A call to (Dis)order: An ethnomethodological study of information technology "Disruptions" in the courtroom

Various social and technical imperatives permeate discussions around information technology (IT) implementation. Given the importance of both social and technical elements in IT implementation, IS researchers have begun exploring how implementation outcomes emerge from an unpredictable interaction between these two elements. In this paper, we explore the use of conversation analysis, with its roots in ethnomethodology, to investigate how IT issues disrupt and disorder the conversational flow of a criminal trial, and how these disruptions are handled through secondary conversations that repair this flow. We focus on two IT issues that posed significant disruptions to the court s orderly conversational process, which during secondary conversations, reveal tacit institutional rules that are brought to the foreground to question and be questioned by these IT issues. We suggest that conversational analysis and ethnomethodological concepts, rarely studied in IS implementation research, provide a complementary research agenda for IS researchers and practitioners – to explore and intervene during the disruptions during IT implementation. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.