Get Your Act Together: An Alternative Approach to Understanding the Impact of Technology on Individual and Organizational Behavior

Research in the larger management discipline is increasingly turning towards practice as an important unit of analysis to study organizational form and function. Reflecting this practice turn, information systems research is specifically interested in what people think they do when confronted with technology, what they actually do in the process of using technology, and what using technology does to them and the organizations they are a part of. In the wake of this development, sociomateriality has been proposed as a concept to study these organizational phenomena. The concept of sociomateriality, however, is not without its difficulties. Much debate has ensued on the ontological assumptions this practice turn and the concept of sociomateriality should be based on, and many scholars using the concept report how difficult it is to empirically investigate the intertwining or entanglement of the social and the material in practice. In this paper, we revisit Parsons’ and Shils’ (1951) general theory of action to address some of these difficulties and develop a framework for researching the social and the material in practice. Particularly, we propose that Parsons’ and Shils’ orientations of action help to better understand and conceptualize what individuals do before acting, what role technology plays, and how individuals and technology shape and are being shaped by each other in action across time. Through ten methodological principles, we demonstrate that such a framework can improve conceptualization and guide the selection and design of research methods in order to generate the data needed for sociomaterial theorizing