Toward Third Wave Information Systems Research: Linking Sociomaterial Practice with Broader Institutional Logics

The sociomaterial movement has done much to strengthen the theorizing of IT artifacts in practice. This “second wave” information systems research, which focuses on theorizing of the interpenetration of IT artifacts and human activity, is a response to the positivistic, reductive accounts that overly simplified human activity around the development and adoption of IT in the name of generalizability. However, with their focus on local ideographic interpretation, sociomaterial views have abandoned the search for regularities across contexts and across time. In this paper, we take a step toward a “third wave” approach as we look to theoretically account for both idiosyncrasies in sociomaterial practice in situ, and the regularities across these practices. Drawing on institutional logics and the concept of sociomaterial practice, we develop a conceptualization that highlights how technologies afford the enactment of different practice scripts as users draw on different institutional logics

Tensions in design principle formulation and reuse

Designing can be viewed as a collective activity that accumulates and reuses knowledge over time and, in the information systems field, such knowledge often takes the form of design principles. While design principles are now a predominant from to capture, accumulate, and reuse design knowledge, their reusability cannot be taken for granted. In this paper, we present the preliminary findings of an ongoing series of experiments that aim to explore the characteristics of design principles that facilitate or inhibit their reuse. Our preliminary findings suggest that, interestingly, these characteristics occur as contradicting elements. We situate the tensions in the light of hermeneutics, expert intuition, and C-K design theory. We hope that, through our ongoing work, we can trigger further discussion on design principles reuse in the DSR community

Integrating Explanatory/Predictive and Prescriptive Science in Information Systems Research

The scholarly information systems (IS) field has a dual role. As an explanatory and predictive science, the field contributes to explaining the pervasive IS that shape the digital age and sometimes also makes predictions about those phenomena. As a prescriptive science, it participates in creating IS-related innovations by identifying means-ends relationships. The two can beneficially interact, such as when explanatory theory provides the basis for generating prescriptions or when applicable knowledge produces explanatory insights. In this commentary, we contribute to integrating these two roles by proposing a framework to help IS researchers navigate the field’s duality to extend the cumulative scholarly knowledge that it creates in terms of justified explanations and predictions and justified prescriptions. The process we describe builds on ongoing, dynamic, iterative, and interrelated research cycles. We identify a set of integrative research practices that occur at the interface between explanatory and predictive science and prescriptive science—the explanation-prescription nexus. We derive guidelines for IS research

Cascading Digital Options and the Evolution of Digital Infrastructures: The Case of IIoT

Digital infrastructures provide a space where possibilities for innovation continuously emerge. They are not stable entities but are evolving. Their boundaries are subject to constant negotiation among multiple organizational actors as well as changing connections of digital technologies, operations, and users. In this paper, we explore the evolution of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructure in a leading manufacturing company. We find that the IIoT infrastructure provided actionable spaces upon which organizational actors discovered opportunities for improving process performance which, in turn, led to investment decisions. We explain this process through the lens of digital options theory and highlight how IIoT infrastructure provides the material foundation for the identification of digital options, how the realization of digital options leads to the emergence of more digital options, and how these “cascading” digital options are implicated in the evolution of IIoT infrastructure. We discuss theoretical and practical implications