovations at Ramboll, a leading Scandinavian engineering consultancy.

The study reveals that customers may be involved in radical innovation processes to different degrees. However, actively involving customers in radical services innovation require a relationship between the customer company and the service provider that might be described as a partnership in which ongoing learning takes place to develop new solutions. The findings reveal that unsolved problems as well as personal trust are key in making customers involved in radical service innovations. Customers involved actively are further characterised by possessing high expertise and extraordinary personal engagement.

As in all case studies, the main limitation of the study is the generalisability of the findings. More cases would help to shed light on the generalisability of the findings across other radical innovation projects within the same company or in similar types of company.

The study contributes with new and detailed insights into both how to involve customers in radical service innovations and the conditions and challenges found in doing so.

The purpose of this article is to investigate whether management and employees in academic libraries involve users in library service innovations and what these user roles are.

The article first reviews the literature focusing on innovation, new product development, new service development and library science with specific focus on users and management. Subsequently the research uses a case study approach to investigate management and customer involvement in a Danish academic library.

Results from the case study show that academic libraries are making some attempts to draw on customers in service innovations and not only rely on management and employees. The main conclusion is that there are unexplored possibilities for customer involvement in library service innovations.

One limitation relates to the difficulty of generalization of the findings to other Danish libraries and especially other national contexts. The other one relates to the preponderance of the literature from sources outside the field of library management and library science. Therefore, library managers might have to be cautious in using the results of this study.

The article has practical implications for library managers, employees, library science and innovation researchers alike.

The article is original because it generates new insights into management and especially customer involvement in academic library service innovations on the basis of an in‐depth case study of a Danish academic library.