Desperately seeking structures

Abstract

Research grounded in a social science tradition tends to focus on people, while research grounded in an engineering tradition tends to focus on artifacts. However, as people and artifacts become increasingly intertwined in digitized processes and practices, these traditional disciplinary divisions sometimes seem a little outdated. So in this essay, I advocate an approach to research on information systems that focuses on actions, rather than people or artifacts. In particular, I examine the possibility of treating patterns of action as the object of inquiry. Grammatical models can be used to represent the space of possible action patterns in a given domain, and can be used to compare, and analyze the structural properties of action patterns. If so desired, these patterns can be tied back to traditional factors related to people (such as culture, habit, or learning…) or technology (such as features, constraints, or affordances…).