Seats at the table: The network of the editorial boards in information and library science

The structural properties of the network generated by the editorial activities of the members of the boards of “Information Science & Library Science” journals are explored through network analysis techniques. The crossed presence of scholars on editorial boards, the phenomenon called interlocking editorship, is considered a proxy of the similarity of editorial policies. The evidences support the idea that this group of journals is better described as a set of only relatively connected subfields. In particular two main subfields are identified, consisting of research oriented journals devoted respectively to LIS and MIS. The links between these two subsets are weak. Around these two subsets there are a lot of (relatively) isolated professional journals or journals characterized more by their subject-matter content than by their focus on information flows. It is possible to suggest that this configuration of the network may be the consequence of the youthfulness of Information Science & Library Science, which has not permitted yet to reach a general consensus through scholars on research aims, methods and instruments.     

Intrafirm diffusion of new technologies: an empirical application

Research on the diffusion of new technologies has centred on the study of the interfirm rate of diffusion, paying much less attention to intrafirm aspects. This paper attempts to overcome this gap in the literature by analysing the factors that influence the speed with which a new technology, the ATM, is fully adopted. The data over which the hypotheses are tested belongs to the Spanish savings banks market. The results show that the rate of intrafirm diffusion is explained by innovation, firm and market characteristics. In testing our hypotheses we make use of both traditional methods and survival analysis techniques.     

The effects of new technologies on productivity: An intrafirm diffusion-based assessment

This paper studies the impact of new technologies on productivity from the perspective of the technological diffusion literature. We argue that several stylised facts about the intrafirm diffusion process are not taken into account in most current research, which results in potentially erroneous conclusions. We critically assess different approaches that have been taken when studying the effects of technology adoption on productivity, and relate them to the main findings of the literature on technology diffusion with the aim of identifying the advantages of an intrafirm diffusion approach. We then conduct an empirical analysis on a sample that describes the diffusion of an innovation - the Automated Teller Machine - among Spanish savings banks from 1986 to 2004 in both its extensive (interfirm) and intensive (intrafirm) dimensions. Our results show that only the consideration of the intrafirm diffusion process is able to account for the contribution of the technology to productivity.