6 Conclusion 4.1 Inscribing Inter-organisational Behaviour into Standards 2 Conceptualisations of the Relationship between It and Organisations Social Shaping of Information Infrastructure: on Being Specific about the Technology

I hereby submit the new version of our paper to the 8.2 conference in Cambridge. The most substantial changes we have made are: 1. New title: Social shaping of information infrastructure: on being specific about the technology. (Old title: Social shaping of information infrastructure and new organisational forms.) 2. Actor-network theory is presented in a bit more detail in section 2.2 3. We illustrate how actor-network theory may be applied to the empirical material Orlikowski presents and which we compare our work with. (This discussion is together with the last part of the old section 2.2 put under a new heading 2.3 Actor-networks meet structuration theory) 4. The empirical material (section 4) is expanded and the links between theory and empirical material are made more explicit. framework for the study of information technology in organizations. A field study of the software design process for large systems. organizations with information technology, pages 219–242. OECD Information networks and new technologies: opportunities and policy implications for the 1990s. Information computer communication policy. Paris, 1992. Orlikowski, W.J. Integrated information environment or matrix of control? the contradictory implications of information technology. Pfaffenberger, B. Fetisched objects and humanised nature: towards an anthropology of technology. There is in 1995 quite a widespread agreement among scholars in the field that " IT enables/con-strains action ". It seems to use that the time is ripe to push further and learn more about how this operate on a concrete level. We argue that a firmer grasp of the interplay between IT and organi-sational issues have to take the specifics of an IS quite seriously. This is, in particular, necessary for informing design and increasing social responsibility (Kling 1991, p. 343). Even highly appraised accounts (we have only considered a few which build on structuration theory but believe that it holds also more generally) fail in this crucial regard. This should not be read as a claim that structuration theory, in principle, is not capable of supporting this kind of concrete and specific description. But we do argue that ANT quite immediately provides a language for doing this; its overall rationale is geared towards this.There are, however, other aspects which, to us, seem to be better captured within structuration theory than ANT (for instance, the role of institutions). Given the premise that we need to be more specific, it strikes us as a more promising strategy to employ ANT than to …