The concept of IS ecosystem has grown beyond the organisational confines. Whilst the expansion of the IS ecosystems concept looked promising for the developing world the nature of its impact is not clearly understood in broader society. Most of the research available on implementation studies that involved IS ecosystems, past and present, have been in developed countries. A need arose to conduct studies in developing countries, especially those with an almost equal balance between formal and informal economies coined hybrid economies, shifting focus to the interplay between ICT4D and mainstream IS governed by a continuously changing context. A gap arose to understand the evolution of the IS ecosystem beyond the organisational confines, its impact on society its context, and how it is being influenced by society and its context. The aim of the study is to enlightened academia and industry on the IS ecosystems evolution through the theoretical lenses of Actor Network Theory (ANT), Structuration Theory (ST) and the Knowledge Creation Theory, especially the concept of Ba, by exploring the emergent and designed associations that impact it and how it influenced these associations. This study deploys a qualitative research strategy with an interpretive theme using inductive reasoning as the main method of enquiry with some elements of abductive reasoning. The case study approach is chosen with the focus on selecting data during a mobile payment implementation project in South Africa via interviews and observation, supported by internal and external documentation. The interpretation of the data collected led to discovering how different a mobile payment IS ecosystem evolved in the organisational, business and consumer environments. The results indicate that, although the implementation was successful in some settings like the organisational environment where more control can be exercised, when the implementation extends beyond the borders of the organisation the power dynamics change. The research further highlights how the mobile payment IS ecosystem influences and is being influenced by society and its context. It also highlights how context (time and space) “is both constitutive of social action and itself the outcome of social action. Social action reinforced the notion that context is a social structure which is identical to Giddens duality of structure theorem. This led to the understanding that the IS ecosystem is a never constant but constantly evolving and dynamic. Since social structures was evaluation in this study it also highlights the impact on IS ecosystem pre and post pandemic conditions. Additionally, traditional contextual analyses focus on the environment, this study proposes a different view on contextual analysis that may benefit future contextual analysis. Given this consideration, future research may consider focusing on the phronetic research approach to extract more detailed contextual data and how it impacts the value and well-being of the actors participating in the evolution of an IS ecosystem. This study will also contribute to the development or conception of new methods to aid similar IS ecosystems evolution and research studies in a pre and post pandemic environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/35624 |
| Date | 26 January 2022 |
| Creators | Harry, Ricardo |
| Contributors | Sewchurran, Kosheek, Brown, Irwin |
| Publisher | Faculty of Commerce, Graduate School of Business (GSB) |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, Doctoral, PhD |
| Format | application/pdf |
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