This thesis investigated the appropriation of information and communication technologies in everyday life among university students and mature people. To that end, pertinent literature was reviewed resulting in the identification of three issues in need of a more careful appraisal by the HCI field. These issues were used as the research questions propelling this work; they include the identific...

A growing body of research work tries to go beyond the classical dichotomy of ‘design’ and ‘use’ in order to better understand the accountabilities of technology production and use. Our research focuses on the creative activities at the ‘user’ end of the production line of organisational software. Support for these activities is traditionally discussed in the context of ‘Tailoring’ applications...

It is sometimes argued in the corporate governance literature that the total share of corporate value that can be extracted by a manager is fixed and independent of the avenues through which value is extracted. Shareholders need not worry about an activity such as insider trading, the story goes, because any profits achieved by a manager through insider trading will simply offset conventional c...

This thesis contributes to the field of collaborative information systems and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). It extends the notion of technological support for design activities "in use" beyond providing the flexibility to tailor collaborative software, to provide means to support the appropriation process of these tools in their application fields. Two long-term studies on the evo...

This paper describes three initial case studies of software use by teachers to support learners with special educational needs. In each case, the teachers were observed to be appropriating the software in ways that went beyond the intended use of the technologies. Appropriation has been previously explored as a positive process that provides benefits to users, yet these cases suggest that there...

Organizations invest in information technology (IT) looking for positive results that can only be produced if the technology is effectively used by individuals. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) applies a simple and quantitative model to predict intention of use, but it has difficulties to keep its explanatory power when analyzing implementation in mandatory settings (which are usual in bus...