Theorisation In Critical Realist Is Research And Its Implications On Structure And Agency Interplay: A Morphogenetic Approach

The paper develops a conceptual framework to advance the understanding on theorising the sociomateriality of Information technology (IT) especially with regards to a complex inverse information infrastructure (II) that depicts emergent usage behaviour. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenetic approach, derived from the critical realism (CR) philosophy, we discuss the relevance of understanding theory/theorisation from a critical realist perspective and its implications on structure and agency interplay. We also highlight the contributions of realists’ theorisation to IS research and the need to identify the mechanisms that give rise to emergent IT usage as a future research endeavour. We then propose the morphogenetic model of emergent IT usage behaviour which questions the assumption of the duality of structure and agency, instead of conceptualising them separately. We illustrate this approach with a discussion of a specific example of web personalised systems for online banking services, as an example of a complex inverse II.