Towards a Theory of Affordance Ecologies

  • Aron Lindberg
  • Kalle Lyytinen
Chapter
Part of the Technology, Work and Globalization book series (TWG)

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.

Keywords

Information System Organization Domain Language Game Family Resemblance Ecological Psychology 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© Aron Lindberg and Kalle Lyytinen 2013

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  • Aron Lindberg
  • Kalle Lyytinen

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