Extending the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) Framework to the Digital World

The rapid rise of digital technologies forces us to re-think our current conceptualization of Information Technologies (IT) where recent theoretical approaches like complexity, evolutionary and network theories tend to remain silent on human (managerial and organizational) choices underlying the development of digital technologies. In this Research-in-Progress paper, we first describe the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, originating in the 1980s. We then propose extending the SCOT framework along four dimensions in order to ensure its suitability for the digital world: (1) Technology – focus towards digital technologies, (2) Interaction – focus on interpersonal, person-technology, technology-technology and technology-physical environment interactions (3) Social Groups – focus on networked individualism, and (4) Context – focus on socio-digital context. We conclude by proposing to co-develop and test the extended framework as a joint effort across several academic disciplines in order to use it when conducting research on the social construction of digital ecosystems.