Information Systems and Global Assemblages. (Re)Configuring Actors, Artefacts, Organizations

Information Systems (IS) are omnipresent in today’s organizations. While much research has been performed on adoption, implementation, and use of IS, still many practitioners are faced with IS change endeavors in organizations that equal “death march” projects and fail before or directly after go-live. Research with a positivist stance has thoroughly studied factors that describe individuals’ intentions to adopt or use technology, while largely ignoring social and organizational contexts. Researchers with a constructivist view, on the other hand, have studied how social processes and structures change or emerge in the light of the new IS. We suggest that there is a need to combine what we know from these two streams in an attempt to clarify terminological bafflement that seems to be caused by the different philosophical stances. Our paper contributes by suggesting a framework and methodology for collecting and re-assembling scattered conceptual pieces of organizational and individual IT adoption and integrating them into a coherent understanding.

Existing studies of IT within early childhood education and care settings are scant, and those that do exist traditionally utilise a Cartesian worldview where humans and IT are separate self-sufficient entities with properties. In this worldview, change is attributed to either the technological or the human entity, leading to limited, either techno-centric or human-centred accounts of IT implementation and use. We reframe the activities in an early childhood organisation as a process of appropriation, and utilise a sociomaterial theory of technology appropriation alternative to the Cartesian worldview. We contribute a rich account of the changes that occur to the practices, the educators, and the technology itself during the appropriation process and demonstrate the theory’s usefulness as an analytical tool for providing a deeper understanding of how early childhood educators appropriate a new technology into their practices in a sociomaterial, non-dualistic way.

Organizational researchers have acknowledged that understanding the relationship between technology and organization is crucial to understanding modern organizing and organizational change [1]. There has been a significant amount of debate concerning the theoretical foundation of this relationship. Our research draws and extends Deleuze and DeLanda’s work on assemblages and Callon’s concept of performation to investigate how different sociomaterial practices are changed and stabilized after the implementation of new technology. Our findings from an in-depth study of two ambulatory clinics within a hospital system indicate that “perform-ing” of constituting, counter-performing, calibrating, and stratifying explained the process of sociomaterial change and that this process is governed by an overarching principle of “performative exigency”. Future studies on sociomateriality and change may benefit from a deeper understanding of how sociomaterial assemblages are rendered performative.

This paper seeks to place the phenomenon of technology within the context of everyday practices using the logic of practical rationality. We draw some insights from our ethnography of young professionals and shed light on their everyday technological practices by invoking the concept of entwinement from hermeneutic phenomenology. Our findings reveal that the new generation users are becoming intimately entwined with information technologies in their everyday practices. Our study contributes toward the ongoing debate concerning the theorizing of technology and its relationship to practice.

This paper explores the utility of assemblage theory for intergenerational counter-mapping and, through this, for reconfigurations of indigeneity. Counter-mapping is theorised as a kind of assemblage that, through intergenerational learning, is fundamentally memetic (composed of evolving units of information) in nature. Assemblage is theorised as having three aspects (relations of exteriority, meshworks and memes) for reconfiguring indigeneity in line with spatio-temporal aspects of memes. Counter-mapping assemblages are explored with examples of First Nations’ (indigenous peoples residing in Canada) political and commemorative activity. Kaachewaapechuu, a long commemorative walk in the northern Quebec Cree village of Wemindji, acts as a case study for exploring how assemblages-as-memes can be used to theorise new kinds of counter-mapping that reconfigure indigenous commemoration precisely as political, and therefore as not separate from more media-driven aspects of Canadian politics, including those concerning its First Nations. Global positioning systems and Google Earth mapping platforms were used during the primary author’s participation in kaachewaapechuu, providing for the exploration of new media platforms upon which such a re-theorised politics might be envisioned.

Prior research provides conflicting insights about the link between investment in enterprise systems and firm value and in the ES governance mechanisms. The literature generally suggests that management should cultivate its technical and organizational expertise to derive value from currently deployed Enterprise Systems (ES) [8]. In the realm of practice, ERP vendors and configuration/integration partners strongly recommend the creation of an organizational structure to govern the ERP implementation and post-implementation process to improve project success and extract greater value from the ES investment. The ES literature, while unclear on the formation, and functioning of ES governance units, suggests the need for formal and fixed governance structures. This research utilizes Deleuze’s assemblage theory and emergence theory to explain the genesis and evolution of the governing ‘structure’ known as the Competency Center (CC). Our results illustrate the business needs driving the structuring processes behind the CC, are also those that lead to unintended and destabilizing outcomes. Whether the CC ‘assemblage’ survives to provide value depends on how the emergent issues are handled and how the assemblages are “positioned”. This research suggests effective ES governance is not derived from a prescribed step-wise process yielding formal structures, but rather form an organic process of assemblage.

Based on a literature review, this paper identifies four socio-technical challenges relating to innovation actor’s interactions in digital innovation. Furthermore, the paper explores how these challenges can be addressed. The challenges are investigated in a case study of digital innovation. The study is based on a two year long research and development project where an e-newspaper concept and a demonstrator based on e-paper technology was developed. Based on empirical findings, the paper presents eight activities which address the identified socio-technical challenges with digital innovation. The activities are: 1) support transparent digital ecosystem relationships, 2) facilitate cross-organizational communication, 3) create digital value blueprints, 4) translate heterogeneous knowledge, 5) involve all relevant user groups, 6) identify, design for, and authenticate digital user values, 7) design for multiple contexts of use, and 8) prototype iteratively.

Contemporary societies increasingly rely on complex and sophisticated information systems for a wide variety of tasks and, ultimately, knowledge about the world in which we live. Those systems are central to the kinds of problems our systems and sub-systems face such as health and medical diagnosis, treatment and care. While health information systems represent a continuously expanding field of knowledge production, we suggest that they carry forward significant limitations, particularly in their claims to represent human beings as living creatures and in their capacity to critically reflect on the social, cultural and political origins of many forms of data ‘representation’. In this paper we take these ideas and explore them in relation to the way we see healthcare information systems currently functioning. We offer some examples from our own experience in healthcare settings to illustrate how unexamined ideas about individuals, groups and social categories of people continue to influence health information systems and practices as well as their resulting knowledge production. We suggest some ideas for better understanding how and why this still happens and look to a future where the reflexivity of healthcare administration, the healthcare professions and the information sciences might better engage with these issues. There is no denying the role of health informatics in contemporary healthcare systems but their capacity to represent people in those datascapes has a long way to go if the categories they use to describe and analyse human beings are to produce meaningful knowledge about the social world and not simply to replicate past ideologies of those same categories.

Medicines are digitalized as aspects of their regulation and use are embodied in or draw from interlinked computerized systems and databases. This paper considers how this development changes the delivery of health care, the pharma industry, and regulatory and professional structures, as it reconfigures the material character of drugs themselves. It draws on the concept of assemblage in presenting a theory-based analysis that explores digital drugs’ ontological status including how they embody benefit and value. The paper addresses three interconnected domains – that of use of drugs (practice), of research (epistemology) and of regulation (structures).

This paper examines how social media can support communities of patients with chronic illness and their care givers. This study is a qualitative case study and is informed by grounded theory. Sociomateriality is adopted as a theoretical lens to understand and explain the key findings. Our findings suggest that there is a dynamic relation between the contrary roles that social media in chronic care management and this is not only attributed to the functionalities of these technologies but to the attributes of patients and their states of health. We were also able to observe how these technologies are bounded up with human activities in the ways that separating them is not possible. What we learnt from our findings is that the ways patients and carers use of social media can change their perceptions about their conditions, and influence how they understand and approach the management process.

Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) in companies have profoundly changed in recent years. They have become KMS 2.0 that aim to transform the firm and are driven by a new relationship to knowledge in line with 2.0 organisations. These 2.0 KMS have implemented modes of organisation that disrupt those that previously guided firms’ performance. This can sometimes lead to paradoxical organizational dysfunctions as witnessed by the difficulties faced by some traditionally hierarchical French companies. Through a case study of Constructor and a theoretical background on IS appropriation in organizations and myths in management, we show how the Asterix myth contributes to understanding how 2.0. KMS are appropriated in such companies. We find evidence of similarities regarding knowledge and Knowledge Management between the Asterix’ myth and the behaviours and practices concerning knowledge management within Constructor. As a result, the Asterix’ myth may be a relevant perspective for understanding the obstacles, advantages and appropriations of 2.0. KMS within French organizations.

Whilst many studies have looked at the characteristics of effective communications via social media platforms, their use during public events for people to communicate and organize is still relatively uncharted. We have even less understanding of the roles that public event participants play in their use of social media, and this study seeks to address this gap in our knowledge. We analyse the Twitter data related to the 1st May 2014 event (Labour Day) in Germany to identify participant roles in this event, and the impact their tweets had on other participants. From this analysis we draw some tentative conclusions about participant roles in public events and their impact and highlight areas for further investigation.

Technological knowledge has been characterized as having a scope that is specific to a particular problem. However, the information systems community is exploring forms of design science research that provide a promising avenue to technological knowledge with broader scope: design theories. Because design science research is materially prescriptive, it requires a different perspective in developing the breadth of applications of design theories. In this paper we propose different concepts that embody forms of general technological knowledge The concept of projectability, developed originally as a means of distinguishing realized generalizations from unrealized generalizations, helps explain how design theories, being prescriptive, possess a different form of applicability. The concept of entrenchment describes the use of a theory in many projections. Together these concepts provide a means for comparative discussions of the importance of design theories. Projectable design theories guide designers in the design of artifacts similar in principle, but different in context. These can also help design researchers understand interrelationships between design theories.