OrganizationScienceVol. 18, No. 5, September–October 2007, pp. 749–762issn 1047-7039 �eissn 1526-5455 �07 �1805 �0749

informs ®

doi 10.1287/orsc.1070.0307©2007 INFORMS

Information Technology and the ChangingFabric of Organization

Raymond F. ZammutoDepartment of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010 Australia,

rzammuto@unimelb.edu.au

Terri L. GriffithLeavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, California 95053,

tgriffith@scu.edu

Ann MajchrzakMarshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Bridge Hall 401, Los Angeles, California 90089,

amajchrz@marshall.usc.edu

Deborah J. DoughertyDepartment of Management and Global Business, Rutgers University, 111 Washington New Street, Newark, New Jersey 07102,

doughert@rbsmail.rutgers.edu

Samer FarajDesautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada,

samer.faraj@mcgill.ca

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However,organization science’s interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during

which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them.Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information aswas the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technol-ogy (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done withinformation. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their featureswith organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form andfunction remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances—visualizing entire work pro-cesses, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/syntheticreality—that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordancescan result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue “Information Technology andOrganizational Form and Function” are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding oforganizations when the “black boxes” of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.

Key words : technology; organizational design; organizational form; organizational structure; organizational processes;information systems; affordances; Web 2.0; IS strategy

The relationship between technology and organiza-tional form and function has been of interest to organi-zation scientists for over 50 years. Within the context ofcontingency theory, Woodward’s (1958, 1965) researchand a theoretical article by Thompson and Bates (1957)first called attention to technology as a determinantof organizational structure (Scott 1992). Technologyformed one of the three legs of contingency theory as adeterminant of organizational structure along with orga-nizational size and the environment. Later models oftechnology and organization by Thompson (1967) andPerrow (1967, 1970), and Galbraith’s (1973, 1977) infor-mation processing view of structure, added to a growingunderstanding of technology’s role in shaping organiza-tional form and function.

These models focused on different aspects of organi-zations’ technical systems broadly defined. For instance,Woodward’s (1958, 1965) seminal research on man-ufacturing technology and organizational structureargued that increasing technological complexity requiredgreater structural complexity for effective performance.Thompson (1967) expanded technology’s applicabilitybeyond manufacturing organizations with his conceptof technological interdependence, focusing on the coor-dination requirements imposed by different patterns ofinterdependence between elements of an organization’stechnical system. Perrow (1967, 1970) examined the rel-ative routineness of work. He suggested that the num-ber of exceptions in a work flow and the extent towhich exceptions were analyzable would impact the

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location of discretion and power within an organization,the interdependence of work groups, and how they werecoordinated.Galbraith’s (1973, 1977) perspective viewed organi-

zational forms as a response to the uncertainty createdby the difference between the amount of informationrequired and the amount possessed by an organizationfor task performance. He suggested that decision-makinguncertainty could be reduced by decreasing the amountof information required through the provision of slackresources, by buffering, or by increasing an organiza-tion’s capacity to process information. Increasing infor-mation capacity could be accomplished using formalhierarchical information processes and through lateralintegrating mechanisms. Galbraith saw information tech-nology (IT) as a tool to enhance vertical information pro-cessing whereas horizontal information processing couldbe increased by creating linkages between people whopossessed part of the information required for a specificdecision-making activity. Common to these models isthe underlying premise that the structural forms of orga-nization (e.g., functional, divisional, matrix) are definedby hierarchies because they specify authority relation-ships, determine information flows, and serve as the pri-mary mechanism for the coordination and control ofactivities. Hierarchy was the original thread from whichthe fabric of organization was woven.The contingency theory debate about the relative merit

of technology versus size and environment as deter-minants of organizational structure led to substantialresearch on the relationship between technology andorganizational form and function in the 1960s and 1970s.A count of the articles published in the two leadingjournals of the period, Administrative Science Quarterly(ASQ) and the Academy of Management Journal (AMJ),between 1966 and 1975 shows that 39 (5.8%) of their664 articles incorporated technology as a major theme,the majority of which fit within the contingency theoryframework. However (and much to our surprise), 10 ofthe 39 articles focused on computer technology’s impacton organizations.The 1970s saw the displacement of contingency

theory by several new approaches to the study oforganizations. Among the most prominent were semi-nal works introducing institutional theory (Meyer andRowan 1977), population ecology (Hannan and Freeman1977), and resource dependence theory (Pfeffer andSalancik 1978). Within the context of the contingencytheory of determinants of structure, the environment“won” because these new approaches focused heavily onits role in shaping organizational form and function. Bythe mid-1990s, technology had virtually died out as atheme in the study of organizational form and functionwithin the organization science literature.Between 1996 and 2005, only 14 of 1,187 (1.2%) arti-

cles published in three of the field’s top journals, ASQ,

AMJ, and the Academy of Management Review (AMR),focused on technology’s relationship to organizationalform and function. The content of these articles reflectedthe demise of contingency theory with only one con-tinuing with contingency theory themes. The remain-ing 13 articles examined the relationship between ITand organizational phenomena such as communications,teams, learning, the nature of work, and interorganiza-tional relations. In absolute terms, the number of arti-cles on IT and organization appearing in ASQ, AMJ, andAMR between 1996 and 2005 was virtually unchangedfrom the number of articles on computer technology andorganization appearing in ASQ and AMJ between 1966and 1975. The only mainstream journal in the field pub-lishing much research on IT and organization between1996 and 2005 was Organization Science. Thirty-one ofits 443 (7%) articles examined the relationship betweenIT and organizational phenomena, such as communi-cations and decision making, cognition and learning,coordination and control, and virtual teams and organi-zations. In total, only 2.8% of the research publishedin these four leading journals focused on the relation-ship between technology and organizational form andfunction.1

While the field’s interest in the relationship betweentechnology and organization declined, IT’s penetrationof everyday life and the world of organizations increaseddramatically. Consider the simple fact that the number ofInternet hosts (e.g., computers hosting Web pages and/orInternet services) grew from 9,472,000 in January 1996to 394,991,609 in January 2006.2 This inverse relation-ship raises an important question: If the phenomena westudy in the organization sciences are changing due tothe ubiquitous adoption of information technology byindividuals and organizations, do not we run the riskof our theories and research becoming irrelevant unlessthey reflect the changes in those phenomena? It wasthis very question that formed the basis for our specialissue call.In the sections below we discuss how the relationship

between IT and organization has changed and argue thatIT is supplanting hierarchy’s role in coordinating andcontrolling activities. As a result, it has become one ofthe threads from which the fabric of organization is nowwoven. As the relationship between IT and organizationevolves, the potential for new forms of organizing is con-tinually created. We try to capture the interplay betweenIT and organization using the term “affordances” in thesense that new combinations of technology and orga-nizational features continually create possibilities thataffect organizational form and function. We describefive possible affordances—visualizing entire work pro-cesses, real-time/flexible product and service innovation,virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simula-tion/synthetic reality—by outlining their general form,the technical and organizing features that jointly create

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them, and some implications they have for the studyof organizations. Finally, we examine how each of theseven articles in this special issue speaks to these affor-dances and the challenges they raise to the traditionalways of thinking about organization.

The Changing Fabric of OrganizationThe relegation of technology to the background in theorganization sciences could be dismissed as simplyreflecting the role that information technology played inorganizations into the 1980s. IT was primarily used toautomate existing operations and to increase the speed ofcommunication. Automation within organizational func-tions meant that routine information collection and stor-age tasks were taken over by IT, replacing paper andpeople with electrons, without fundamentally changingthe way work was done. As “automated plumbing,”IT reinforced the traditional, bureaucratic approach forhandling uncertainty and information complexity. Thinkabout the “bureau” in “bureaucracy” literally as a chestof drawers, each drawer representing a function. Eachfunction collected and stored information relevant tothe activities within its own drawer. Marketing devel-oped and held sales information, accounting generatedand kept financial information, manufacturing assembledand possessed production information, and so on. Whatinformation technology did in this situation was acceler-ate the existing patterns of operation within each drawer.Work itself remained understood as functionally orga-

nized, jobs continued to be clearly defined within thebureau drawers, and the coordination and control ofinformation and activities was accomplished throughmanagerial hierarchies. When information from onefunction was needed by another, or activities required theinvolvement of more than one function, communicationand coordination was accomplished using vertical chan-nels, or horizontally through Galbraith’s (1973, 1977)lateral integrating mechanisms that were bolted on tothe vertical hierarchy. Managers relied on upward flowsof information to surface problems with the ongoingoperations and downward flows of instructions for mak-ing adjustments. As Zuboff’s (1988) seminal researchdemonstrated, automation increased managers’ sense ofcertainty and control over both production and organiza-tional functions, thereby reinforcing hierarchy.Phenomenally, the “automated plumbing” role may

have reinforced the idea that organizational theory didnot need to take information technology into account inits conceptualizations of organization. And, to a largeextent, this view was supported by research throughthe late 1980s on the industrywide impact of informa-tion technology investment and productivity that showedtechnology investment had little effect on productiv-ity. Even though there were reports of specific firm-level instances of information technology having a major

impact on organizational performance, no general trendwas found. This conundrum became known as the “pro-ductivity paradox” and suggested that information tech-nology was not significantly affecting organizationalform and function as reflected by outcomes.This situation changed in the 1990s as research began

to report a positive relationship between IT investmentand productivity in industries and firms, provided therewere investments in both information technology andorganization. The Dedrick et al. (2003, p. 1) review of55 studies on investment and productivity concluded that“greater investment in IT is associated with greater pro-ductivity growth. At the firm level � � � the wide range ofperformance of IT investments among different orga-nizations can be explained by complementary invest-ments in organizational capital such as decentralizeddecision making systems, job training, and business pro-cess redesign. IT is not simply a tool for automatingexisting processes, but more importantly is an enabler oforganizational changes that can lead to additional pro-ductivity gains.”On the information technology side, these new bene-

fits arose from IT’s increasing capacity in terms of com-puting power, communication (e.g., Fulk and DeSanctis1995), and integration capabilities. The doubling of pro-cessing power and storage capacity every couple ofyears, along with rapid increases in communicationbandwidth, increased the speed and decreased the costof information processing and communications. Cou-pling these capacity increases with the development ofenterprisewide information systems created opportuni-ties to organize around processes, not only their sepa-rate steps or functions. Enterprisewide systems create asingle database for transactions associated with a stan-dardized business process. Hosted on a server dedicatedto the transaction-processing software, enterprise sys-tems provide automated processing and analytic reportsaccessed by user (client-side) computers with the poten-tial for integration with other processes hosted on otherapplication servers.The earliest manifestation of enterprise systems was

the introduction of manufacturing resource planning(MRP) systems during the 1980s, which integrated infor-mation across historically distinct activities within themanufacturing function. MRP systems morphed intoenterprise resource planning (ERP) systems during theearly 1990s, integrating information across more func-tional areas. ERP then incorporated supply chain man-agement systems during the late 1990s, which allowedintegration to occur across organizational boundaries.Advances in networking and communication technolo-gies made this information widely and easily avail-able. The integrative aspects of these systems reducedthe need to use hierarchy to manage information flowsand coordinate activities because information was no

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longer contained in separate bureau drawers with sep-arate sets of functionaries charged with gathering andmaintaining it. As a result, these enterprise systemsdecreased the need to move information through a hier-archy, allowing people to organize around the work itselfand what could be done with the information.But to gain the potential benefits of process-oriented

IT integration, organizations needed to take advantage ofwhat Zuboff (1988, pp. 10–11) referred to as the “infor-mating” power of IT, where, in addition to automat-ing work “activities, events, and objects are translatedinto and made visible by information.” Increasing work’sinformation content set into motion a series of dynamicsthat changed the nature of work itself and the social rela-tions among the people doing it. The tasks performed bypeople at the lower organizational levels, including lineemployees, supervisors, and middle managers, began tochange significantly. People were freed to focus on morecomplex, judgment-related, and creative tasks such assolving customer problems right away with resourcesat hand rather than seeking information or permission,working on problem-focused teams and task forces (e.g.,for new product development, transforming productioncapabilities), and contributing one’s expertise to a largerset of activities.These changes opened the door to new ways of deal-

ing with complexity and uncertainty because they cre-ated opportunities for emergent patterns of interactionor, in other words, new forms of organizing. People nolonger had to separate their own work from the work ofothers, because everyone working on a particular pro-cess, be it manufacturing, inventory control, new productdevelopment, or product line management, could nowuse the process-based IT systems to “see” and under-stand the whole work flow. They no longer had to insistthat the problems be shaped to fit into their separate,specialized knowledge, but rather they could see howto shape their specialized knowledge to fit the prob-lem (Iansiti 1993, Leonard and Sensiper 1998). Holisticrepresentations of work flows also enabled what Barley(1996) calls horizontal communities of work. Thesecommunities of practice organize work not through staticvertical slices, but through emergent horizontal flows ofwork around core processes (Brown and Duguid 1991).As IT takes over many coordination and control

responsibilities from hierarchy, traditional hierarchicalviews of organizational form become incomplete. Manyforward-looking organization writers have suggestedalternatives to the traditional structural forms, includ-ing the adhocracy (Mintzberg 1983), the heterarchy(Hedlund 1986), the shamrock (Handy 1989), the bound-aryless organization (Devanna and Tichy 1990), thehypertext organization (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995), andthe edge-of-chaos organization (Brown and Eisenhardt1998), just to mention a few. Although these alternativeorganizational forms vary in their detail, they all present

conceptions of more flexible and less hierarchical formscompared with traditional structures. Their inherent flu-idity suggests that a conceptual shift—from “organi-zational form” to “forms of organizing”—is needed,based on the premise that unpredictable and unantici-pated forms of organizing emerge out of the combinationof IT and organization features and practices. Viewingthe social and technological systems of organizations inconcert, which was a critical part of sociotechnical sys-tems theory in the 1950’s (Trist 1981), is a perspectivethat the field needs to rediscover because IT has becomeinextricably intertwined with social relations to weavethe fabric of organization.

Affordances and New Forms of OrganizingOne way to explain the increasingly symbiotic relation-ship between IT and organization is through the lensof “affordances.” Gibson (1979) developed the idea ofaffordances to explain how people and other animalsorient to the objects in their world in terms of thepossibilities the objects afford for action, and that theparticular affordances of an object may be different fordifferent species. Hutchby (2001) adapted the term forthe sociology of science and technology, specifically toreconcile the opposing poles of constructivism (technol-ogy as a tabula rasa that is only given meaning andstructure through people’s interpretations) versus deter-minism (people are caused to act in a certain way bytechnology). An affordance perspective recognizes howthe materiality of an object favors, shapes, or invites, andat the same time constrains, a set of specific uses. Thisview is also consistent with Weick’s (1990) discussionof the new technologies as “parallel technologies involv-ing a technology in the head and a technology on thefloor” (p. 17) and Boudreau and Robey’s (2005) notionthat technology is enacted from an evolving humanagency, but may also constrain that agency. Possibilitiesof action are not given, but depend on the intent of theactors enacting them. Thus, an ERP system (in terms ofhardware and software) implemented in a leading-edgemanufacturing organization may develop into differentpractices of organizing than would the same systemimplemented in a resource-poor organization possessinglittle experience with IT. We use affordances for orga-nizing as a bridging concept that emerges from the inter-section of IT systems and organization systems. Ouraffordances are the result of the confluence or intertwin-ing of IT and organizational features. The technology-organizing possibilities that we refer to as affordancesfor organizing depend not only on the functionality char-acterizing the information technology, but also on theexpertise, organizational processes and procedures, con-trols, boundary-spanning approaches, and other socialcapacities present in the organization. Thus, one cannottalk about a complex technology without reference to the

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social setting, just as it makes limited sense to talk abouta door handle without discussing the people opening theopen doors.Using an affordance lens suggests that although IT

and organization features may exist independently ofeach other, their value for explaining organizational formand function comes from how they are enacted together.That is, although IT and organizational features mayhave their own potentials and constraints, theories areneeded that elaborate on the affordances that arise whenthey are woven together. Understanding these affor-dances requires that the features of both IT and orga-nization be considered simultaneously. Theorizing aboutaffordances ideally would define them using both ITand organization science language to explain how theircombined features interact to create new affordances fororganizing. At its core, an affordance perspective rec-ognizes that a technological object has some recognizedfunctionality but needs to be recognized as a socialobject. As a social object, its influence on organizationalfunctioning and performance cannot be separated fromexpertise, jobs, processes, or structures. We believe suchtheorizing will help open up the black boxes of IT andorganization simultaneously, which was the theme of thespecial issue’s call for papers.3

In the paragraphs below, we attempt to inspire organi-zation and information science scholars to open up theblack boxes of IT and organization together by offer-ing concrete examples of five affordances for organiz-ing: visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexibleproduct and service innovation, collaborating virtually,mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic representa-tion. This list is not exhaustive; the articles in this specialissue offer their own affordances as well, some of whichoverlap with ours. For each of these affordances, wedefine the affordance using IT and organizational lan-guage and show how it is created by the intersection ofparticular IT and organization design features. We thenexamine the implications of the affordance for organiza-tional functioning and performance.

Affordance 1: Visualizing Entire Work ProcessesWe define the “visualizing entire work processes” affor-dance as the ability to observe the entire work processin action from “end to end,” representing it through lan-guage, imagery, or physical artifacts to make decisionsabout next steps when alternative actions can be taken.The broader the work system visualized and the moreaccurately the entire process can be represented, themore complete the decision-making process will be inan organization. This affordance is enabled by the sym-biosis of technology and organizational features. Tech-nologically, business process management tools coupledwith dashboards that display the status of the work inprocess are needed to have real-time visualization capa-bility. In addition, integrated databases, usually throughan enterprise system coupled with business intelligence

software, are needed if the flow of information throughthe process is to be monitored. Finally, real-time track-ing sensors such as radio frequency identification chipsor software cookies are needed to indicate when a prod-uct has passed a particular point in the process or whena service has been delivered to a customer’s desktop.Wal-Mart, for example, offers its employees and suppli-ers visualization of the entire work process through itslogistics tracking system, which allows them to moni-tor a product as it moves from the supplier’s warehouseinto the Wal-Mart store and into the customer’s shop-ping cart.These technology features need to be coupled with

important organizational features to enact the affor-dance. These organizational features include processstandardization and a deep enough understanding ofthe process to identify key performance indicators andto carry out continual operations reviews to monitorprogress (Jelinek and Schoonhoven 1990). Althoughstandardized, processes also include organizing fea-tures that enable the ongoing identification of prob-lems and joint problem solving (Clark and Fujimoto1991), such as simple, decentralized structures withfewer interfaces across job categories (e.g., reduce thenumber of assistant chiefs and deputy assistant direc-tors), and a reward system that holds people account-able for how well their work fits into the overallprocess and how well they anticipate other functions’constraints. Process-centered organizational designs thatinclude team norms for helping others, work layoutsthat help people see how others are doing, and rewardsthat encourage working across functions to help anentire process are needed as well (Majchrzak and Wang1996). Process-centered organizing also includes differ-entiating work into horizontal flows of problem set-ting and solving (e.g., around product development,R&D/manufacturing/marketing capability building, andbusiness management) that can proceed separatelywithin strategic guidelines (Dougherty 2001). Finally,cultural norms and reward systems that encourage exec-utives to assist each other are needed to ensure that func-tional subprocesses are not optimized at the expense ofthe complete process.The visualization affordance helps to explain orga-

nizational performance in ways that examining eitherIT or organization alone does not. By examining howthe entire work process can be visualized by variousmembers in an organization, interdependencies acrossprocess steps can be more easily identified (Barki andPinsonneault 2005). By examining how people use thisaffordance to respond to dynamics in the entire process,the role of too much and too little job flexibility canbe examined. By understanding the organizational, cul-tural, and cognitive factors that enable different abilitiesto visualize, despite having access to the same infor-mation, the different roles that people play in dynamicproblem solving can be better understood.

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The visualization affordance has several implicationsfor organizing. First, it enables people to organizearound the work itself and helps them to both accessand make sense of the requisite information in a col-lective manner. That is, visualization enables the col-lective sensemaking people must do as they figure outhow to respond to the inevitable but unanticipated prob-lems and glitches that arise in the unfolding of complexwork. As such, it allows them to gradually develop pat-terns about how to react to potential future events, thusgrowing and changing not just in response but proac-tively. Second, this affordance makes the organizing pro-cess emergent and mutable as people follow the flowof work. Third, it raises issues about how much emer-gence is possible in various sectors or industries beforethe work and the organization “fly apart at the seams”as Schon (1963, p. 82) put it. Fourth, this affordance canmake organizational boundaries more permeable yet ableto be monitored. Once processes are optimized withinan organization, visualization of the entire process canquickly expand the boundaries of an organization toinclude other members of its value chain. As boundariesfollow the work, firms and individuals are no longerparts of single value chains, but become parts of net-works and ecosystems. The broader purview of visual-ization, facilitated through the technical and relationaluse of social network analysis, may also help partiesto identify gaps, holes, and opportunities for new busi-nesses, relationships, and roles. Finally, with visualiza-tion, people’s everyday work practices may become lessscripted and more complex, as they apply their exper-tise to actual work flows rather than enact their jobs asseparate functions.

Affordance 2: Real-Time/Flexible Product andService CreationWe define this affordance as the ability to create software-enhanced products and services by quickly recombin-ing components in new and innovative ways. It ismade possible by the existence (either within a com-pany’s software catalogue or in cyberspace) of smallsoftware-based components that can be integrated insome fashion, and of the organizational system byinvolving business strategies and practices that empha-size agility. A company can license Google Maps andquickly integrate it with their store locations to help cus-tomers find their stores. Book publishers can modularizetheir books to allow for the ability to create customizedtexts as products on demand.Several enabling technology features make possible

the integration of components in innovative ways includ-ing web-based service-oriented architectures, standard-ized component designs, and open source software.Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) refer to the notionof breaking up the software in a firm into its various ser-vices that can then be reused to rapidly create new appli-cations. Software components for a bank, for example,

might include foreign currency exchange, loan applica-tion, fund transfer, secure logon, and open an account.The online bank ETrade, for example, used these com-ponents in their SOA to rapidly create an application thatallowed customers to open accounts securely and trans-fer funds within ETrade accounts and between ETradeaccounts and other banks. These components are oftenWeb based, and may be “integrated” not only by liter-ally being combined, but by having such fast connec-tions that data and rules are transported back and forthbetween the different components so rapidly that theyseem like a single integrated system. As a result, a cus-tomer making travel arrangements may actually be usinga number of different components (e.g., flight sched-ules, cost optimizer, credit checker), with each compo-nent residing with a different vendor over the Web. Tyingthese different components together is made possiblethrough standards agreed to by the various key playersin the software market. These standards cover everythingfrom how messages are sent to how to describe formatsfor inputs and outputs of each component, and the for-mat of the code that connects the components. Finally,many of the components are available as open sourcecode, with a set of community-enforced norms of usethat include open availability, sharing, and improvingupon others’ design. Therefore, innovative services cre-ated from integrating two open source components couldbe posted on a webpage to stimulate others to add yetmore components to create other innovative services.Several organizational features are necessary to enable

the real-time/flexible product and service creation affor-dance. The continued creation of a “common ground”of social action that enables people from diverse back-grounds and expertise to come together easily is nec-essary, and can occur via product concept articulation(Bacon et al. 1994) and shared understandings of thestrategic value to be created that are developed and pro-mulgated by managers (Tushman and O’Reilly 1997).Transactive memory systems is one example of sharedunderstanding that must be able to allow for emergentcognitive structures as problem definitions and solutionsdynamically evolve (Lewis et al. 2005, Majchrzak et al.2007). Exposure to ideas from other disciplines (Allen1977), along with job rotations across boundaries to fol-low a development process, keeps people mindful ofthe whole activity and how their part fits in. Foster-ing the practice of “heedful interrelating” (Weick andRoberts 1993) helps people to quickly create a repre-sentation of the situation that fits with those of oth-ers, develop their own contribution effectively, and fit itinto the collective work (Dougherty and Takacs 2004).Structures are needed to facilitate crossing thought worldboundaries such as boundary objects that accommodatethe kinds of knowledge being codeveloped among thegroups (Carlile 2004), and boundary spanners of vary-ing types to gather up information, scout out oppor-tunities, or ward off unnecessary interference (Ancona

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and Caldwell 1992). These roles, coupled with helpfrom intermediaries such as brokers, opportunity recog-nizers, and translators (Markus et al. 2002, Majchrzaket al. 2004), facilitate more creative mixing of thecomponents.Attending to either IT or organizational aspects alone

would not provide a complete picture. By examin-ing the organization from the perspective of combin-ing components, organizational scholars can begin tounderstand how different actors within and across orga-nizations define the critical components of organizing,be they intellectual, physical, or software- or resource-based components. Organizational scholars can identifynew theories for explaining boundaries by examininghow components are differentiated. Finally, by examin-ing the process and outcomes of the combination processand how the organization and IT accommodate and sup-port these combinations, new theories of organizationalagility can be created.Quickly being able to create new products and ser-

vices has several implications for organizing. First,it grounds peoples’ everyday collective sensemakingaround understanding the emerging needs of those in-tended to use the services or products. As such, it couldhelp organizations maintain alignment in the face ofconstant change. It also introduces a rapid feedbackcycle by enabling quick probes and experiments withrapid feedback from potential user communities. Work-ing with users in this way provides a rich and vividsense of “what we are doing” and why, and keeps thedefinition of the work itself front and center. Second,this affordance enables people to readily follow, and attimes lead, emerging needs and opportunities as theseshift and morph into alternate applications and use func-tions, which allows the boundaries of markets servedand products offered to evolve over time. Some orga-nizations may use this affordance to proactively stimu-late the market in new and unusual ways, such as whenETrade introduced the Intelligent Cash Optimizer to pro-vide expert-system investment advice over the Internet.Individuals may simply use it to proliferate existing bestpractices rather than to creatively generate new practices,as when a scientist simply borrows from others’ workrather than innovate with it (Majchrzak et al. 2004). Forsome organizations, the ability to quickly create newproducts and services will be used primarily internallyby IT departments to better service their business unitswhereas other organizations will use it to develop newcustomer experiences. Forms of organizing that do notconstrain innovation to the organization itself and iden-tify ways to include customers and suppliers within legalumbrellas are needed. This affordance makes many newstructures and practices possible now, and in the futurepromises to facilitate further possibilities.

Affordance 3: Virtual CollaborationCollaborating virtually refers to the ability to share andintegrate others’ knowledge when that knowledge isprimarily conveyed through virtual media. It can takethe form of virtual teams (Cramton 2001, Fiol andO’Connor 2005, Hinds and Mortensen 2005, Majchrzaket al. 2000), online electronic networks of practice(Wasko and Faraj 2005), or new patterns of collaboration(von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). The virtual collabo-ration affordance is highly dependent upon intertwiningtechnological and organizational features in ways thatencourage open knowledge sharing, knowledge acquisi-tion, knowledge maintenance and updating, and knowl-edge retrieval. For example, the nature of the task willoften determine the type of technologies and organiza-tional arrangements needed to enable task completion.Technologies that support contextualizing others’ knowl-edge (e.g., using keywords in subject headers, linkingbetween posts in the workspace to know the connec-tions between documents, etc.) lead to greater knowl-edge comprehension for nonroutine tasks, but are toocomplex for routine tasks (Majchrzak et al. 2005). Cre-ating a structure of periodic face-to-face meetings maybe needed when parties are unable to, or do not have thetechnology support to, negotiate virtually (Maznevskiand Chudoba 2000). Research on distributed work alsosuggests several organizational features that can play arole in enacting this affordance. For example, withoutthe effective management of organizational features suchas psychological safety (Edmondson 1999) and situa-tional awareness (Cramton 2001), virtual workers tendto not share their unique knowledge (Majchrzak et al.2000), have greater interpersonal conflict (Hinds andBailey 2003, Hinds and Mortensen 2005), create sub-groups (Fiol and O’Connor 2005, Polzer et al. 2006),and fail to coordinate their work effectively with others(Polzer et al. 2006).When we open up the black box of the IT system

that supports virtual collaboration and combine it witha fine-grained analysis of how people cognitively pro-cess and interact with others’ knowledge virtually, wecan better explain what might happen in the cycles ofsynchronous and asynchronous virtual interactions overtime in such virtual collaborations. In turn, we may bebetter able to explain the role of diversity in distributedwork, the dynamics of knowledge transfer across the fullrange of virtualness (Griffith et al. 2003), why transac-tive memory systems can be created in teams that nevermeet (Moreland and Myaskovsky 2000), why commu-nities that have no boundaries are able to encouragepeople to volunteer for specific roles (e.g., Flemingand Waguespack 2007), and how engagement of virtualcommunities is maintained without explicit relationship-building activities.The virtual collaboration affordance has several impli-

cations for organizing. First, with the proper intertwining

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of organization and IT, virtual collaboration can broadenparticipation in an organization’s work processes anddecision making by including people located at itsperiphery, such as individuals in developing countrieswho might not be engaged in a strategy session, the newmother who might otherwise have quit her job but nowworks ten hours a week telecommuting, or the personwho represents a small constituency in a global enter-prise. Second, virtual collaboration increases the poten-tial for bringing people from different organizations anddisciplines together dynamically for short periods oftime who would not otherwise have the opportunity tobecome engaged in the activity. Such people are ableto stay in close contact with their constituencies toobtain localized knowledge as the knowledge of the taskevolves, thereby maintaining the unique perspective thatthe task requires (Sole and Edmundson 2002). Third,virtual collaboration provides the opportunity to cap-ture decision rationales and work processes as work isdone, enabling future actors to reuse or learn from pastwork. Fourth, virtual collaboration enhances the poten-tial for organizations to extend their boundaries tem-porarily, experimentally, or permanently. For example,by sharing common technologies and work processes forcollaborating, two quite different businesses can cocre-ate and coevolve a unique joint business strategy.

Affordance 4: Mass CollaborationThe mass collaboration affordance is defined as the pro-cess by which people interact on a many-to-many basisvia the Internet as opposed to a one-to-one basis (e.g.,instant messaging), or a one-to-many basis (e.g., listservers). The intention of mass collaboration is to haveinformation seen and used by unknown others (thus dis-tinguishing it from virtual collaboration), creating newunexpected content. At the most basic level, this cansimply involve people reading and then creating tags,labels, or links to content that others have posted sothat when others view the content they’ll see a link toother information that someone else thought was rele-vant. At the more sophisticated level, mass collabora-tion refers to cocreation where predictions about stockmarkets are more accurate when made by the massesthan when made by chosen experts, where encyclope-dia entries are more up-to-date and as reliable as thosewritten by paid scholars, and where articles are writtenthrough a democratic collaborative process with no edi-tor, no webmaster, and no teacher.The mass collaboration affordance is dependent on

the intertwining of both technical and organizational fea-tures. For instance, a study of the corporate use of wikisrevealed that certain technical features, such as requir-ing secure logons, providing statistics on the use ofthe wiki page, allowing for reversions back to old ver-sions, providing a discussion page in addition to thewiki page, and mechanisms to block inappropriate use

of the site, were absolutely critical to the success ofwiki-based communities (Wagner and Majchrzak 2007).However, the same study found that a relatively complexset of organizational arrangements, such as allowing andencouraging different levels of participation, having acommunity-owned management structure for monitoringthe site, and aligning the work of the wiki with the goalsand work of the individual, were needed as well. Orga-nizational design decisions must be made for each com-munity such as who is invited to contribute, what typesof contributions are to be encouraged, and the degreeto which the collaborations involve open cocreation orsimply collating diverse opinions. Maintaining norms ofreciprocity so that people will both share problems andadvice, providing the opportunity for posters to obtainrecognition from others for posting their information,and stimulating contributions with interesting questionsand tasks are all affected by the combination of organi-zational and technological features.The mass collaboration affordance can help explain

organizational performance in ways that examining ITor organization in isolation cannot. By examining howmasses collaborate, organizational scholars can begin tobring the dynamics of consumer markets into the dynam-ics of organizational change, such as by examining howearly adopters emerge, the role of supportive struc-tures, and how to manage the balance between imposingencouraging structures and allowing for emergent behav-ior. Examining how masses collaborate may help to gen-erate new theories of organizational innovation becauseit may help to explain how to cross functional bound-aries among unknown collaborators. Finally, examin-ing how masses collaborate may provide the means forreconceptualizing some organizations as masses wherethe individual’s role is less important than that of the col-lection of individuals that have been temporarily broughtto bear on a problem.A major implication of the mass collaboration affor-

dance for organizing is that it creates the potentialfor quickly developing temporary organizations. Forexample, the KatrinaWiki was started by a student inAmsterdam who felt compelled to help and contacted asmall group of people who had created websites duringthe tsunamis. They created a wiki that within days of thehurricane included thousands of organized entries fromhundreds of people who posted missing persons, missinganimals, found animals, people needing jobs, companieswith jobs, and resources for emergency response andrecovery. Some contributing to the KatrinaWiki did soexclusively for days, relaying messages to rescue work-ers in the field as information was posted to the wiki site.Mass collaboration also affords the possibility of creat-ing parallel structures. Prediction markets are increas-ingly being seen as a parallel structure to the expertiseof fund managers, stockbrokers, investment bankers, andbond traders. Another implication for mass collaboration

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is that it affords the possibility of unbounded networks.Networks of music fans or a video on YouTube can cre-ate attention that draws more people into a phenomenon.Such networks can also have detrimental effects, aswhen Slashdot posts a call to bombard a site and theSlashdot community responds. Such networks may alsorespond in unpredictable ways, as when Digg.com, anopen publisher of news posted by anyone, decided toblock links to software code for pirating movies. It sub-sequently suffered a user rebellion and had to reverse itsdecision. Finally, this affordance raises questions regard-ing people’s everyday activities: how can they enactdiverse roles and how many roles can they handle?

Affordance 5: Simulation/Synthetic RepresentationThe simulation/synthetic representation affordance isdefined as the capability to conduct what-if scenarios.Simulations can favor or shape a variety of specificuses, from guiding immediate next steps to challengingpast assumptions, from empowering action to informa-tion overload, from confident decision making to anx-ious worrying. Clearly technology plays an importantpart in simulations. Dashboards coupled with business-process management tools integrate data from a businessprocess’s critical junctures in real time and aggregate thedata across the process. In this way, users may decidethat what may appear to be a problem early in a processhas been resolved, and what early indicators suggest isa problem needs to be resolved quickly before it affectssteps later in the process. Shifting the dashboard into“what-if” mode allows users to temporarily decouple themetrics from the actual performance of the process andobserve the possible impact of alternative actions laterin the process.Business intelligence is another technical feature

underlying simulations. Business intelligence is the useof artificial intelligence to identify patterns in data andthen extrapolate from those patterns to predictive behav-ior. When coupled with an enterprise resource planningsystem, business intelligence allows the user to identifypatterns in buying behavior, shipping behavior, returns,supplier relationships, and even competitor and industry-level behavior. With these systems in place, the user canobserve changes to the patterns when new factors areinjected, such as discounts for buying behavior, rerout-ing, and incentives for supplier relationships. Althoughsome of these sorts of simulations have always beendone, technology now allows anyone with access to con-duct them. Simulations have also been used for sugges-tion systems, such as at Nortel, where employees workthrough a simulation system that helps them identify thekey root causes of a suggestion, the support structure itneeds, and the quantifiable benefits it may bestow uponthe organization.The availability of simulation technology will not lead

to its widespread use unless necessary organizational

features that support it are in place. Simulations implyaction. Thus, employees who use them are likely torequest changes from their organization and engage inactions emergently as they respond to the simulationresults, whether these actions are for experiential learn-ing purposes (Lewis et al. 2005) or for real-world adjust-ments to dynamic environments (Majchrzak et al. 2007).Therefore, if organizations provide employees access toa simulation capability, they also need to encourage theexploration of alternatives based on simulation resultsand, just as importantly, be willing to implement orat least seriously examine the resulting recommenda-tions. At one organization that provided a simulation toolto its members, a supervisor became so excited that sheused it and found that her process could be improvedsubstantially, but only with the support of the materialhandling unit (Markus et al. 2002). She put together aproposal for the executive management team; manage-ment’s response was that the proposal made too manychanges and therefore denied the request for action. Thesimulation capability was never used again in the orga-nization, even when the management team promisedto try to implement subsequent proposals. Organiza-tional simulations may find greater acceptance in orga-nizations where there is acceptance of simulation forother purposes. NASA, for example, has effectively usedboth engineering and organizational design simulationsbecause they are congruent with engineering culture andmethods (Carroll et al. 2006).By understanding the organization and IT characteris-

tics that distinguish overload from empowerment, con-fidence from anxiety, and refinement from fundamentalarticulation, organizational scholars can better appreci-ate how performance can be enabled by empowermentwithout the overload, enabled with confidence withoutthe anxiety, and enabled by the right balance betweenrefinement and challenge. Virtual worlds can also openthe possibility of rapid, low-cost experimentation (Hemp2006). For example, a marketing person in an organi-zation can pursue an idea for a new style of furniturewithin a virtual world space at relatively little cost; ifthe furniture garners attention in the virtual world, themarketing analyst may be able to use the virtual worldas evidence for pursuing the new style. Educationalinstitutions have used Second Life to create distancelearning courses; Toyota uses Second Life to rapidlyconfigure cars to see how the millions of online partic-ipants acquire the car component and use it; Nike usesSecond Life to create “shoe” components to observehow the shoes are discussed and traded. Quantitativewhat-if scenarios can now be relatively easily performedby anyone in an organization with an enterprise system;the worker can simulate what might happen if the mixof materials in a manufacturing process was changedin response to changing supplier availability. Predictive

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markets allow for simulating what might happen to amarket under qualitatively distinct scenarios.The simulation affordance has several important orga-

nizing implications. First, it can affect the processesand nature of sensemaking that people engage in. Sim-ulations afford in-depth analysis and the opportunity tomake sense of new possibilities and discover alterna-tive courses of action, but only if people have local-ized knowledge to appropriately interpret the results.Coupled with local knowledge, modeling the potentialconsequences of different courses of action can reduceuncertainty in organizational decision making. Second,this affordance may push organizations to evolve in newdirections. By focusing on intelligent action, employees’immediate dependence on others for information, knowl-edge, and brainstorming may be sufficiently lessenedsuch that employees may be able to view themselves asindependent decision makers striving to achieve goals ofthe organizational collective. As such, traditional organi-zations could be transformed into collectives of artisansunder a single organizational umbrella, an artisanshipthat is inextricably tied to the intelligent simulation.Third, simulation can affect how people actually goabout their work by giving them multiple simultaneouspersonas to play, e.g., a person may play an avatar atToyota and a real marketing person at Toyota. Some ofthese roles are intentionally acted—as when an individ-ual plays the “good cop” to a partner’s “bad cop” duringnegotiations with a difficult client—whereas others arecloser to the person’s true persona. How these roles playout in a work day and how playing them out affectsthe forms that organizing takes are interesting researchquestions.We see these five affordances as potentials made pos-

sible by the combination of technical and organizationalfeatures. Whether the affordances manifest themselveswhen these features are present and how they do so isnot a given because there can be no affordance absentactor intent. Although these IT and organizational fea-tures may combine in ways that favor or shape spe-cific uses, the range of possibilities in how they areenacted within organizations will define the uses andoutcomes associated with them. And because they aredefined by intent, affordances continually present oppor-tunities for new forms of organizing. Organization andinformation systems researchers can explore how affor-dances emerge, evolve, and shape organizational formand function in novel ways. Such research will bringorganization science concepts and theories into a worldwhere IT is a fundamental thread in the fabric of orga-nization.Developing theoretical perspectives that open the

black boxes of IT and organization, be it with the fiveaffordances we suggest or others, requires future re-search that addresses three issues. First, we need tostudy how information is socially and organizationally

made sense of because organizing takes place aroundthose understandings and subsequent actions, not onlyaround information acquisition and transmission (e.g.,Brown and Duguid 2000, Dougherty 2001). Second,we need to study how affordances emerge and evolvewith changing technological and organizational features(Majchrzak et al. 2007). Innovations in IT and orga-nization create new options, raising new questions toexplore. How do novel combinations of IT and organi-zational features create new affordances? How do con-tinuous versus discontinuous innovations in either ITor organization change the dynamics (e.g., Rothaermeland Hill 2005) of affordance emergence and evolu-tion? What impact do new combinations of IT andorganizational features have on organizational form andfunction? Which combinations are selected in organi-zations and why? Organizations and IT are designed,but given their complexity and interaction, the resultsare mutable and dynamic (e.g., DeSanctis and Poole1994, Orlikowski 1992, Griffith 1999). Third, we needto study the impact of affordances on organizations’boundaries. Organization theorists (e.g., Kellogg et al.2006) have argued that boundaries are becoming increas-ingly permeable and each of the five affordances speaksto changes in boundary conditions. Better understand-ing the impact of affordances on boundary conditionswould improve our ability to understand why bound-aries have become less constraining and how interac-tions across organizations occur. Overall, research thataddresses these issues either by continuing theory devel-opment or by presenting perspectives elaborating ontheir underlying dynamics would be valuable. The arti-cles in this special issue provide examples and founda-tions for such future research.

Summaries of the Special Issue ArticlesOur call for the special issue was responded to by 149abstracts that eventually led to the set of seven peer-reviewed articles in this special issue. These seven werethe most fully developed in striving to study the inter-twined nature of IT and organizing. Each article tacklesthe above three issues in a different way and, each intheir own way, offers perspectives that incorporate thenotion of affordances, although sometimes varying fromthe ones we mention. They focus on how informationis processed, emergence and evolution, dynamics, con-text, intentions, and actions rather than structures, corre-lations, boxes, and arrows. It is our hope that they willspur a substantial shift toward studying the conjunctionof IT and organization in future research.Sinan Aral and Peter Weill’s article “IT Assets, Orga-

nizational Capabilities, and Firm Performance: HowResource Allocations and Organizational DifferencesExplain Performance Variation” examines why there arevariations in the effects of IT investment on firm perfor-mance. Their answer focuses on the intersection of IT

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investments and organizational capabilities as moderatedby strategic intent in generating value. They argue thatIT investments are directed by strategic intent that, inturn, leads to uses of information technology that gener-ate different performance outcomes. When taking differ-ences in strategic intent into account, the combination ofinvestment in IT and organizational capabilities explainsvariations in performance outcomes in a sample of 147firms across 1997–2002. The article demonstrates thegeneral concept of affordances, where actors’ strategicintent shapes the outcomes that can be obtained throughthe combination of technology and organizational invest-ments. It also highlights the importance of the presenceof both organization and technology factors in creatingaffordances. On a phenomenal level, the article providesa nuanced view of why the “productivity paradox” reallyisn’t a paradox when you unpack the black boxes onboth sides of the equation.Brian Pentland and Martha Feldman’s “Narrative

Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization”proposes a way to represent and visualize patterns oftechnology in use. They suggest that a narrative networkis a sociotechnical tapestry that intertwines informationand communication technologies (ICTs) and organizesinto stories involving people using tools to do tasks.“Narrative” refers to a set of actions or events thatembodies coherence or unity of purpose, and “network”refers to an image of many interconnected elements(including people and ICTs) from which particular per-formances can be constructed. The authors describe howproperties (or features) of ICTs such as modularity,recombinability, distributed, and communicative natureprovide new and different ways (what we would callaffordances) for people to use tools to do tasks acrosstime, space, and participants. These properties shapeand expand possible storylines that constitute organiz-ing, because ICTs both participate in and transform net-works by evolving in unexpected ways. The authorsoutline theories of structuration, actor networks, and rou-tines that underlie their narrative network method, showhow to construct narrative networks, and suggest possi-ble applications for exploring degrees/types of structureand examining organizational change and organizationalthinking through design. The organizing affordances weoutline can be narrative networks in their own rightbecause they display broad possibilities for depictingstorylines. They can also be narrative fragments that arewoven into theories that seek to understand future orga-nizing possibilities.Gerald Kane and Maryam Alavi’s article “Informa-

tion Technology and Organizational Learning: An In-vestigation of Exploration and Exploitation Processes”extends March’s classic computational model to exam-ine how three IT tools affect organizational learning:knowledge repositories, groupware, and e-mail-assistedelectronic communities of practice. They illustrate the

power of the simulation affordance, showing how arelatively simple computational model can intertwinevarious IT and organizing features to explore diver-gent outcomes on learning (and sensemaking). It alsodelves into the virtual collaborating affordance, explor-ing how different kinds of relations among team mem-bers using different kinds of IT can lead to more or lessorganizational learning. Their modeling suggests thate-mail-assisted electronic communities of practice leadto more exploration than knowledge repositories or teamrooms because more knowledge variance is introduced.However, blending e-mail with other IT-enabled learningmechanisms has a detrimental effect on knowledge lev-els, whereas team rooms blended with other mechanismsproduces the highest levels of learning. The authorsconclude that the right IT-enabled learning mechanismsemployed under the right conditions can benefit orga-nizational learning, but that the wrong mechanisms forparticular conditions can be severely detrimental.Paul Leonardi’s article “Activating the Informational

Capabilities of Information Technology for Organiza-tional Change” moves in the direction of all three issueswe raise for future research. The study explores specif-ically how information that a new IT tool provides canlead to changes in the social structure of an organi-zation. The findings of his ethnographic study of theimplementation and use of an IT tool to manage ITservices in an organization demonstrate that, as IT isappropriated within an organization by its users, infor-mal advice networks emerge, which in turn lead to newsocial structures. Informal advice networks then becomean affordance that intertwines how the IT is designed toconvey and use information and the way that the users’jobs are designed to use that information.The article by Olga Volkoff, Diane Strong, and

Michael Elmes “Technological Embeddedness and Orga-nizational Change” highlights our proposed three themesfor future research. Their ethnographic study examinedthe effect of an ERP implementation on an organiza-tion. Using a critical realist perspective, the authors findtheoretical traction around considering ERP as consist-ing of data, routines, and roles, which take on not onlya performative and ostensive (i.e., abstract and general)quality, but a material (i.e., concrete and specific) qual-ity as well. Although the material qualities of the data,routines, and roles of the ERP should conceptually beinterrelated with each other and with their performativeand ostensive qualities, the authors find this not to be thecase; at various points in the implementation process,roles, routines, and data were unrelated to each other andat other times the performative, ostensive, and materialqualities were unrelated as well. The authors’ explana-tions for these findings provide us with a new vocabularyand level of analysis for studying affordances, as wellas caution us to not assume that expected relationshipsamong concepts will be found.

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Mark Dodgson, David Gann, and Ammon Salter’sarticle “ ‘In Case of Fire, Please Use the Elevator’: Sim-ulation Technology and Organization in Fire Engineer-ing” examines the impact of simulation technology onthe work of fire engineers and show how traditionalways of design are turned on their head. They start witha description of how engineers use simulation technol-ogy to accurately create virtual representations and toanalyze a large number of situations and generate appro-priate solutions. However, the changed way of work-ing afforded by the technology requires higher levelsof skills and forces novel ways of exchanging informa-tion to validate new engineering knowledge and buildingdesigns. Knowing when to simulate and recognizing thatmodeling assumptions become intertwined with a socialprocess of brokering knowledge between different par-ties, combining knowledge, and constructing judgment.In the context of our special issue, the paper opens up theblack boxes by richly explaining the organizing changesassociated with fire engineering simulation.Arvin Sahaym, H. Kevin Steensma, and Melissa

Schilling’s article “The Influence of Information Tech-nology on the Use of Loosely Coupled OrganizationalForms: An Industry-Level Analysis” explores how con-textual factors can affect IT investment’s impact onfirms’ boundaries. They note that IT systems can be usedto enhance coordination within or across firm boundariesand argue that industry contextual factors will influencewhether IT investments lead to loosely or tightly cou-pled organizational forms. They find that contextual fac-tors, such as established industry standards, asset speci-ficity, technological change, and production input diver-sity, influence the extent to which firms within indus-tries use loosely coupled organizational forms as repre-sented by alliance formation and the employment of con-tingent workers. Within the context of our framework,their results suggest that affordances affecting organiza-tional boundary conditions can be enhanced or inhib-ited by industry context. Thus, researchers need to beaware of how the contextual environment of the organi-zations they study may impact the types of affordancesthat emerge and how they are used.

ConclusionWe began with a history highlighting the organizationalscience’s declining interest in the relationship betweentechnology and organizational form and function at atime during which IT has become increasingly perva-sive in every day life and work. We also have explainedhow IT has supplanted many of the coordination andcontrol roles of hierarchy, creating the opportunities fornew forms of organizing that focus on process insteadof function. This emerging coordinative role of IT hasmade it one of the threads from which the fabric oforganization is woven. It is no longer possible to designor modify organizations without recognizing that IT is

part of the fabric. And it does not make sense to studythe dynamics of human behavior within organizationswithout taking into account how information technolo-gies might affect it. Thus the central question raised bythis special issue: If the phenomena we study are chang-ing due to the ubiquitous adoption of information tech-nology by individuals and organizations, do not we runthe risk of our theories and research becoming irrelevantunless they reflect the changes in those phenomena?We have offered affordances, created by the con-

junction of IT and organization features coupled withmanagerial intent, as one way of moving forward indeveloping conceptualizations of organizations appropri-ate in an IT-intensive world. These affordances push usto stake claims in our theory and research regarding themeaning and use of information, rather than its bureau-cratic transmission; how affordances come to be andchange; and how organizational boundaries form. Exam-ples of five affordances are presented, but we have notattempted to create a theory of how they develop orevolve or dissolve. We leave this to future research. Wealso leave to the future the exploration of other inter-twinings of IT and organization that result in other affor-dances, such as IT-strategy affordances.We hope that by presenting a story of IT and organi-

zation in combination, clarifying future research needs,and showcasing seven exemplar articles, this specialissue will help move the field forward. As a commu-nity of organizational scholars, we have much to offerour students and managers, particularly if we can makeour theory and research more applicable to the Infor-mation Age. We also urge organization and informa-tion science scholars to question research that is notexplicit in its consideration of both these foundationalcomponents. Leaving either side of the relationship unat-tended is likely to result in an underspecification of thephenomena being studied.Just as Perrow (1983) suggested that engineers may

need to “marry” human factors specialists to designcomplex organizations to avoid normal accidents, orga-nizational scientists may need to “marry” informa-tion scientists to succeed at opening these blackboxes. Whether through marriage, collaboration, or self-training, the affordances that arise from the interweavingof IT and organization need to be explored if our the-ory and research hopes to reflect the reality of today’sorganizations, not those of 40 years ago. We hope thatboth organization and information scientists take up thischallenge.

AcknowledgmentsThe order of authorship is by date of involvement in the edi-torial process. All authors contributed equally to this article.

Endnotes1This lack of theorizing among organizational scientists isnot due to a lack of attention across all disciplines. Research

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examining the evolving relationship between IT and organiza-tional form and function is the focus of significant researchattention by information systems researchers. For example,almost half the articles (24 of 49) published in 2005 in twoleading information systems journals, MIS Quarterly (MISQ)and Information Systems Research (ISR), focused on the rela-tionship between information technology and organizationalform and function. About one-third of these articles focusedon aspects of IT and knowledge management, reflecting thetheme of a two-volume special issue of MISQ. Other articlespublished in MISQ and ISR during 2005 explored topicsthat included IT’s impact on strategy and firm performance,interorganizational relations, and the effects of individual,work environment, and industry characteristics on IT use. Thisinformation systems research is well informed by the organiza-tion science literature. The ISI Journal Citation Reports showthat articles published in MISQ and ISR during 2005 cited arti-cles from ASQ, AMR, AMJ, and Organization Science (OS) atotal of 287 times. More generally, articles in MISQ and ISRcited articles in recognizable organization science journals 632times, which represented 19.4% of their total citations to jour-nal articles. However, current organization science research isnot similarly informed by the information systems field. Arti-cles in ASQ, AMR, AMJ, and OS cited articles published inMISQ and ISR a total of 19 times in 2005. Seventeen of thosecitations were in OS. More broadly, articles in these four jour-nals cited 67 articles in total from journals in the broadlyrecognizable information systems and computer science liter-atures, which is four-tenths of 1% of their total citations tojournal articles during 2005.2Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/ops/ds.3The affordance perspective builds on structurational viewsof IT and organizations (e.g., DeSanctis and Poole 1994,Orlikowski 1992, Griffith 1999) in its recognition of the dual-ity between action and structure. We lean towards the languageof affordances versus structuration (Giddens 1979) given thefocus on the materiality of technology (e.g., Hutchby 2001) inthe affordances literature.

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