Involvement

How does involvement differ from engagement?

• involvement often refers to user participation in a systems development process
  
• is distinguished from participation, being a separate construct that refers to a psychological state (Barki, 1989 : 53)
• is an intervening variable between user participation and system use (Hartwick, 1994) (which seems a bit like engagement being the intermediate variable between website drivers and consumer behaviour in Mollen's MRes dissertation)
• job involvement has to do with self image and how employees employ themselves in the performance of their job (Saks, 2006: 602)
• managers can be "a priori involved" or "inquiry involved" (Swanson, 1974) depending on whether they make queries about using a system or whether they initiate changes. Activities that make a change possible sound a bit like engagement to me.
• "working with others to get things done" {Axelrod, 2004 :xi} written after Axelrod's book on engagement makes it sound like Axelrod thinks engagement and involvement are the same.
  

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AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.
SWANSON, E. B. (1974) MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS: APPRECIATION AND INVOLVEMENT. Management Science, 21, 178-188.

Participation

I'm trying to distinguish between engagement and other concepts like participation.

• user participation for developing and testing IT projects
• dimensions of participation are: responsibility, hands-on activities, user-IS relationships (Barki and Hartwick, 1994 :423)
• "a set of behaviours or activities performed by users in the system development process" (Barki and Hartwick, 1989)
• increases bureaucracy {Axelrod, 2001}
  
• involves hearts and minds (Handley et al., 2007)
• leads to involvement (Hartwick and Barki, 1994)
• refers to a process of taking part and to the relationship with others that reflects the process, i.e. both action and connection, reserved for actors who are members of social communities (p56). It is not collaboration. It is a constituent of meaning so is broader than engagement. (Wenger, 1998)

Now that last point by Wenger, does sound important. Engagement is a sub-set of participation, whereas I'd been thinking of participation as something specialised, that meant users of systems had to participate (because management said so) but that management didn't do. Wenger's point concurs with Mike Hales findings that participation in design can work, but that strategic management has to do something too.

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AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations. Journal for Quality & Participation, 24, 22.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1994) Measuring User Participation, User Involvement, and User Attitude. MIS Quarterly, 18, 59-82.
HALES, M. (1993) User participation in design - what it can deliver, what it can't and what this means for management. IN QUINTAS, P. (Ed.) Social dimensions of systems engineering: people, processes, policies and software development. Horwood.
HANDLEY, K., CLARK, T., FINCHAM, R. & STURDY, A. (2007) Researching Situated Learning. Management Learning, 38, 173-191.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Jermias

I've been reading Johnny Jermias' paper on accountability [1]. Unlike all the papers that I've recently read about EU accountability, he at least has the results of experiments to report. Although the stress in his research is on overconfidence and resistance to change, he reports that accountability mitigates and attenuates overconfidence in a system. He suggests that someone could research the impact of accountability on overconfidence when performance is evaluated against a goal that is set participatively.

I like this idea. The public sector seems to be moving to more participative governance (probably a way of avoiding accountability), but could goals be set participatively? Imagine a school governing body. Who would set the goals? Usually it's the governing body in conjunction with the head teacher, so would other stakeholders participate, and then who would be evaluated? Probably only the head teacher and the teachers, not the governors. Wouldn't the governors be accountable for setting up this participation anyhow? I can't see how to set up the research situation, unless it's a totally artificial one like Jermias' experiment with statistical results.

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Jermias, J. 2006. The influence of accountability on overconfidence and resistance to change: A research framework and experimental evidence. Management Accounting Research, 17(4): 370-388.