How Should Technology Affordances Be Measured? An Initial Comparison of Two Approaches

Technology affordance and constraint theory (TACT) is an emerging perspective in the Information Systems (IS) literature to understand technology use and consequences. A technology affordance (or constraint) is defined as a relational construct that depends on the interaction between technology features and individual goals (e.g.,Leonardi 2013; Majchrzak and Markus 2012; Strong et al. 2014; Volkoff and Strong 2013). Most of the existing TACT research is either qualitative or conceptual. Researchers argue that to establish the status of TACT as a lens to understand technology use and consequence, it is necessary to apply TACT to a specific context, generate some testable propositions and empirically test these developed propositions (Majchrzak and Markus 2012). Measuring technology affordances represents a challenge to researchers.