Distributed Tuning of Boundary Resources: The Case of Apple's iOS Service System

By Ben D. Eaton, Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood, Carsten Sørensen, Youngjin Yoo. MIS Q., 2015

575 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The digital age has seen the rise of service systems involving highly distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-integrating actors whose relationships are governed by shared institutional logics, standards, and digital technology. The cocreation of service within these service systems takes place in the context of a paradoxical tension between the logic of generative and democratic innovations and the logic of infrastructural control. Boundary resources play a critical role in managing the tension as a firm that owns the infrastructure can secure its control over the service system while independent firms can participate in the service system. In this study, we explore the evolution of boundary resources. Drawing on Pickering's (1993) and Barrett et al.'s (2012) conceptualizations of tuning, the paper seeks to forward our understanding of how heterogeneous actors engage in the tuning of boundary resources within Apple's iOS service system. We conduct an embedded case study of Apple's iOS service system with an in-depth analysis of 4,664 blog articles concerned with 30 boundary resources covering 6 distinct themes. Our analysis reveals that boundary resources of service systems enabled by digital technology are shaped and reshaped through distributed tuning, which involves cascading actions of accommodations and rejections of a network of heterogeneous actors and artifacts. Our study also shows the dualistic role of power in the distributed tuning process.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e42be56ffe6dacd5f68489566b9300b169143f6c

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Citations in the corpus

Introduction - Platforms and Infrastructures in the Digital Age (2018, background): “At the same time, however, as the examples of Amazon and Alibaba show, a few companies now dominate the construction and maintenance of global digital infrastructures requiring prohibitive amounts of ﬁnancial and technological resources for market entry (Eaton et al. 2015, Tilson et al. 2010).”
Platform Ecosystems: How Developers Invert the Firm (2017, unknown): “Eaton et al. (2015) show that tensions have arisen among Apple, its developers who build on top of iOS, and its end-users, many of whom have “bricked” their devices in order to gain access to apps outside Apple’s control.”
Embracing Digital Innovation in Incumbent Firms: How Volvo Cars Managed Competing Concerns (2017, background): “These findings show how Volvo Cars managed competing concerns through an emergent tuning process of accommodation and resistance (Barrett et al. 2012; Eaton et al. 2015).”
Recombination in the open-ended value landscape of digital innovation (2018, background): “2015; Ghazawneh and Henfridsson 2013), and procrastinated binding of functionality (Eaton et al. 2015; Henfridsson et al. 2014).”
Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda (2021, background): “Such wider analysis may be helpful, for example, to shed light on the sociopolitical dynamics that may result in the concentration of digital platforms in a few regions of a few countries (Eaton et al., 2015).”
The digital platform: a research agenda (2018, methodology): “…there are so far only very few examples of intimate studies of digital platforms from the inside (for exception, see Alaimo, 2014), and so far most work is conducted by interviewing complementors (Selander et al., 2013), or by collecting data from an outside perspective (Eaton et al., 2015).”