Abstract
The relationship between a system and its organisation is considerably more complex and interrelated than is generally recognised in the information systems research literature. Within this literature a system is often construed as a monolithic entity that impacts upon the organisation with the frequent implication that systems or their features can be ‘best fit’ to a given social milieu solely according to technical and economic rationale. In contrast, semiotics has the potential for providing a range of new theories, concepts and practices for exploring the complex interrelationships between systems and organisations. Clarke (1998) applied a combintion of a semiotic and contextual model of language called systemic functional linguistics or SFL (Halliday 1978, Halliday 1994; Halliday and Hasan 1976, Halliday and Hasan 1985; Martin 1992; Ventola 1987) and a compatible semiotic theory based on it called social semiotics (Kress 1985, Kress 1988; Thibault 1991; Lemke 1995) to information systems analysis. This combination of theories is referred to as systemic semiotics (Fawcett in Ventola 1987). An unusual aspect of this theory is that it uses text as the unit of analysis instead of one or more models of the sign. A systemic semiotic workpractice framework has been developed in order to understand the relationships between specific system features within their organisational contexts (Clarke 2000).
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Clarke, R.J. (2002). Intertextuality at Work: Large Scale Organisation of Workpractices. In: Liu, K., Clarke, R.J., Andersen, P.B., Stamper, R.K. (eds) Coordination and Communication Using Signs. Information and Organization Design Series, vol 2. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0803-8_3
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