IT and Societal Change: An Institutional Perspective

Article: How Information Technology Matters in Societal Change: An Affordance-Based Institutional Perspective, DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2020/14193

Authors: Isam Faik , Michael Barrett , and Eivor Oborn

Interviewers: Sonika Jha and Zoyia Konstantopoulou

Sonika and Zoyia: We extend a very warm welcome to you for joining us today. Thank you for sharing your valuable time with us, and giving us an opportunity to have this conversation with you. We are very excited, and eagerly look forward to delve deeper into the world of this research study with you.

Zoyia: The paper touches upon some of the very interesting spheres in the domain of Information Technology research. We would like you to delve into what motivated you to pursue this area of inquiry, and how did the creative blend and synergy come by amongst the authors while undertaking this research?

How might the affordance-based model adapt when applied to contexts where societal values—like data ethics, privacy, and inclusivity—are under intense negotiation, as seen in recent election interferences or data privacy debates? What are the implications of this model for studying institutional power shifts within increasingly polarized and digitally mediated societies?

Dr. Isam Faik: Sure. Maybe I'll make some brief comments, and then Michael and Eivor can join in. I think we started first with an empirical paper that we were trying to make sense of in term of some empirical insights and data, and the idea of looking at the societal level became something that was interesting in the data. That led us to the literal and institutional logics. But, at some point like, when Michael joined the research (Michael was my Ph.D. examiner), so I was familiar with the empirical work, and we were at the same institution - the Cambridge so we had started the collaboration on this project. At some point we sort out the empirical data was constraining our ability to say what we wanted to say. So, it was a bit risky, but at the end of being rewarded in decision to drop the empirical part of the paper, and turn it into a theory paper. Yes, and then it started to like getting bigger in terms of both the ambition of what we wanted to say with it and what kind of empirical and theoretical domains we were trying to touch with the new scope now that we were not limited to just one specific impact or context.

Dr. Michael Barrett: I can add a bit of background here. I'm not sure how and what scope you're looking for. But the motivation in addition to working closely and enjoying working with Isam and Eivor on projects, especially empirical work that looks at IT, and in the context of developing countries - that's been a longstanding research area that I've shared with them and so the the theoretical ideas of some of my earlier work I was always interested in looking at macro and micro linkages in understanding, for example, in Giddens's earlier work, sort of late modernity ideas, which connects actually the institutions and at the level connecting that to self-identity. And so, this micro and macro and its’ role has been an area of interest. I guess the question might become, well, then why institutional theory. For example, I think that was one of your questions. And indeed, there are some synergies, you know, from a social theory perspective. They're different, but there are some commonalities between foundations, say, structuration theory and institutional theory. And, institutional theory has a really longstanding, wide and a rich vocabulary. It's amazing how much has been done on it from a management perspective and an organizational theory perspective. And we could see that, you know, well, what would be quite interesting and why to look at how to engage scholars as well in that area. It did not really say very much, at least at that stage, on IT and digital technologies. And so, the idea of trying to look at what had institutional theory said at that point in time - the work of Dick Scott, who was probably one of the first people - he's well-known, as you probably know, institutional theorist at Stanford, highlighting the role of information technology as a carrier of institutional change. And, we noticed the links that he would then make with earlier work of scholars like von der Likovsky on embodying the norms, rules and practices, so the idea of how that may have synergies with the management scholarship is already in the IS domain having that resonance. Probably a starting point for us to look at, and engage with institutional theory. I'll stop there for now. There's lots more. Eivor may want to share a bit.

Dr. Eivor Oborn: Yeah, sure. Though I'm conscious, Michael, that because you have to leave, I'm happy for you to ramble on. You know, I'm quite amazed, actually how well both Isam and Michael remember - you know it's been what 15 years - is a long time ago since this project started. This wasn't like in the last 5 years, and it's further than even 10 years. So, I commend both Michael and Isam. But I think the key issue, so what you asked in your question was about societal level change and the societal interest, so the context of societal impact seemed to us that a lot of work related to information technology was quite Euro-North American centric at one level, but it focused on what are people doing in their organizations? It was quite sort of micro in that sense. But we have all for various reasons got a very diverse set of cultural spheres that we've lived in. And, we were noticing, particularly with this data set that Isam was referencing, and the interesting thing in the data set was how much change was going on, but it wasn't just about the change within organizations. And neither was it just about changes in the way one works. It was about more fundamental kinds of changes and now actually we do have a vocabulary around that which has been growing but 15 years ago. Or, you know, it seemed to be an interesting spark. And the link between the technology seemed central in it. And you ask, there's maybe a question that you have later that relates more directly to institutional theory, and you didn't ask that now so I won't go into why institutional theory, but there seems to be, when we were looking at this little theorizing about it, but we saw in the data and we didn't think the organization was the interesting part nor the work.

Isam: If you're probably familiar with these sentences that most IS papers start with that digital technologies have transformed how we live, you know like that's almost like as a standard start for a lot of papers and one of the motivations of doing this is trying to provide some theoretical framework or some vocabulary to say how that actually is happening when we say that it's transforming not just this particular context that we're looking at about transforming society at large, and how can we understand that in a way that gives us like a theoretical backgrounds to talk about that change here.

Sonika: The most intriguing part of the study has been the choice of theory lens i.e., institutional theory. What motivated you to choose this theory lens? And, how do you think that studying the relationships between IT and societal change would contribute to our existing understanding of the relationship between IT and organizational change? Do you think there are convergences or divergence in this regard. What are of the other theory lenses that may be looked into to explore and create a field of inquiry in such dimensions?

Isam: Okay, so maybe quickly I'll say that at the time we started working on this paper, there were already some studies out there that started talking about going beyond the organizational level when trying to understand the effect of technology. If I remember like Susan Winter, I think, had one paper.

Michael: Yeah.

Isam: There were some papers that helped us think, okay, this is an area where there is a need to develop a theory. And when you're trying to link what's happening in practices, either organizational practices or individual practices, well, I think institutional theory was an obvious choice because that's where it started in trying to link the organizations with their environment and trying to understand them as well in relation to their environments. And so, yeah, that's basically how that progression happened and, I think there could have been many other theories to consider and then in the paper such as what we refer to as the social materiality, for example, and other theories. Because even within the institutional theory, there is a stream of research that tries to focus all that relates to it or tries to link institutional theory concepts and ideas to more practice-based approaches. They call it practice-based institutionalism – which is like a group of researchers who would try and develop this stream of research further. And that's, I think the paper kind of fits within that type of research.

Michael: Yeah, maybe just briefly in that. Just to build on that point, institutional theory, always struck by the early work of Friedland and Alfred, and the whole idea of society as an institutional system, that's always resonated with me as something which then provided a resonance for why it would be valuable to look at societal change. Indeed, they talk about multiple institutional orders that constitute this inter-institutional system, so understanding that or seeing that as an opportunity to engage with institutional theory more generally. Then we drill down on to looking at logics and institutional logics. In particular, which indeed are connected to each of those institutional orders. One of the things to link back to what Isam just said was you know that the institutional logics work also has a good connection with practice. That also excited us that as to something that might be relevant for helping to make those links. If you like, the micro to the macro in terms of change. I mean, there's a couple of things I'll say. Briefly, only because of time, maybe. So, if I jump into other questions and you'll forgive me. But I do think the idea within why affordance and how do we link that and why to logics. I think those were all very interesting puzzles.

If I think about the paper, as Eivor says, it's some time ago, but I remember it being very much developed between us at different stages. Like a puzzle, you know, that, why all the questions that you're asking were ones that we had to justify and think about, well. Why focus in on logics per se? Was that the right dimension, how to link it to affordances and why. And I remember, you know, the penny really dropping on the connection of how. The term that still is in my mind. And I think it was probably you, Isam, that mentioned it and highlighted that it was this notion of the institutional logics dealing with focus of attention as being a really important aspect, which we could see resonance with the idea of affordances as well, providing that focus of attention, and so in terms of what possibilities for role-oriented action could you have. So, linking the IT affordances to the idea of institutional logics and how they come together - there were some certain very click points in the process of developing the paper that really were very, very important. I mean, there are others, but I'll stop there for now because we talk about the scaling, how we move from scaling IT affordances to making institutional change potentially happen. There are similar kinds of points in our discussions and ours being pushed by reviewers to justify and and make those connections a lot realer in developing the theory.

Zoyia: The novelty of the research topic draws in cross-disciplinary attention. What particularly stands out in this regard is the comprehensive and exhaustive affordance-based model proposed in the study. We would like you to shed some light and expound on the journey of coming up with that model, and how would you place its’ relevance for future research by scholars??

Michael: Yeah, sure. Because I think it's quite helpful as you're saying, you know for the process of the paper, and indeed, these are, as you can see, marathon projects. This takes a lot of time and energy. It's not something you wake up and say, okay, let's do another one of these. But the other click moment I'll mention is at that level of moving from IT affordances to institutional change and the idea of scaled IT affordances and what was really important was there's often some key papers that really help you. For us, the Willie Ekozia Ocasio paper in 2015 was really important as there, you know, he has set out without talking about materiality to highlight the ideas you know of the way in which sense giving. I think it's translating and theorizing. It was very important in how we think about scaling happening. But that's more not with IT affordances, but more generally how you scale from specific instances. Often in his work, it's discursive actions that are allowing for then wider sets or layers of meaning to happen more generally.

The question then became and the challenge was, well, this is, you know, we're both practice scholars and we take seriously social materiality, as how we think of the world ontologically. So how do we draw on what great scholars who I haven't necessarily paid too much attention to it - the material instantiations and still find it of some very great value. How do we connect the vocabularies without having, if you like, paradigmatic incommensurability. One of the things that was really central was shifting away from theorizing which was too laden with a discursive connotation to having a much, drawing on work that had been done in the IS field, which was a lovely marrying of Barent and use decoupling which helped provide that discursive materialization in understanding the scaling processes. I'll stop there, but I just wanted to try to give a sense of the biography of how parts came together different ways, and how literatures are valuable, even if they're different from ones where we've engaged with the scholars. They might be in the IT area in the way in which one can draw on, engage with, mix, and try to not make a total mess of things in doing so was a real challenge for us to have that narrow balance, fine balance.

Isam: Yeah.

Eivor:? I think it would be inaccurate to say, though, that it's not that we come up with any of these ideas without the balancing back and forth with the editor and the reviewers, right? These are always responses to where the reviewers and editors push you. So, we're talking about it as if we had written it without editorial processes, and it's very much steered and we write to an audience. We were well aware of our audience and what they're asking for. So, we're saying less about that in this process, in part because it becomes a dull memory but we had an audience in mind.?

Michael: That's a great point. Just briefly on that, I mean, as you can imagine that people like this is going to be sent out. We don't know who the reviewers are, of course, but we certainly had an institutional theorist on the board who would have been maybe not so socially materially inclined and then we would have had an IS scholar that would have done work on institutional theory. There is a work that goes back a couple of decades, mostly quantitative work earlier. And so, you know, as Eivor says this is where the editor, associate editor and senior editor play an important role of how it gets shaped and cultivated or not. Depending on, you know, the views of the three reviewers. Indeed, we're giving you a very potted view, and without the great back and forth and the wonderful highs and the wonderful lows that every review process gives you.?

Eivor: T your question about the future potential. I think that a lot of work up until the last maybe four or five years in particular have focused more on the organizations. Because we're management scholars and we look at managerial often even within IT, it's context of use are workplaces. But now with technology becoming ubiquitous in a lot of practices that are not necessarily work, and the confluence of our work and our non-work life mingling together. So, we're all checking our media platforms while we're at work, and sending messages to our family, you know maybe even in the midst of this kind of a meeting. So, looking at some of these more societal level questions. I think becomes even more pertinent for IS scholars and in addition to the phenomenon of IT being more ubiquitous, and to hand at various non-work traditional boundaries, there is also an increasing preference and agenda to look at societal challenges within our scholarship more generally. And a demand for more impactful research, also in that direction and some of those challenges are not, again, necessarily organizational or individual or team level, they have a bigger radar. So, I think this kind of a framework lends itself to looking at those intersections.

Michael: One other thing which certainly I think influenced certainly myself and I think all of us with some of the earlier work that had been done in MISQ, I believe it was the work of Lynn Marcus and colleagues where they had done the special issue, right, on linking IT and societal change. And I think it was a circa and a couple others. So, you know, there are these earlier and ongoing work that has been done, you know, that certainly triggered that this is a triggered, increasingly recognized space, which I think we all were working in that area in different ways but there is a timing issue sometimes of when phenomenon or a theory is recognized as being particularly valuable. So particularly valuable for us, the connection of the affordance based and using linking those institutional logics in examining IT-based societal change was a choice, but also, we thought that also the timing was a good one to try. We were very conscious, I think I certainly was of the again, rich vocabulary and the amount of work that had been done theoretically in institutional theory to be potentially helpful lens for examining and building out this theory.

Sonika: How do you think that the interaction of institutions and digital technologies affect societal outcomes such as inclusion, equality, and prosperity? What are some of the societal aspects that still remain underexplored in this domain of study and have huge potential to offer some significant insights?

Eivor: You know, the interesting thing about these societal outcomes such as inclusion, equality, prosperity. I guess if I was going to look at these questions using the framework that we developed there you know, it could either depend on what the study is and so forth the technology that might be involved. But I think there's something interesting about. We know that technology is not neutral, so it's a tool that can create inclusion or exclusion, and we know that. It can create equality or less equality prosperity for some is changing the boundaries. Of course, it might be creating exclusion for others. And these are probably the processes that relate more to the use and the implementation and access. But what's interesting about thinking about this societal level is that, I think we can get at some of the structural aspects beyond just the technology and how it's being used and who is using it and what data might or might not be used to develop. For example, algorithms, if that is the technology which is a popular, it's an important phenomenon we look at nowadays, you know, the exclusion based on lack of data, for example, or digital divides. But I think that there are a lot of institutional reasons for some of these challenges and there's a lot of intersectionality across institutional issues.

I guess one of the things, so I'll say two points. One of them is that the studies on institutional theory predominantly have been done in I thin as Patrice Thornton would explain it, they've been done in societal context, maybe we could call them Western perspective, where the institutions are understood in a very particular way. And when they talk about, for example, the institution of religion, they're framing religion in a Western kind of way - when they talk about the institution of state, they're kind of implying a more democratic version of a state. You know, how some of these theoretical ideas work in different very different societal context, for example, if there is not a democratic state, but a different kind of state organization and if market mechanisms are operating, and I can't easily think of an example, but I think that there is scope for examining institutional theory problems and questions in non-Western contexts that might help us understand institutional theory differently, and how the various seven orders function together or not. In some context, for example, they talk about it as a lack of an institution – so there's a lack of a state and then we get anarchy or there's lack of - I don't know, religious freedom and so then there is lack of that so whether or not we speak about it in reference to lack or we understand these institutional orders as becoming coalesced into one, so if the state and the corporate and the market are all forced into one kind of an order, it would create very different dynamics.

My point is that I think to understand how societies function and function differently - there's a lot of scope for institutional logics and institutional theory to speak to some of the issues if we can rethink them outside of the current Western framing of those institutional orders. And then if we also bring that with that, the intersection with how the different ways that technologies can be used, can be appropriated the different ways that data can shape, for example, technology in and of themselves. This brings a lot of possibilities for looking at new challenges, and of course, the challenge that you put forward the challenges of inclusion, equality, prosperity these are not new challenges, but hopefully we can see the root of them in different ways. So is the root coming more from for example, you know inclusion or exclusion because of data and the way a technology is being appropriated or is it because of the particular weight a state apparatus is functioning and less about the technology a priori. So, I think it gives It gives another angle in on the analysis to understand the interaction of the, for example, things like equality. So, if equality is coming from an institutional order of a religious view or of a state view or of the way that corporations are assumed to work, then we can see that driving the technology. Or the other way around, but we need to be open to question how both of these sides work because they're both open for analysis.

Isam: Great. So, I'll be picking up on what Eivor just said. So, I'll say two things. The first one is the last point that Eivor made is about how this helps us overcome that problem of technological determinism, which a lot of IS scholars has been trying to do for a long time in relation to organizational processes, we're trying to do it with societal processes because a lot of people when they think technology is causing problem in society. They think, okay, like particular technologies are deterministically going to be either great for society or bad for society and this is where we're trying to bring in the other ways of thinking of overcoming those deterministic ways of thinking about how technology is actually changing society. But what's particularly interesting in the institutional logics’ perspective is that it brings that multiplicity of logic. What is your professional activities that interact with each other, those dynamics between multiple logics help us in an understanding of thinking about how that change is happening like we have in the paper drawn specifically on one paper for how we think about those dynamics, but there are multiple ways of doing it. Bisholovan Smith emphasized these two aspects, like with the centrality of centrality of logic changes and how the compatibility of logic exchange.

And these dynamics can help us see, for example, how when a technology comes into a societal area, and things start to change – is it that a particular logic that has been dominant is being undermined now and now there are new logistics that are becoming dominant so they say There are areas where the family logic has been dominant and technology comes in and brings in like a more like a market logic call. Let's say community has been dominant in certain areas and technology has been argued to diminish the strength of community like throughout history that the multi technology you get that this community well debatable issue but it's an argument that people have made. So is there like a dominance of a community to logic and when technology comes in you have other logics that's become dominant or is it that when you bring in the technology, it reinforces the dominance of the community. It can go either way, but the framework gives you that vocabulary and way of thinking of looking how that change is happening. Is it like, for example, if you have particular in certain areas logics that are in conflict with each other like we mentioned in the paper the health care field where the logic of the professions like doctors and medical professionals have drawn on their identities as professionals in the way they engage in their day-to-day practices.

But then you have in certain parts of the world, particularly in places like the US, where the market logic is strong influence on in the healthcare system. And you have like tensions between those two - when technology comes in, does it make those two more compatible or does it exacerbate the tensions between them? So, the framework gives you that vocabulary to think of how those changes, how is technology making that change and how those tensions, like in the other way, how the existence, for example, of those tensions of the dominance of a particular logic influences how technology is designed or adopted or used within a particular context. So, it goes in both ways - how technology changes, that dominance and those tensions or how the existence of the dominance and tensions influences how we develop new technologies, adopt new technologies or use technologies that have been adopted.

Zoyia: How can theory driven IS research be translated into actionable insights for practitioners? What steps would you suggest for bridging the gap between theoretical understanding and practical application in complex, tech-driven environments?

How can IS research guide organizations in creating practical strategies for ethical digital transformation, especially as technologies like AI and blockchain continue to reshape societal expectations around transparency, accountability, and inclusivity?

Eivor: Well, you know, the question about practice. I don't think what you're asking is unique to our paper there, right? Because that's an enduring question for any study. Well, I mean, we probably have divergent views here but you know, at one level I don't think practitioners actually want to change. I think it is a big question. You see, our framework, I don't think is particularly useful for practitioners. That's not what it was constructed for, I think the role of academia is in part to to understand processes and deliver insight and you know the extent to which practitioners want to change are often more political questions. And I don't think, you know, there's, if it's not my domain of action, why should I assume that that practitioner wants to take my advice, for example, if this framework helps me understand why a company is exploiting a group of people, I don't think that that motivates nonetheless a company to not exploit because they're incentivized to do so by the structures. My point is, is that changing practice is a lot more than delivering knowledge about how something works. It's also trying to change, if I could say it, the motivations from something other than idea we're presenting. So that's a kind of a weak answer to your question of why the world doesn't change because it seems that we have the same problems now in different ways we still have problems of lack of transparency, lack of accountability, and lack of inclusivity, you know, it's still with us, even though we know a lot more about it. But I'll let Isam answer how we might change that.

Isam: Well, I definitely agree that it would be naive to think that by writing a MISQ paper, you're going to change the hearts and minds of practitioners that most practitioners don't read these kinds of papers. It doesn't mean that they're not going to be affected by it at some point along the line in the future. There are processes through which these ideas that emerge in these very closed circles of academics end up reaching practitioners like either through someone translating them into practitioner-oriented journals. Through teaching, but there is a translation process that happens like people like engage in either executive education or even through the teaching of students who all go into like undergraduate students who are going to be part of industries or the working world at some point in time. And in this case, I think, what we hope will happen as others take ideas from a paper like this or any theory paper is that people will do that translation process and have ways in which you present to practitioners’ different ways of looking at the world, different ways of thinking about the problem. That's probably the main value as academics have sometimes - you feel like this question of relevance tends to push some people to thinking of academics as consultants. I think that's the wrong way of doing things like we're not in the business of going and telling practitioners when you have this problem, do A, B, and C. I think that's not our role in society as academics and that's not likely to even be effective. I think if we have ideas that help them think about their problems differently, and adopt or at least consider alternative worldviews like as Ivor said, we don't have the power to actually get them to implement anything or change anything. If the political power and the willpower is not there it's not we don't have that ability as academics, but at least the only thing we can offer is ideas that help them think about things differently and hope that that will have an effect.

Eivor: I think I would, you know, I completely agree with Isam on those points. And you ask about you know practical strategies for ethical digital transformation and of course these are loaded terms - what is your idea of ethics might be different from mine, certainly might be different from some other entity. So, we might assume we know what the right ethic is, but whose ethic is the right ethic? – it is already a problem without them saying, now we're more ethical because more ethical than what? So, I think, I would love this to be a happier world without people, you know, in misery and calamity and all of that. So, I would definitely long for more ethics. Of course, I prefer my ethics to someone else's ethics, but you know, I'm just making the point that the key benefit in research that might have a wider frame for IS in particular, because it can become quite myopic – to just look at the technology and the interesting algorithm and oh that it can do things faster. I think the benefit of looking out is to take in the social sphere in a way that can be integrated with the technology so it's not just only tech focused, but the socio-technical comes alive well -integrated. And, then when we start to have the opportunity to ask - who are the winners and who are the losers? – because the boundaries will be redrawn, and the technology will benefit some and not benefit others. So, the world might change, but do we understand really what's changing? And, I think here we can look at what's changing and assume that the changes will hopefully be benefiting some, but always be considering where it's not. So at least it brings us out to take in the world and not just get lost in the technology. Yeah, if we can, just a little bit.

Isam: The question of adding a moral judgment to the changes that will be talking about that we're observing is a tricky one like you both said because uh there are different ways of thinking about uh about ethics. There is a stream of research that intentionally makes the adoption of a moral position of like a basis for the decision usually that's we'll call it critical research, where it would say that this is like a wrong approach to how things are happening and other types of research tends to at least pretend to be neutral or not make that judgment as explicit or as a basis of doing this research. Although a lot of the adjustment tends to be implicit in many cases. But we at least hope that by making things clearer and more well-defined - that how what is actually happening or how we can think of these change processes differently people can it'll help people make their moral decisions better like because a lot of the time the moral decisions are not just a question of choosing between right and wrong there are usually moral dilemmas that people struggle with. Choosing the lesser of the two evils or the better of the two options. Those are tougher things to deal with. And that's where people need better understanding of what's actually going on to make those decisions, to deal with those dilemmas, those moral dilemmas at least in a more informed way.

Sonika: What practical steps would you suggest for researchers to identify and measure the impact of IT affordances in complex societal settings? Any tips on metrics or methods to capture things like their reach, variability, and effects on areas like inclusion or resilience?

In what ways can future research explore the 'dark side' of IT affordances, such as privacy erosion or enhanced surveillance, as these affordances scale and stabilize within dominant institutional logics?

Isam: So, maybe one example I can think of from the multiple examples we used in the paper is the idea of having one dominant logic and technology coming in and reinforcing that logic. For example, when there's a state logic that's dominant in the state already before technology was there had ways of keeping tabs on citizens and tracking citizens actions, and now technology comes in. And it can reinforce the ability of the states. to have stronger surveillance powers and uh and to do that tracking, which is what we identify in the paper as being one of the main affordances within that that institutional order. So, some ways in which or one way in which you can think of the dark side, if I think of or of the technology and the possibilities of action that it creates so-called is that situations in which there's a dominant logic that is I think stifling people's freedoms or whatever or limiting people's choices can be the market logic, it can be the state logic or any other logic and technology comes in and amplifies the dominance of the of that logic so that that's one example like

Eivor: I agree with Isam on the point about the affordances, and the ability of it to restating. The ability of them to somehow overemphasize or allow for the dominant logic to become more overemphasized so that there isn't a multiplicity of expressions, but one gets singled out. So, the affordances because, you know, it's a relational concept, but what relations are being afforded. So, which ones is the technology bringing out? What kinds of relationships does this particular way of using technology reinforce it is a way of looking at the synergies that I think affordances being relational is to see the dark side because dark side necessarily implies a relationship. It's dark with respect to something else.

Isam: Absolutely. Because it's a question of people, the goals that people are trying to reach with the technology and that's Because things are dark because just in relation to humans like we don't think of animals killing other animals as being beds because they do it because they eat but it's the intentions of people that make things right or wrong. And in that sense, the concept of affordances brings those intentions, those goals into that engagement with the technologies that's relationality becomes important in understanding what makes technology well it's not. It's not the physical thing, like the technology by itself, like you can, but it's the intentionality of the human coming into it that makes it either bad or good for society.

Eivor: Yeah. And it's the goals within us that might read bitterness, jealousy, hatred, joy, forgiveness, mercy - none of that is in the tool per se. It's just a widget.

Zoyia: How do you place the role of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the internet of things in either challenging or reinforcing the dominant institutional logics in the overall societal impact driven by technology? To what extent do you think the rapid advancement of new and innovative technologies have on the institutional logics?

Isam: Interesting.

Eivor: So, I had a hard time, you know, kind of to parse my head around that question.

Isam: I think the question of how the new and emerging technologies change like those two aspects of that we talked about the centrality like which logic is dominant is surely interesting to look at.?

Eivor: I think your question, I thought what you meant by the question was, is there anything different about the new technologies, and how we can use this kind of a theoretical apparatus is institutional theory, which is an old theory. It's an old theory. Is it relevant for blockchain? Is it relevant for IoT? That's how I understood it.

Isam: One thing I would say about artificial intelligence in in particular, maybe it applies to other things like blockchain to a certain extent - one thing that's interesting about generative AI is that unlike other technologies that's started or scaled inside organizations in a way, generative AI scaled outside of organizations. And now organizations are trying to figure out a way of to bring it in right so it's that societal implication that scaling. You know, with something like generative AI is something that is something that, at least shows the significance of thinking beyond the organizational boundaries because you can you see how a lot of people now use these Gen AI tools on a day-to-day basis and it's changing a lot of societal domains. At the same time. And after that happens and in such a rapid way, a lot of technology, a lot of organizations are trying to figure out how to adopt that within. In a way, it's like a flipped process compared to how a lot of technologies happen. Usually, they evolve within organizations and then spell out to the broader society. But these new technologies, they're not necessarily different in how they are going to change society from all the technologies in terms of like - think about it at the macro level. But in terms of the actual change that happens, like each technology is going to be to be different like the way artificial intelligence will change with how capitalism works, how our market system works, like how like states processes the processes work and say dominance or democratic processes function is different from how blockchain is going to affect it. It's different from how IoT is going to affect it but we can think of the ideas with each of these technologies, how they make particular logic's dominance, how they make particular areas of social life become the main ones like AI. For example, making markets more dominant proposal or a less dominant way of thinking about the thinking dealing with social and economic processes. So, all these are all questions that are open, but we hope that the kind of vocabulary and the ideas will be the same regardless of which emerging technology we're talking about.

Eivor: I would agree. It seems to me that it's an empirical question.

Isam: Yeah.

Eivor: We always think our generation is different and that it was never like this before. But I guess when antibiotics first came out and when electricity first happened, you know people thought, oh, everything's now different. Look, families are working differently. I think the institutional logic theorists would argue that logics themselves are an ideal type. They're not actually there in the practices. It's an instantiation of what it could be. But what the practice has actually become that's actually an empirical question. Therefore, there's lots to study since there are new technologies and emerging, there's the good questions - what's changing? - how is it changing?

Sonika: How would the dynamics explored in the study change or evolve with the aspects of technology governance being included within the preview and scope of the study? What are some of the institutional, technological and societal challenges that can create barriers in this domain?

Eivor: So, I mean, in the study, we look more specifically at societal levels. I guess, you are wondering how we scaled it down.

Isam: So maybe one thing I can say about that is the that one of the arguments we're trying to make is how you look at the societal level, like how you look at this, not limiting to organizational change, but looking at how technology is making broader changes in society. But an implication or if that is that organizations need to take into account how technology is changing astringent society when understanding the changes within organizations like that's that is now part of how organizational strategies are developed you can't if you are either in the technology field or in, let's say even like in healthcare, you can start to think about how you are going to change a healthcare system without taking into consideration not just how people within the organization, let's say the nurses and the doctors are using technology. We need to take into consideration how society is being changed by technology like the fact that now patients have access to multiple sources of medical information and they go to doctors having read everything and anything about their condition and many patients will diagnose themselves before they even make it to a doctor. And so, all those are part of what need to be taken into consideration. So that's the terms of the implications of or the importance of considering societal change even when trying to understand organizational change now that's one way of thinking how not necessarily a scaling but the effect of that of that scaling for the organizational level.?

Eivor: Yeah, I mean, I'm not 100% sure if I understand the direction of your question. This may or may not be what you're looking at, but I agree on Isam's point. But another way to look at it is if you were going to, so you scale out and see how these things are interconnected, I think it's not just about my interaction in a sphere, but the other spheres that come in on it. But I think that looking at it and foregrounding this tradition that IS researchers have been doing for the last three decades of looking at the use practices. So, in use always. It's never about a technology that's sitting there. It's always about how the practices around it for the is or the widget in use, if you will, is shaped and being shaped by these broader questions. It could be the institutional sphere, the organizational processes. But I think that one of the challenges that comes as we widen out the field of what we study, and this maybe gets to your next question about how you know what future of research but we tend to be quite technologically, especially in IS, maybe by definition, we're pro-innovation, we're pro technology, we're pro new stuff.

We like the next emerging technology and we want to know how it works and how it's changing practice. However, much of society isn't necessarily benefiting from all the infrastructure that is required - it's not just the technology, it's about how do you recycle this stuff - how do you plug it in and keep it charged? how do you have enough memory for yet these new programs that are ever so much bigger? There's a lot of societal issues barriers maybe is what I'm wondering if that's what you mean by the barriers, but there's a lot of ways of living that don't follow this pro keeping up to the latest technology and what that means. So that if buying a technology and running my business using this technology in a context of extreme poverty assumes that every four years my technology can become outdated and I'll just get the new. Well, that might not work in that kind of a technology so there's issues with these other questions that we came up with before about inequality and what forms of inequality does this pro next innovation thing led us to and the assumption that everybody can use this technology.

Well, you know, that there is there's such a wide way to go before that can happen because it's while everybody can have a phone. Maybe most of the mobile phone users aren't using smartphones that can hold you know, 50 apps working at the same time and only needing a charge once a day, that's not the state of most people's phones. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think we forget how society operates in the sphere of the world. And that these kinds of lenses that help us think about practices and in use about the various relationships that are sustaining particular use practices can work downwards as well as upwards. You know, an entrepreneur living in a extreme poverty context of a dump or as isolated - in some rural context - and a lot of people are not being examined because we don't study these contexts not. There are maybe anthropologists that we call to look on the fringes but it's actually those contexts of use that we consider are barriers for these technologies working what we would consider properly. But they're just working in a different way because the whole society is structured very differently in that context of use, rather than my assumption of how this was developed to function.

Isam: Maybe just to add a little bit on what Eivor said on the idea of barriers that if by barriers, we're thinking about like the barriers to making the best out of technology or barriers to how people can have positive societal change - one way of thinking about that is instead of just looking at some traditional ways or there is like a resistance to change that people talk about when trying to explain or explain away some of the issues of people adopting particular technologies or making them relevant to their socioeconomic conditions is to think of what logic is - influencing how the technology is being used. Is that the barrier? If a technology is being adopted with uh you know let's say like a market rationality. That's all that that's to it is that being a barrier to its relevance to a particular community, particularly if we are trying to address like some socioeconomic conditions of like people who are being in marginalized - do you need a different logic to influence how technology is being is being adopted. Do you need like a more community logic or if we are adopting. Healthcare, for example, they need to find a hybrid of like the professional and market logic or a hybrid of community and market logic like when you're developing social enterprises. And so that gives you a way of thinking of how the barriers are not won't be limited to like what kind of technologies are there or people or even people's ability to use these technologies to looking at how the rationality with which technology is being introduced a particular environment influences its ability to make a meaningful change in that environment.

Zoyia: As we end our discussion, we would like you all to share with us some advice that you would like to give to doctoral scholars and early-career researchers who aspire to publish their ideas in top-tier journals like MIS Quarterly?

What practical steps would you recommend for PhD students and early-career researchers interested in theory-driven, conceptual research? Specifically, how can they approach complex ideas and ensure accessibility in their work??

Isam: Well, maybe I'll start. This is was one of my first second post-PhD projects. I would say beginning with a theory paper is a risky endeavour. I wouldn't recommend people making this their main post Ph.D. project unless they have other projects that are based on empirical work, like I think, Michael said it like you don't or you don't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to start another theory paper, what's tricky about theory paper is that the final product looks easy like but the process may not be so necessarily. But the process of going through the back and forth and refining idea is tricky and challenging. Most of them end up taking a long time because, and I don't know empirical papers have like a relatively stable core. You have your data, you have your story - probably if you're doing a case study or if you're using other methods, there is something that is there in your working around it with theory papers as you start pulling out a thread from one end and everything starts to fall apart you have to start pulling everything together and pulling everything together. So, every iteration tends to be more challenging than an empirical paper. They're rewarding though, because you are constantly dealing with like ideas and trying to draw from multiple streams and exploring new literatures like what Michael was talking about like these moments where you face a particular problem and then explore whole literature that might not be directly relevant and you do the translation process of trying to make this new paper or stream of research relevant to what you're trying to say. So, that's interesting and rewarding. But it's also time consuming. In this particular paper, Eivor traveled halfway across the world and we've sat down for I think a week or like going through the table at the end, like the appendix, like for a whole week, like going through each paper, discussing our coding for each for each paper so it was intensive work.

Eivor: Yeah.

Isam: I think that process was critical to getting our paper to continue in the process like that for the second or third round, that work was probably a key way of keeping our paper alive until the main ideas became concrete. Yeah, it's a lot of work. Sometimes the final paper doesn't show, but it does take a lot of back and forth.

Eivor: I guess the advice that I would give - I agree with Isam, but at a more pragmatic level, you really need to choose colleagues that you enjoy spending time with, that you get along with, that you want to ask them how things are going and that you have a relationship because it's as you it takes a long time but it's a lot more enjoyable a process if you work well with people. I would say, it's certainly been one of the things that I've thought hard about is, you know, who do I want to work with and who do I get along with working and not just, well, I'll try to work with that person because, oh, they publish a lot. And I think that that is often the strategy. People who don't even know me have asked, oh, you know, would you like to join this paper? And I'm thinking, actually, this person's taking a huge risk. They might think I'm a really difficult person to work with. Why would they just ask like that. It's a long relationship. So, you know, we were blessed or fortunate in this Isam and I, we knew each other through doing our PhDs, not exactly overlapping, but we did overlap co-temporaneous and, you know, we knew each other's families and so forth. So, it's important who and the other point on theory driven but really on any theory driven, even if it's empirical paper. Take theories that you really think are interesting. They keep you up because you just want to read more about it. The theory seems dry to you or theoretically inaccessible or mundane or you don't quite get the ontology - I would say don't, I mean, a theory is just the lens. And so, you could probably, you know, look at certain ideas through multiple lenses and choose carefully because it's a lot of time invested and so you may as well love it. That's my advice.

Isam: I couldn't emphasize more the importance of choosing good co-authors. Even in terms of the development of ideas. A lot of the ideas in even in this paper we developed in conversations

Eivor: Yeah.

Isam: In meetings like, many times I'll meet Eivor or Michael in conferences and we'll sit at time aside when we meet and chat about the paper - even like I remember like the idea of using affordances as an element in the institutional logics came in one of those meetings in a conference. And if those dynamics are not there, you won't get those opportunities to develop those ideas it's - and that kind of relationship and dynamics is important. Sometimes I've had experiences where it was not there. It makes it much harder to get big results, to get the ideas and complete the whole writing processes.

Eivor: As opposed to trying to draw from Lacao or Heidegger, they're not as used to the IS scholars don't know them. It's harder to make your case when you're writing a paper to introduce some kind of completely new idea. But it's interesting that, you know, because affordances is not a new idea, nor is institutional theory or institutional logics. We understand these theories so working with a known quantity rather than unknown quantities was a strategic choice for us.

Zoyia and Sonika: Thank you for joining us today, and sharing such invaluable insights with us.

Eivor: Yeah, thanks.

Isam: Thanks.

Sonika and Zoyia: Thank you so much.