Organizational Semiotics: Evolving a Science of Information Systems covers such issues as: -Fundamental concepts such as 'information', 'data', 'message', 'communication', 'knowledge', 'organization', 'system' and so on; -Properties of signs vital to organizational functioning, such as their meanings, the intentions they express and the valuable social consequences they produce; -'Architecture' of organizations when they are viewed as information systems, based on their semiotics features; -Understanding language in organizational contexts, for example, the limitations on the language used to conduct business affairs; -The empirical study of communications for requirements elicitation; -Applying semiotic categories (e.g. physical, empiric, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, social) to various problems; -Organizational knowledge representation; -Business process re-engineering methods and the design of e-commerce systems.

This edited volume brings together two largely separate fields – organization studies and multimodal social semiotics – to develop an integrated research agenda for the novel interdisciplinary field of ‘organizational semiotics’. Organizations, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental, dominate much of everyday life, and multimodal communication is not only an output of organizations, but is also constitutive of them. This volume argues in particular for the importance of organization studies for social semioticians – not just as a site of application, but also as a critical contemporary context that requires novel and expanded methods of analysis and critique, and new practices of partnership. The volume addresses a range of institutions and sectors, from civil to retail to medical, from corporations to universities, and reveals how a deep engagement with their meaning-making practices produces insights not just about communication but also about the broader contemporary cultural context in which organizations play such a significant role. Fundamentally, it reveals that the rich analytical and theoretical resources of multimodal perspectives on organizations studies can – and should – make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of organizations in social life. This volume is relevant to social semioticians and organizational researchers as well as to practitioners and decision-makers in organizations.

Drawing meaningful conclusions from organisational data is challenging, and theoretical frameworks can often illuminate information in fresh and useful ways. This book is one of the first to demonstrate how organisational semiotics can be applied to business informatics and information systems. Semiotics, a long-established discipline of signs, offers a rich philosophical and theoretical foundation for understanding information systems. This book demonstrates how applying the framework of semiotics to an organisation can provide insights into its communication needs, and as a result, enhance the design of its information system. The authors demonstrate how organisations collect, process, represent, store and consume information through a complex system which is aligned to support its objectives and enhance performance. Organisational Semiotics for Business Informatics clearly introduces the basic principles and describes a set of methods and techniques rooted in organisational semiotics. These have been applied to business applications; demonstrated through real life case studies. This ground-breaking book has the potential to transform the theoretical understanding of information systems into the basis of a scientific discipline.

This volume stresses the contemporary relevance of semiotics. The introductory chapter shows how the collection of papers emphasises crossings at the material level of physical reality as well as in their semio-cognitive and cultural implications, questioning the delimitation of interdisciplinary borders between the social sciences and humanities and STEM disciplines. The volume shows how semiotics continues to provide a framework for emerging knowledge traditions without completely disregarding its past. Through explorations in fields as wide apart as ecological psychology and visualisation systems, by finding correspondences between the arithmetic of music and cosmic energies or between the pedagogic significance of images and habitat facilities, as well as using investigation tools ranging from the mathematical representation of concepts to science education, this book addresses multifarious aspects and implications of culture and cognition, standing convincing proof that semiotics is as alive, productive and scholarly useful as ever.

As the use of remote work has recently skyrocketed, digital transformation within the workplace has gone under a microscope, and it has become abundantly clear that the incorporation of new technologies in the workplace is the future of business. These technologies keep businesses up to date with their capabilities to perform remote work and make processes more efficient and effective than ever before. In understanding digital transformation in the workplace there needs to be advanced research on technology, organizational change, and the impacts of remote work on the business, the employees, and day-to-day work practices. This advancement to a digital work culture and remote work is rapidly undergoing major advancements, and research is needed to keep up with both the positives and negatives to this transformation. The Research Anthology on Digital Transformation, Organizational Change, and the Impact of Remote Work contains hand-selected, previously published research that explores the impacts of remote work on business workplaces while also focusing on digital transformation for improving the efficiency of work. While highlighting work technologies, digital practices, business management, organizational change, and the effects of remote work on employees, this book is an all-encompassing research work intended for managers, business owners, IT specialists, executives, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how digital transformation and remote work is affecting workplaces.

A research agenda for collaborative networks Purpose. Many practical application experiments and pilot cases nowadays provide evidence on what works and what still remains as a challenge for collaborative networked organizations (CNOs). The fast evolution of the information and communication technologies and in particular the so-called Internet technologies, also represents an important motivator for the emergence of new forms of collaboration. However, most efforts in this area are highly fragmented, considering only some partial facets and not a holistic perspective that would be required. We are therefore at a point in which it is necessary to define much more consolidated and sustainable research strategies for a second phase of research and development in this area. This book addresses the main disciplines involved in CNOs. It further synthesizes the views and opinions expressed by a large number of visionaries from the main disciplines involved in CNOs, and offers a comprehensive set of recommendations for the establishment of a research agenda on collaborative networks. As recognized experts in their specific areas, different authors in this book have presented work that is backed by a large number of research results, each focusing on specific facets of collaborative networks, and coming out of a large number of international and national projects.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.