Sociomaterial practices: Challenges in developing a virtual business community platform in agriculture.
| Autor | Hoppen, Norberto |
| Cargo | Report |
Abstract
Virtual business communities (VBC) are virtual networks of people who share common interests and comprise online software platforms that enables the fast exchange of information, collaboration and business interactions. From 2011 to 2015, we developed a design science research to create a VBC platform for an agricultural cluster of flower growers in the South of Brazil. The goal of this platform was to help to structure and strengthen this cluster by bringing together buyers and sellers while fostering cooperation to boost cluster competitiveness and economic development in the region. However, a number of challenges surfaced during the process, which led to a failure in the VBC platform's diffusion. We adopted a sociomaterial perspective based on the mangle of practice concept (Pickering, 1993) to investigate this failure, by analyzing the key challenges involved in developing a VBC platform in an agricultural context. As its main result, this paper reveals the mangling process during the design and application of the VBC platform and details the different instances of tuning between the participants and the technology. We observed resistance and factors that weakened cooperation and resulted in a lack of governance rules, which are key to the success of a VBC platform.
Key words: virtual business communities; mangle of practice; ICT adoption; agriculture; design science research.
Introduction
Virtual business communities (VBC) are defined in this paper as virtual networks of people who share common interests and comprise online software platforms that enable the fast exchange of information, collaboration and business interactions. They are mediated social spaces that allow groups to achieve business goals and have a functional nature (Bagozzi & Dholakin, 2002). In the concept of VBC proposed in this paper, economic agents work together to create value-added processes with the support of Information and communication technology (ICT) platforms (Hackney, Burn, & Salazar, 2004; Markus & Loebbecke, 2013). Studies involving market organizations have focused on the economic impacts of such online environments, including lower transaction costs for buyers and sellers, 24/7 operations, better pricing, wider availability of product information, improved transparency of the price formation process, less collusion among buyers, less exploitation by middlemen and more streamlined supply chains (Banker, Mitra, & Sambamurthy, 2011; Kambil & Van Heck, 1998).
A key economic sector for the application of VBC platforms is agriculture, particularly in developing countries. A VBC platform can provide informational services, transactional services and e-governance to agricultural value chains (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2013; The World Bank, 2011), and in this way they (a) deliver access to price information, (b) manage production systems and (c) foster financial inclusion. The literature provides some examples of these applications, such as e-Choupal and iKisan.com in India, FarmerNet in Sri Lanka and DrumNet and KACE in Kenya (Ali & Kumar, 2011; FAO, 2013; Rao, 2007). Many developing countries are affected by problems of limited access to knowledge and large-scale information asymmetries in almost all stages of the agricultural value chain, which results in local communities being exploited and generates inefficiencies across the chain (Ali & Kumar, 2011; Rao, 2007). ICT can help to create opportunities for dialogue between previously isolated actors in agricultural supply chains and facilitate collaborative alliances between farmers and consumers. Information and knowledge are important factors in accelerating agricultural development by means of appropriate production planning, the adoption of improved cultivation practices and effective post-harvest management and marketing (Ali & Kumar, 2011; Vallauri, 2014). Access to markets requires logistics and low transaction costs, which must be combined with up-to-date market information (Magesa, Michael, & Ko, 2015).
Considering the potential of VBC platforms in the development of agriculture in developing countries, we present the results of a four-year longitudinal study based on design science research (Lacerda, Dresch, Proenca, & Antunes, 2013; Peffers, Tuunanen, Rothenberger, & Chatterjee, 2007) where a VBC platform in the flower sector was created. This sector has approximately 8,200 flower growers in Brazil and their gross revenue amounted to $ 2.42 billion in 2014 (Instituto Brasileiro de Floricultura [IBRAFLOR], 2015).
The VBC platform was developed collaboratively with members of a local flower association (henceforth Flowers Associated) that represents the cluster studied. The association showed interest in our project to create a technological artifact (i.e., software) that could support the economic development of the cluster. Flowers Associated presented characteristics of a face-to-face community. It is a group in which individuals come together around a shared purpose, interest and goal (Rothaermel & Sugiyama, 2001); and there were leaders that could be involved in the project (Koh, Kim, Butler, & Bock, 2007). The goal was to bring together buyers and sellers to foster collaboration and create business alliances among cluster firms, in order to achieve better collective efficiency by means of joint sales and the sharing of costs and logistics services.
This issue is relevant because, for example, Banker, Mitra and Sambamurthy (2011) highlighted the importance of carrying out empirical research on the impact of ICT on agricultural supply chains in developing countries, because ICT can positively affect the lives of millions of farmers around the world. This impact, however, has been poorly investigated in the information systems literature, which tends to emphasize demographic and individual variables that may influence the diffusion of ICT in agriculture (see, for instance, Ali & Kumar, 2011; Botsiou & Dagdilelis, 2013; Das, 2014; Lapple, Renwick, & Thorne, 2015). Some studies investigate factors such as access to technology, connectivity and digital inclusion among farmers (Moghaddam & Khatoon-Abadi, 2013; Rao, 2007) and focus primarily on technology and the benefits derived from the use of ICT by clusters, market organizations and virtual communities. However, these studies tend to overlook the development process of VBC platforms and the challenges faced when trying to make these benefits possible: there are few references to social elements such as the huge gaps in farmers' knowledge, their access to and use of IT, the diversity of organizational structures and processes to come across when attempting to implement ICT to support agriculture.
Therefore, our research question is: What are relevant challenges in the development and diffusion of VBCs platforms in agriculture? Our goal with this article is to analyze the main challenges faced when trying to develop and spread the use of a VBC platform in an agricultural cluster, while considering a sociomaterial perspective based on Pickering's mangle of practice concept (1993).
The mangle of practice is a relational perspective that can be broadly characterized as sociomaterial (Stein, Newell, Wagner, & Galliers, 2014). A sociomaterial perspective integrates technology, people and their work, and organizations when attempting to understand the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in organizational life (Jones, 2014). We analyzed the process involved in designing the software and the reasons for the failure in implementing it, because the proposed VBC software platform was not adopted by the community (Flower Association) that contributed to its development.
The research deals with a particularly complex problem (Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004) that is characterized by (a) varying requirements and constraints in an ill-defined context, (b) complex interactions between elements of the problem and its solution, (c) flexibility to change the design processes and artifacts, and (d) critical dependence on human cognitive and social abilities to produce effective solutions.
Lessons learned from our research can contribute to future developments of VBC platforms for agricultural clusters, networks, informal business communities or collaborative groups, particularly in relation to the development of ICT in agricultural value chains in developing countries. The discussion of our experience can also prove useful for policymakers and researchers interested in longitudinal design science research.
In the following section, we review the literature on VBC. We then present and discuss our theoretical foundation: Pickering's mangle of practice (1993). An outline of the research method, followed by a description of the process used to develop the VBC platform, a discussion and concluding remarks make up the remainder of the article.
Virtual Business Communities
Virtual business communities (VBC) are defined in this paper as virtual networks of people who share common interests and comprise online software platforms that enable the fast exchange of information, collaboration and business interactions. They are mediated social spaces that allow groups to achieve business goals. Such platforms connect buyers, sellers, suppliers, financial agents and R&D institutions that can work in tandem to create value-added processes with the support of ICT (Hackney et al., 2004; Markus & Loebbecke, 2013). As in other types of virtual communities, members participate by volitional choice, attempting to achieve mutual goals, and the environment is digitally mediated, allowing groups to be formed and sustained through virtual communication processes (Bagozzi & Dholakin, 2002). There are some drivers that encourage members' participation, such as the involvement of leaders, high levels of offline interactions and the usefulness of the community (Koh et al., 2007)...
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