A Meta-Theory for Understanding Information Systems Within Sociotechnical Systems

Abstract

is the L. Edmund Rast Professor of business at the university of Georgia. he teaches in the MIS area. he is also President of bostrom & associates, a training and consulting company focusing on facilitation and the effective integration of people and technology. Dr. bostrom holds a b.a. in chemistry and Mba from Michigan State university, an M.S. in computer Science from SuNY at albany, and a Ph.D. in MIS from the university of Minnesota. In addition to numerous publications in leading academic and practitioner journals, he has extensive consulting and training experience in the areas of MIS management and design, organizational development, leadership, facilitation, business process management, and digital collaboration. his current research interests focus on high-performing individuals, facilitation, business process management systems, digital collaboration, technology-supported learning, and the effective design of organizations via integrating human and technological components.

Individual Appropriation of Learning Management Systems—Antecedents and Consequences

“…Researchers originally applied AST to understand the appropriation process of groups in the domain of group support systems (GSS) (Chin et al, 1997). Despite this major focus on GSS, research has also highlighted that AST may serve as a metatheory (Bostrom, Gupta, & Thomas, 2009) for understanding other complex information systems, such as LMS (Tennant et al, 2014) or massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Whitaker, New, & Ireland, 2016) that are applied in sociotechnical systems. Though in the past usually used on a group level, AST serves as a multilevel theory (Bélanger, Cefaratti, Carte, & Markham, 2014), and researchers have applied it particularly in a TML context on an individual level to understand how individuals use IT in their learning process (Gupta & Bostrom, 2013;Hardin, Looney, & Fuller, 2014).…”

In Search of Information Systems (Grand) Challenges

“…These results reflect the foundation of IS in socio-technical systems (Bostrom et al 2009;Bostrom and Heine 1977). Relevant contributions to the IS body of knowledge require the simultaneous consideration of the technical and the social subsystem (Gregor 2006).…”

It-Enabled Management Control Systems Transformations: Lessons Learned From Savecom

“…According to theories of sociotechnical systems (e.g., Bostrom et al, 2009), an organizational work system consists of social and technical subsystems, interacting with and influencing each other. The effects of a newly implemented IT can, over time, lead to changes in social structure of an organization and information enabled by IT is then implicated in organizational action (Leonardi, 2007).…”

“…The role of information technology (IT) interventions in organizational change, especially as the vehicles of enhanced business and managerial efficiency, has been a hot research topic (Bostrom et al, 2009). This research stream often incorporates models that generally prescribe information technologies as enabling agents for organizational change.…”