Research
Five lines of inquiry into how digital technologies reshape trust, control, and collaboration.
Two newer programs sit alongside three lines built over the prior decade. The newer work theorizes how agentic AI is reorganizing knowledge work, governance, and evaluation, and how digital platforms substitute for institutions in the Global South. The established lines cover digital trust and platform behavior, networks and spatial systems of arrangement, and control and emotion in digital work.
- 15
- 8
- 2,327
- AE, JAIS & CAIS
AI, Governance, and the Reorganization of Knowledge Work
Agentic AI is restructuring how organizations produce, govern, evaluate, and disclose cognitive work. This is the most active line in the portfolio: a theory of how production time decouples from the temporal cues institutions use to evaluate work; a theory of how delegating productive labor to AI converts it into cognitive vigilance; a theory of functional absorption that explains how general-purpose AI agents displace categories of specialized software; and a connected program on how firms disclose, govern, and lobby around AI ethics. The work is targeted at FT 50 and other top journals.
Under review
Tripp, J.
Theorizes how delegating productive cognitive work to AI agents does not eliminate the labor but reorganizes it into a continuous regime of supervisory vigilance, with implications for skill, fatigue, and the experience of work.
Tripp, J.
Detects compositional shifts in the entry pattern of online product reviews following the public release of ChatGPT, asking what large-scale generative AI does to the integrity of user-generated content infrastructures.
Featured working papers
A selection of papers in the active pipeline, targeted at FT 50 and other top journals. Additional conceptual projects are not listed here.
Tripp, J.
Develops a theory of how agentic AI compresses production time without recalibrating the temporal expectations institutions use to evaluate work. Introduces temporal theater, the deliberate decoupling of production time from display time, and theorizes why lower-status actors disproportionately bear the burden of staging that delay.
Tripp, J.
Argues that generative AI does not only accelerate research but reorders its constituent learning processes, with consequences for how the field should evaluate methodological contribution, mentorship, and graduate training.
Tripp, J.
Develops a theory of functional absorption to explain why general-purpose AI agents simultaneously displace many categories of specialized software, and what determines which functions are absorbed first.
Tripp, J.
A companion theory to functional absorption. Argues that AI development tools do not reduce software risk but displace it, transforming the kinds of failure organizations have to govern.
Tripp, J.
Treats corporate AI investments as real options that firms stage, scale, pivot, and abandon, and uses corporate disclosure text to recover the staging behavior empirically.
Tripp, J., Declan, A., Taylor, A.
Examines how healthcare organizations translate AI ethics regulation through pre-existing economic logics, and how that translation determines whether compliance becomes substantive governance or surface-level ceremony.
Digital Innovation in the Global South
How digital platforms substitute for, reshape, or fail to substitute for the institutions that classical economic theory takes for granted. Built around cross-border microlending, ethical surveillance in East Africa, and the cultural and geographic frictions that platforms encounter when they scale into deep institutional voids. Current work asks whether digital exposure attenuates distance (it does not, for cultural distance), how platforms reach institutional voids without customizing to them, and what the ethics of market-infrastructure-as-surveillance demand of firms operating in the Global South.
Under review
Tripp, J.
Uses 17 years of Kiva cross-border microlending data to test whether digital exposure attenuates the cultural and geographic distances that classically structure international economic exchange, finding cultural distance instead deepens as scale grows.
Tripp, J.
Examines how the same digital systems that enable markets in the Global South also function as instruments of surveillance, and what that dual character demands of business ethics. Grounded in field engagement with AVODA Group in Uganda.
Featured working papers
A selection of papers in the active pipeline, targeted at FT 50 and other top journals. Additional conceptual projects are not listed here.
Tripp, J.
A three-dimension null discovery on Kiva: the platform reaches institutional voids at scale, but shows no void-moderated customization on sector opacity, gender, or borrower tenure. Reads the absence of customization as evidence of an institutional-substitution mechanism that is reach-driven rather than fit-driven.
Digital Trust, Privacy, and Platform Behavior
How individuals construct trust and manage privacy in technology-mediated environments. The thread runs from a foundational reconceptualization of trust in technology, through cluster and nomological models of Facebook privacy behavior, into the trust dynamics that distinguish one sharing-economy platform from another.
Published
Tripp, J., McKnight, D. H., Lankton, N. K.
Shows that adoption of sharing-economy platforms hinges on platform-specific trust stories rather than a generalized trust model, refining trust transfer theory.
Lankton, N. K., McKnight, D. H., Tripp, J.
Integrates privacy calculus with uses and gratifications to test a full nomological network of antecedents, behaviors, and outcomes of Facebook privacy practices.
Lankton, N. K., McKnight, D. H., Tripp, J.
Identifies distinct privacy behavior types showing that users enact privacy through patterned strategies rather than single behaviors, challenging one-dimensional treatments of privacy in IS.
Lankton, N. K., McKnight, D. H., Tripp, J.
Reconceptualizes trust in technology by introducing perceived humanness as a dimension that shifts the basis of trust between interpersonal and system-based beliefs. Widely cited as a foundation for current work on trustworthy AI and conversational agents.
Under review
Tripp, J., Lankton, N.
Uses response surface analysis and discrete surface probing to show that trust transfer is highest under aligned antecedents and weakest under misalignment, with source trust as a compensating mechanism.
Networks, Platforms, and Spatial Systems of Arrangement
How structural arrangements (relational networks, digital platforms, geography) reshape interaction patterns and redistribute risk and opportunity. The work spans the symbolic capital embedded in journal classifications, the public-safety consequences of platform entry, and a theoretical case for taking geography seriously in IS research.
Published
Tripp, J., Wimble, M., Shortridge, A. M.
Argues that IS has under-theorized geography as a system of arrangement, and introduces a toolkit of spatially explicit methods (clustering, spatial interaction, space–time convergence) for the next wave of geospatial IS research.
Cunningham, S., DeAngelo, G., Tripp, J.
Finds that the Erotic Services platform restructured prostitution markets toward safer indoor channels, associated with a 17.4% reduction in female homicide and a 10.9% reduction in reported rape. Cross-disciplinary impact in economics and policy.
Chipidza, W., Tripp, J.
Demonstrates that the symbolic classification of the AIS Basket of 8 reshaped collaboration networks and reduced inequality in institutional and geographic representation.
Chipidza, W., Tripp, J.
Maps the structure of co-authorship in IS, identifying centers of influence and the antecedents that shape tie formation across the field.
Under review
Tripp, J.
Theorizes how individuals derive value from participation in multi-functional networks; current work pairs the model with simulation evidence.
Control, Team Dynamics, and Emotion in Digital Work
How control mechanisms, collaborative routines, and collective emotion jointly shape outcomes in digital work. The empirical base is agile software development, but the theoretical reach extends to job redesign, professional identity, and an emerging socio-technical theory of group emotion in IS.
Published
Tripp, J., Sambamurthy, V.
Introduces team-managed formal control as a governance mechanism in agile contexts, contesting the assumption that formal control is exclusively a managerial activity.
Tripp, J., Sambamurthy, V.
Treats agile feedback practices as contingent control mechanisms, showing that their effect on software quality depends on the type of environmental uncertainty teams face.
Dinger, M., Thatcher, J. B., Grover, V., Tripp, J.
Finds that workgroup embeddedness fosters citizenship and commitment but also amplifies work-life conflict, with professionalism intensifying both sides of the double-edged sword.
Tripp, J., Armstrong, D. J.
Shows that firms adopt agile with different motives (efficiency vs. flexibility), shaping the tailoring of practices and downstream performance outcomes.
Tripp, J., Riemenschneider, C., Thatcher, J. B.
Establishes agile practices as a form of work redesign, linking iterative planning, continuous feedback, and customer collaboration to job characteristics that raise satisfaction independent of technical performance.
Under review
Tripp, J., Hansen, S.
Argues that psychological safety in software teams is not solely an interpersonal phenomenon but is materially scaffolded by the socio-technical artifacts teams act through, with implications for how safety can be designed for rather than only cultivated.
Featured working papers
A selection of papers in the active pipeline, targeted at FT 50 and other top journals. Additional conceptual projects are not listed here.
Tripp, J.
Develops a socio-technical theory of group emotion in IS, integrating distributed cognition and collective affect to explain how emotional dynamics emerge in uncertain digital work. Currently restructuring around a group-connective construct and a four-mechanism architecture.