Semiotics, Virtual Organizations, and Information Systems

Traditional information system methods and organization theories fail to give a clear account of virtuality, virtual organizations, horizontalized organization structures and governance forms, and multiple active representations. Semiotics helps us in finding new approaches for inquiry and design of virtual organizations and information systems at the social level, the pragmatic level, and the semantic level. At the social level, the perspective on the role of information systems in organizations has shifted from a problem of the application of information and communication technology to an opportunity for constructing a virtual domain. In the elaboration of the basic idea on which an information system or virtual organization is based, information system metaphors can be used. At the pragmatic level, the perspective on work and coordination has shifted from integrated planning and design to communication, cooperation, and coordination in multi-actor systems. The definition of the behavior of information systems in terms of use cases, semiotics and language action theory gives us levels of interaction and patterns of interaction that can be used as norms of behavior. At the semantic level, the perspective on the use of symbol structures has shifted from central processing of data to the self-organization of multiple active representations. In the definition of a central part of the world model of an information system, the object model, a categorization of representation types and a set of abstraction operators turn out to be very helpful. 1 Prof. dr. Henk W.M. Gazendam is Ernst and Young professor of Information Systems in the Public Sector at the Faculty of Public Administration at Twente University, The Netherlands, and associate professor of Information Strategy at the Faculty of Management and Organization at Groningen University, The Netherlands (P.O. Box 800, NL-9700-AV Groningen, The Netherlands, tel. +31-50-3637090, Email: [email protected]; Web page: www.bdk.rug.nl/medewerkers/h.w.m.gazendam ).