Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces

ion? Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself? Like so many true things, this one doesn't resolve itself to a black or a white. Nor is it gray. It is, along with the rest of life, black/white. Both/neither." {John Perry Barlow 1995, p. 56) 1. What Is Infrastructure? People who study how technology affects organizational transformation increasingly recognize its dual, paradoxical nature. It is both engine and barrier for change; both customizable and rigid; both inside and outside organizational practices. It is product and process. Some authors have analyzed this seeming paradox as structuration: (after Giddens)—technological rigidities give rise to adaptations which in turn require calibration and standardization. Over time, structureagency relations re-form dialectically (Orlikowski 1991, Davies and Mitchell 1994, Korpela 1994). This paradox is integral to large scale, dispersed technologies (Brown 1047-7047/96/0701/0111$01.25 Copyright © 1996, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH Vol. 7, No. 1, March 1996 111