Identifying Theories of Agency In Information Systems

Previous research has suggested that systems that are designed according to existing methodology fail in routine contexts whereas others that have evolved in such contexts without a traditional methodology work better. In previous work we have suggested that this is because the theory about purposeful activity that underlies the design of a system has an impact on the success of the system in particular task domains. In order to investigate this empirically we need to establish a method for determining the underlying theory of agency that informs an existing system’s approach to purposeful activity. This poses the following question: how do we recognize the theories of agency in systems? To investigate this, we propose a method for extracting the theory of agency from an existing system where we have tentatively assigned an underlying theory of agency to the system but want to definitively categorize it. This is a vital first step in developing an IS design methodology for routine information systems.