A Realist Social Theory of Information Systems

Rose, Jones and Truex (2005) (RST) call for a re-examination of the relationship between the IT artefact and the organization. This paper responds to that call. It first recognizes that existing approaches such as structuration theory (ST) and actor-network theory (ANT) have difficulties accommodating information systems within organizations and thus create issues in analyzing the relationship between agencies and information systems. To address these deficiencies, this paper suggests that the realist Morphogenetic Social Theory (MST) be adopted. The paper summarizes Rose, Jones and Truex (2005), highlights issues with ST and ANT, then gives an introduction to MST. Then, it extends MST by adding a typology of technological artefacts and placing them within MST. Finally, the paper shows how MST explains information system development and implementation activities.