Introducing Collective Identity into Information Systems Research: Collective Identity as a Bridge between IS research and Practitioners

In the turbulent economy an organization must often reconstruct itself with self-reference to its own practices. Many business and IS professionals need some approaches to understand their practices or social realities for self-reference. Researchers developed academic approaches or methodologies such as structuration theory and actor-network theory that enable people to make sense of their social realities. However, it is considered that the absence of some vocabularies has kept the practitioners away from the use of these approaches. On another front there are the increasing interest and use of collective identity in the related social sciences recently. We argue that a vocabulary “collective identity” can become a bridge between academic researches and the practitioners. Allowing the practitioners to look at multiple or alternative social realities among social forces rather than the single functional image of an organization, the vocabulary is expected to lead way to the possible use of existing approaches by the practitioners. To show its effectiveness we will incorporate collective identity into activity theory and apply it to a real case of IS implementation in an organization