Social Process: a Structurational Model

Prior research has shown that social interactions are important in order to understand the phenomena involved in information systems development. However, most traditional research largely ignores these issues. DeSanctis and Poole (1994) made an important contribution to the study of social dynamics in information systems research with their Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST). Although the concepts have found broad acceptance for the study of information technology (IT) uses and effects, AST has not been widely used for studying the process of designing IT artifacts and developing information systems. In this paper we transfer AST to studying information systems development as a social process. We build on Markus and Silver’s (2008) redefinition of AST’s core concepts ‘structural features’ and ‘spirit’ as technical objects, functional affordances, and symbolic expressions, and we extend them with relational concepts for agents and activities that we derive from social construction of technology (SCOT) studies. The result is an AST-based model that describes the information systems development process. We illustrate and discuss how researchers might use these concepts to generate hypotheses in studies of information systems development processes.