Socio-Theoretic Accounts of IS: The Problem of Agency

© Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 2005, 17(1):133–152
Socio-Theoretic Accounts of IS: The Problem of Agency Jeremy Rose Dept. of Computing Science, University of Aalborg, Denmark jeremy@cs.aau.dk Matthew Jones Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge, UK m.jones@jims.cam.ac.uk Duane Truex Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA dtruex@gsu.edu Abstract. A long-standing debate in the IS literature concerns the relationship between technology and organization. Does technology cause effects in organizations, or is it humans that determine how technology is used? Many socio-theoretic accounts of a middle way between the extremes of technolog- ical and social determinism have been suggested: in recent years the more convincing explanations have been based on Giddens’ structuration theory and, more recently, on actor network theory. The two theories, however, may be seen to adopt rather different, and potentially incompatible, views of agency. Thus, structuration theory sees agency as a uniquely human prop- erty, whereas the principle of general symmetry in actor network theory implies that machines may also be actors. This rather fundamental disagree- ment may be characterized as the problem of agency. At the empirical level the problem of agency can be studied through ERP systems. These systems, though built and implemented by people, are thought to be wide-ranging in

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