5. Contribution and future implications
5.1. Contribution Our paper makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on mobile ICTs and organizational fluidity. As a theoretical paper, it adheres to the standards established by Whetten [133], in delivering new theories relevant to both academic and practitioners. Notably, this is an example of a cross-level theory that describes “the relationship between independent and dependent variables at differentlevels” [102,p. 20]. The mobile ICT affordances are mostly at the individual level, whereas fluidity is at the organizational level. This cross-level theorizing is valuable.5 In organizational research, cross-level theorizing is in great demand, with some arguing “that cross-level . . . effects are so central to an understanding of organizational phenomena that they should be distinctive features of organizational scholarship . . . ” often, a focus of such cross-level analyses has been how organizational properties emerge from activities occurring at the lower (e.g., individual/team) levels of analyses [134,p. 541]. While the focus of such theories is often apparently individuals, they are actually individuals embedded in an organizational context [56]. In this context, it is useful to note that regardless of how we define IT affordances, they basically refer to what IT allows users to do in an organizational context [72,140]. The IS discipline has increasingly considered cross-level/multilevel theories. Notably, one of the “highly valued characteristics” in MIS Quarterly Theory and Review include “multilevel theory” [71,p. v].
