From the editor
Authors: Stafford Tom , Chau Patrick Y.K. 
Published: August 2009

Hello, and welcome to the summer edition of Data Base! I trust your time away from work has been enjoyable and productive; but, in the event that you're carrying work with you as you enjoy the summer pursuits, here is an issue with something for everybody.

We lead with an article on formative measurement by Roberts and Thatcher. Formative construction and modeling has become quite popular of late, and the ability to effectively build and model indices for formative constructs is important to many emerging areas of MIS research. In this article, we have a nice compilation of the relevant literature to guide your thinking, but, more importantly, we also have a tutorial guide for how to do the actual work. We hope you will find this valuable and informative as you begin to consider the role of formative constructs in your research models.

This issue, we also provide an interesting look at recruitment for the IT profession. As Kuhn and Joshi point out in their article, the desire to achieve diversity in the IT workforce drives much recruitment planning and decision making, but little is yet known about gender differences in IT job perceptions of employees and their subsequent evaluations of their jobs and careers. In this article, we find that there are few differences on the basic and substantive aspects of workplace performance and work enjoyment, but, also, that there are some subtle differences that might not be immediately expected. For anyone interested in IT workforce composition or recruitment, this will be a useful piece of work to consider.

Mitchell and Zigurs give us a perspective on trust in virtual teams. Trust in the context of IT and its use is a critical topic, receiving much attention recently. There have been notable journal special issues, conference panels and landmark articles on the topic, but we are still just beginning to understand and appreciate the role that trust plays in the deployment of the IT function. This is especially important in the virtual team context, where individuals must cooperate without direct interpersonal contact.

Lastly, in this issue, Fink and Neumann bring us an international flavor with their study of Israeli firms and the impact of Web Services on their corporate operations. Data Base continues to bring you research from the far and varied corners of the globe, and this article is yet another example of how your Data Base is expanding its coverage to important international constituencies. In this article, results related to the deployment and management of Web service are provided for both general application, and also for the specific case of the Israeli IT market.

We hope you will continue to send us your best work as Data Base grows and expands into the future. Already the longest continually-published research publication on the topic of Management Information Systems, Data Base aims to provide important support and coverage for the international scholar in a variety of emerging and developed markets, world-wide. Please visit our online review and submission portal to upload your latest research for our consideration. You'll find it online at http://www.editorialmanager.com/sigmisdb/.