{"title":"Researching digitalized work arrangements: A Laws of Form perspective","authors":"Sven-V. Rehm , Lakshmi Goel , Iris Junglas","doi":"10.1016/j.infoandorg.2022.100391","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Advances in digitalization<span> have changed our apprehension of technology from discrete devices and application software as bounded artifacts, to dynamically evolving social-material entanglements in Digitalized Work Arrangements (DWA). This development makes studying DWAs increasingly difficult and challenges us to advance our methods that define how we can study, observe, and conceptualize DWAs. In this essay, we draw on the mathematical-logical formalism of the Laws of Form (LoF) (</span></span><span>Spencer-Brown, 1969</span>) to analyze how six illustrative IS studies conceptualize the social and the material to arrive at distinct perspectives on DWAs. Our analysis reveals three archetypes that capture these studies' conceptualizations and that inform a discussion of how IS research can extend qualitative methods beyond those six works. We offer two contributions. First, we provide novel insights and explanations to key conceptualizations in the study of DWAs. Second, we present the LoF as a pre-ontological and pre-theoretical formalism that enables commensurability of methods and development of novel qualitative empirical methods. Specifically, we demonstrate how the formalism helps articulating the distinctions we draw to refine our object of study and to critically examine and reconstruct other researchers' reasoning.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47253,"journal":{"name":"Information and Organization","volume":"32 2","pages":"Article 100391"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information and Organization","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471772722000045","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Advances in digitalization have changed our apprehension of technology from discrete devices and application software as bounded artifacts, to dynamically evolving social-material entanglements in Digitalized Work Arrangements (DWA). This development makes studying DWAs increasingly difficult and challenges us to advance our methods that define how we can study, observe, and conceptualize DWAs. In this essay, we draw on the mathematical-logical formalism of the Laws of Form (LoF) (Spencer-Brown, 1969) to analyze how six illustrative IS studies conceptualize the social and the material to arrive at distinct perspectives on DWAs. Our analysis reveals three archetypes that capture these studies' conceptualizations and that inform a discussion of how IS research can extend qualitative methods beyond those six works. We offer two contributions. First, we provide novel insights and explanations to key conceptualizations in the study of DWAs. Second, we present the LoF as a pre-ontological and pre-theoretical formalism that enables commensurability of methods and development of novel qualitative empirical methods. Specifically, we demonstrate how the formalism helps articulating the distinctions we draw to refine our object of study and to critically examine and reconstruct other researchers' reasoning.
期刊介绍:
Advances in information and communication technologies are associated with a wide and increasing range of social consequences, which are experienced by individuals, work groups, organizations, interorganizational networks, and societies at large. Information technologies are implicated in all industries and in public as well as private enterprises. Understanding the relationships between information technologies and social organization is an increasingly important and urgent social and scholarly concern in many disciplinary fields.Information and Organization seeks to publish original scholarly articles on the relationships between information technologies and social organization. It seeks a scholarly understanding that is based on empirical research and relevant theory.