Involuntary Adoption of Information and Communication Technologies During Emergencies: Temporality of Technology Use in Virtual Collaborations

Abstract

Emergencies often require multiple organizations to respond, and coordinating this response may involve the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated both the potential and challenges of ICT use within emergency collaborations, especially as ICT adoption was often spontaneous and forced, rather than voluntary and planned. In this research, we engaged a temporal perspective, which is interested in how organizational members understand and enact time, to understand involuntary ICT adoption. This study consisted of interviews and observations of a public safety collaboration during the pandemic. We found two themes in how ICT use changed over time during the pandemic: first, understanding of the crisis was interpreted through ICT usage, and second, constraints to collaboration caused by ICTs were ultimately transformed into assets. This study contributes to ICT scholarship by finding that, beyond conveying collaboration information, ICT use also influences and changes the collaborative process over time.