Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
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Göran Goldkuhl
Abstract
Information systems actability is a theoretical and methodological approach to technology-based information systems in organizations. Its emphasis is on communication and its basic view is that information systems are instruments for technology-mediated work communication. It received its original theoretical inspiration from speech act theory and the language action perspective. Information systems actability has been further developed and it has obtained theoretical inspiration from many other traditions and theories. This article presents a coherent analysis and view of information systems actability and traces its different theoretical roots. Besides the language action perspective and speech act theory, information systems actability gets its current theoretical backing from theories and knowledge traditions like pragmatic philosophy, classical semiotics, social action theories, affordance theory, semiotic HCI engineering, conversation analysis, discourse theory, and activity theory. The article contributes with a synthesizing analysis of different information systems actability publications and reconstructs the theory and presents it in a condensed form in fourteen propositions.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Signification and space
- Towards an anthropological theory of space and place
- Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia
- Spatial representation, activity, and meaning: Children's images of the contemporary city
- The performance of secrecy: Domesticity and privacy in public spaces
- The choretic work of history
- Art, land, and the gendering of Parnassus
- The semiotics of the Vitruvian city
- Space complexity and architectural conception: Revisiting Alberti's treatise
- Meaning of space and architecture of place
- Ship as a space locus, architecture as a space fabrica
- Introduction: Organizational semiotics and social simulation
- A conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction
- The semiotic actor: From signs to socially constructed meaning
- Information systems actability: Tracing the theoretical roots
- Norms-based simulation for personalized service provision
- Universities as producers of evolutionarily stable signs of excellence for academic labor markets?
