The internet has given birth to an expanding number of shared virtual reality spaces, with a collective population well into the millions. These virtual worlds exhibit most of the traits we associate with the Earth world: economic transactions, interpersonal relationships, organic political...

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per...

Several million people currently have accounts in massively multi-player online games, places in cyberspace that are effectively large-scale shared virtual reality environments. The population of these virtual worlds has grown rapidly since their inception in 1996; significantly, each world also...

How has innovative and competitive behavior in computing and Internet markets evolved over the past half-century? In the first section of this review, I discuss these questions in light of six topics: the limited role for technology push; the diffusion of general-purpose technologies; the...

In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called "Norrath", populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per...

Increasingly, software is no longer developed as a single system, but rather as a smart combination of so-called software services. Each of these provides an independent, specific and relatively small piece of functionality, which is typically accessible through the Internet from internal or...

The notion of best practice is a foundational concept for vendors of Enterprise Resource Planning systems who use it to support a claim to provide tried and tested, ‘best of breed’ process models. This study illustrates how a best practice ERP system was actually created. The product...

This paper develops a temporal perspective to examine information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption and processes of globalization. The foundations of our theoretical approach explicitly draw upon three intersecting planes of temporality implicit in structuration; namely...

Research in this article traces the origins of a not-for-profit financial institution the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (S.W.I.T.). Swift is a core part of the financial services infrastructure and widely regarded as the most secure trusted third party network in...