Dear All,

You are cordially invited to the lecture organized by Department of Management (DM), Faculty of Business and Management (FBM). Details of the lecture are as follows:

Topic: Beyond Intention: Understanding the Contextual Influences on and the Chronological Order of Insider Computer Abuse

Speaker: Professor Robert Willison, the International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University

Time: 2:00-3:30pm, 13 May 2026

Venue: T1-108

Language: English

Speaker:

Robert Willison is a professor of management at the International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University. For his doctorate, in Information Systems (IS), he studied at the London School of Economics. He has published in leading IS journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Information and Organization, and Information and Management. His research predominantly focuses on IS security, with a specific focus on insider computer abuse, but more recently he has studied the elderly digital divide.

Abstract:

Insider computer abuse (ICA) represents a major threat to organizations, with incidents frequently costing firms excessive amounts of money in damages and reputational damage. Despite laudable attempts in the extant research to understand the insider, we argue that this research is primarily predicated on two assumptions. First, insider behavior relates solely to the perpetration of ICA and is studied mainly in intention or behavior models. The second assumption is that the organizational context will have negligible influence on an insider’s actions. Although most of the ICA papers reflect these two assumptions, a small number have suggested that insider behavior precedes the formation of intentions and that contextual influences play a central role in ICA. We thus concluded that the extant literature lacks clarity and requires further clarification. Consequently, we studied how an insider’s behavior unfolds in a real-world ICA incident and the related contextual influences, using an interpretive case study. We drew on a highly ecologically valid data source, which involved the court transcripts relating to the prosecution of Christopher Grupe, a former Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) employee found guilty of sabotaging the company’s computer network. Leveraging this case study, based on an analysis of the 752-page court transcript, our findings reveal ICA behavior that precedes the crime and emphasize the centrality of contextual influences in such incidents. Our study offers notable contributions in practice, theory, and methodology.

Please scan the QR code in the poster for registration.