The Sociomateriality Of Boundary-Spanning Enterprise IS Design

The paper uses and extends upon a sociomaterial view of organizational IS by relating this to modalities of sensemaking across boundaries and levels of framing in managing the meaning of IS performativity. Data from a field study of Enterprise IS redesign at a US University are analyzed from an actor-network perspective to reveal a genealogy of IS design evolution. Three modalities of sociomaterial design boundary objects, bridging operations and conscription devices – are examined at multiple levels of design-framing, to understand the emergence of enterprise IS redesign, its political alignment and associated business processes. The result is a conceptual framework which explains how the meanings attached to an enterprise IS emerges are temporally emergent in practice, demonstrating interactions between levels of sensemaking which create unexpected consequences for IS users and exposing backstage negotiations that enable the meaning of an IS design to be managed in practice.