Towards a Theory of Affordance Ecologies

Abstract

To understand how pervasive digitalization is changing organizational practice, scholars need to get to grips with how technology becomes intertwined with and embedded in practice and what its effects are for organizing and its outcomes. This needs to be done in ways that avoid the Scylla of technological determinism and the Charybdis of social relativism (Baxter, 2008; Kling, 1992; Markus & Robey, 1988). To achieve this, a potentially powerful theoretical device has been proposed — the affordance construct (e.g. Leonardi, 2012; Markus & Silver, 2008). This allows us to characterize features of technological artefacts in relation to specific users within specific contexts (e.g. email technology affords asynchronous communication between members of a software development team). Though the affordance concept was initially developed in ecological psychology to combat mentalist explanations of behaviour (Gibson, 1977, 1979), it has been increasingly adopted within the information systems (IS) literature to serve different theoretical purposes (DeSanctis, 2003; Markus, 2005; Norman, 2002). In the IS discourse the construct is primarily used in relational terms as a means to avoid giving primacy to either the material features of the artefact or the pure social construction of its usage. Due to this relational character it has been argued to resolve the theoretical tension between pure material or constructivist accounts of technology use.

This chapter is based on work supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation under grant VOSS-1121935 — Collaborative Research: Evolution of Virtualized Design Processes in Project-Based Design Organizations. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.