Activity theory in Information Systems Research

Activity theory, based on the concepts of the cultural-historical school of Russian psychology, which draws on the works of Vygotsky (1978) and others including Ilyenkov (1977) and Leont'ev (1978), and more recently developed by Engeström (1987), has developed into a contemporary social theory for studying work and social activity. Over the last three decades, activity theory has become increasingly internationalised and has emerged as a founding theory for understanding change and development in work and social activity. In the fields of organisation studies (e.g., Engeström, 2000), management (e.g., Jarzabkowski, 2003), social psychology (e.g., Blunden, 2010), education (e.g., Roth & Lee, 2007), and Human Computer Interaction and systems design (e.g., Nardi, 1996), it has become particularly accepted for framing studies and generating insights. Each of these disciplines has drawn on specific elements of activity theory and identified contributions. While its use in Information Systems (IS) has traditionally remained limited, in recent years, there has been growing interest in its use in IS research (e.g., Hasan, Smith, & Finnegan, 2017; Karanasios & Allen, 2014; Malaurent & Avison, 2015; Simeonova, 2018). The context of its use has transcended complex organisational change and IS implementation, disaster response, education, health, and ICT for development. Scholars have also aligned activity theory alongside other philosophical perspectives and theories such as critical realism (Allen, Brown, Karanasios, & Norman, 2013), institutional theory (Ogawa, Crain, Loomis, & Ball, 2008), complexity theory (Hasan, Kazlauskas, & Crawford, 2010), and structuration theory (Canary, 2010) in order to generate novel insights. This Special Issue aimed to build on this literature, stimulate discourse and further advance the use of activity theory in the field of IS. It also aimed to act as a source of outstanding research on how activity theory can inform IS research. We see the development of activity theory in IS as productive for two main reasons. First, for IS Researchers, one of the greatest appeals of activity theory lies in its ability to address the challenge of studying the interaction between technology and actors, that is, accounting for role of technology in activity without privileging the social or the material aspects. Other scholars have noted that there is a trend in IS studies towards neglecting technology (Cecez-Kecmanovic, Galliers, Henfridsson, Newell, & Vidgen, 2014; Sarker, Xiao, & Beaulieu, 2013) or resorting to deterministic reasoning (Leonardi & Barley, 2008). Second, as the IS field is concerned with mediation, the role of technology, across different settings, we see that IS can advance and develop activity theory in new theoretical directions as technologies continue to go well beyond the notion of tools as initially conceptualised in activity theory. Our call for contributions received numerous submissions, and on the basis of a thorough reviewing process, we selected four of them for publication in this issue. The papers cover and address a range of contemporary themes in IS research: enterprise social media, evaluation and ICT for development, information modelling, and crowdfunding. Each uses activity theory in a different way and by doing so highlights different strengths. The first paper, by Forsgren and Byström (2018) “Multiple social media in the workplace: contradictions and congruencies,” examines the use of multiple social media in the workplace. Drawing on qualitative data from a software development company, the authors show how social media helps to maintain coherence in some work activities by improving ambient awareness as well as for socialising. However, their study also shows that social media served different purposes in different activities and this often led to tensions, that is, what is seen as beneficial for some work activities appeared as a limitation for others. The authors' use of activity theory focused predominately on uncovering contradictions and “congruencies” in work activity as a means of uncovering the impact of social media. Rather than focus on a single work activity system, the authors explore multiple interlinked work activity systems. Unlike many activity theory studies, they also show how the notion of the activity “object” is contested and can be fractionalised in networked activities made up of teams in organisations. The second paper, by Kelly (2018) “An activity theory study of data, information, knowledge and power in the design of an international development NGO impact evaluation,” uses activity theory to uncover issues around power in the evaluation of development initiatives. It argues that power is neglected in evaluation and IS research even though power dynamics influence what data and knowledge is discarded or foregrounded. An in-depth case study was conducted using interviews and an examination of organisational documents and evaluation tools. The paper uses activity theory to tease out how power inequalities were generated during evaluation and the underlying power dynamics around the dual nature of evaluation in terms of presenting evaluation results for marketing to the development sector and humble assessment of impact on beneficiaries. The paper also argues that activity theory helps uncover power dynamics. Significantly, it builds on activity theory by proposing the notion of “temporal activity chains” to help frame sequences of activities along the evaluation value chain. The third paper, by Gleasure and Morgan (2018) “The pastoral crowd: exploring self-hosted crowdfunding using activity theory and social capital,” provides an example of studies which use activity theory in conjunction with other frameworks to understand complex phenomena. In this study, the authors bring together activity theory with social capital theory to both describe and analyse the crowdfunding of technology. The authors use the two theories to explore the social resources that enable self-hosted crowdfunding activities focusing on a case study of the crowdfunding of the massively multiplayer space simulation video game Star Citizen. The study presents several implications for practice framed around crowdfunding as an activity to ensure the crowd grows, its potential is realised, and contributors are actively engaged during a crowdfunding initiative. Importantly, this paper demonstrates how the analysis of user-generated content can be used within an activity theoretic study. The study supports the usefulness of activity theory for understanding various aspects of complex and dynamic activities. The authors propose social capital as a part of activity theory to help explain distributed and collective phenomena with emergent structures, such as crowdfunding. The fourth paper, by Miettinen and Paavola (2018) “Reconceptualizing object construction: the dynamics of building information modelling in construction design,” provides an interesting exploration of the properties of and conduction of digital artefacts and simultaneously provides a nuanced and thoughtful development and exploration of the concept of the object in an activity system. Focusing on the construction of building information models, the authors argue that instead of viewing such digital models as immaterial or intangible, they can be seen as demonstrating concreteness and materiality. Drawing upon Lektorsky (1980), the authors provide an account of the collaborative work of developing building information models. Ilyenkov's (1977) theory of the “ideal” is also employed to describe the gradual construction of building information models as an “ideal object” that exists in a different material form to the final object (the building and construction of a building). They describe how such “ideal objects” are constructed though a series of intermediary objects. We believe that the selected articles demonstrate the value of activity theory in IS research as well as the development of activity theory in IS, which has evolved in thoroughly different ways from early understandings of activity theory as per Vygotsky and others. In this way, the papers contribute to new insights regarding activity theory but also empirically within their own genre of IS research.