Some notes and questions

By Ileana

In the reading for this seminar, the authors propose an enterprise modeling “that helps with the design of corporate information systems that are in line with a company’s organization and its long terms strategies” (Frank). The particular strength of the proposed enterprise model is that it integrates information systems with organizational context and organizational strategies into one multi-perspective model. As such, it moves away from previous models that focused on only one of these elements, be it information systems or organizational processes.

As enterprise modeling is not my field of study, I will focus this conversation starter on a more general topic. Particularly, I would like to raise a question related to the authors’ view on IT.  Reading the articles for this week, I couldn’t not notice that the authors write about IT as being 1. an organizational resource that can help an organization stay competitive and 2. a tool that facilitates particular organizational processes (see Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) for a critique on these views on IT). Despite the fact that the authors propose an enterprise model that aims to integrate IT and organizational processes, cultures and strategies into one framework, IT and organizational processes are still portrayed as independent, albeit influencing each other.

Challenging the notion of “organizational change”

By Ileana

My conversation starter is intended to raise a question concerning our conceptualization of the notion of “organizational change” and its usefulness when used together with the sociomateriality approach.

I deeply support the call for a theorization of people and technology (or any other non-human actors) as “constitutively entangled” (Orlikowski 2007), rather than viewing them as independent entities mutually influencing each other. Likewise, I do support the argument that the constitutive entanglements generated between human and non-human actors are at the heart of understanding how new forms of organizing come about and how they are negotiated and performed.

HELP! I am a qualitative researcher in IS!

By Ileana

My conversation starter is also on the topic of article review. I am also now in the process of writing a research-in progress paper for ECIS and I am confronting myself with the same challenges as Arjan and maybe others: how to develop a good theoretical framework that will pass the rigorous review process at ECIS?

On Epistemic Objects and Knowing as Emergent in Practice

By Ileana

In my own research project on the practice of designing social media, issues of learning and knowing are central. In particular, I look at how designers come to know how to design a social media that engages participants and encourages interaction and communication, what bodies of knowledge they use to achieve their goals and how designers negotiate and re-create these bodies of knowledge through sensemaking in the creative practice of designing social media.

(Ideas on) Examining Electronic Objects as Metaphors

By Ileana

One aspect I am paying particular attention to in my project is how electronic objects on different websites, such as photos on Flickr, music on Last.fm, news items on Digg etc. become binding objects that facilitate the creation and development of online social interactions.

There are many approaches that can help me understand how electronic objects become binding objects, such as Latour’s actor-network theory, Knorr Cetina’s sociality with objects, or Orlikowsky’s socialmateriality approach. Reading on relevance theory and on multimodal metaphor, however, made me wonder whether I could look at the different electronic objects in terms of metaphors, and think how such a view would contradict or build on the post-social approaches mentioned above and how it could help me better understand how these electronic objects facilitate the creation and development of (sustainable) social interactions.  

Maintain the status quo or perish…?

By Ileana

What impressed me very much in Lyytinen et al. (2007)’s article was not so much that the European and North American IS scholars have a different research culture and that the European scholars, because of their research culture, are less present in the top IS journals than their American counterparts. Rather, what amazed me (and made me worried at the same time) was that the editorial boards of the top IS journals seek to publish only that type of work that satisfies their understandings of “regimes of truth” as Lyytinen et al. call them and that further reinforces the status quo.

Researchers around the world: START DEBATING!!!

By Ileana

It is surprising when you think how similar the practice of research is today to the practice of religion. Take for example Christianity, how many churches (or divisions) does it consist of? You have the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic one, the Protestants, the Baptists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the list continues. Each church has its own rules, understandings and norms of what constitutes a good follower and a good religious practice. The same can be said about research. In the IS field only, there are many sub-communities of research, each with their own ideas, purposes and methodological norms and rules of what constitutes a good research.

Mutuality 2.0: Amuse me or lose me!

Mutuality 2.0: Amuse me or lose me!

By: Ileana

The World Wide Web has become so wide in the last years that it became part and parcel of millions of individuals’ lives, both their private and public lives (if there still is such distinction). People use the internet to communicate, form relationships, share, buy, sell, make money, lose money etc. In any case, a significant effect of the expansion of www is that it opened up the public world to the private individual, it encouraged him to express this ideas and wishes and it taught him that he can take life in his own hands, not being dependent anymore on the state, public or private institutions, organizations, parties and so on.

The use of the www by private individuals as a means for financial investments is no longer a proposition; it is already happening and apparently flourishing as well. In the Netherlands, the community of private investors called Alex (www.alex.nl) is an example in this sense. However, what we observe in these types of financial communities is quite different from the mutual societies developed in the 18^th and 19^th century Britain.

Agency in the “Internet of Things”

Conversation starter: Agency in the “Internet of Things”

By Ileana

While reading “The internet of things” by van Kranenburg (2008), my attention was particularly attracted by one persistent (and yet still problematic) issue, namely that of agency. In his paper, van Kranenburg argues that information technologies are becoming more and more part of our everyday life. The presence of IT in our daily lives is so ubiquitous that we become oblivious of its existence and use. Even more, he argues, what we see is “a massive hegemonic move […] towards the disappearance of the digital as tangible and visible technology” (p. 11) as IT becomes incorporated into the objects we use and activities we undertake in our daily lives. However, information technologies do not simply become part of our daily objects and activities but also, in Kranenburg’s view, they seem to have a life of their own, communicating and interacting with each other while circumventing the people (eg. the automatic pilots in planes that fly the plane by communicating with satellites). The outcome of this “hegemonic move” is, according to the author, the disappearance of the human and material elements as we know them and their transformation into “information spaces”. In van Kranenburg’s words: “In places where computational processes disappear into the background – into everyday concepts – both my reality and me as subject become contested in concrete daily situations and activities. Buildings, cars, consumer products, and people become information spaces” (2008: 13, italics in original).