Material Works: Exploring the Situated Entanglement of Technological Performativity and Human Agency

Rose, Jones and Truex (2005) offer a valuable discussion of the issue that has occupied center stage in IS research for decades: how to conceptualize the relationship between technology and organizations? They raise a number of important concerns with existing approaches to this issue, and by highlighting these limitations, Rose, Jones and Truex challenge us to rethink our cherished assumptions and conventional approaches to studying information systems (IS) phenomena. The question of the relationship between technology and organizations is a fundamental one in the IS literature, and goes to the heart of how we think about, study, and develop information technologies. Whether explicitly addressed by IS researchers in their work, or not, all IS studies reflect a particular position on this question (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). And that position has tended to swing, like a pendulum throughout the history of IS research (Kling and Scaachi, 1982; Markus and Robey 1988), from those privileging the technology (technological determinism, discrete-entity tool view, autonomous technology), to those favoring the social (strategic choice view, web-based ensemble models), and then onto more middle-ground approaches as reflected in socio-technical and emergent perspectives.