This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the value of structuration theory as ‘an ontology of potentials’ for empirical research in accounting. In engaging with the two main papers in this issue, it considers issues of methodological bracketing and the extent to which the work of Coad and Glyptis (2013) offers an agency focus rather than an institutional focus for analysis. F...

In this paper, we address the problems caused by changes in the regulations on the legal corpus and its calculative implementations. From the ontology of law suggested by R. van Kralingen, we construct a generic document structure, which renders explicit the semantics of legal documents. These are represented in a sufficiently fine and rigorous way to link together documents belonging to distin...

The communication of meaning as different from (Shannon-type) information is central to Luhmann’s social systems theory and Giddens’ structuration theory of action. These theories share an emphasis on reflexivity, but focus on meaning along a divide between inter-human communication and intentful action as two different systems of reference. Recombining these two theories into a theory about th...

The nature of the relationship between information technology (IT) and organizations has been a long-standing debate in the Information Systems literature. Does IT shape organizations, or do people in organisations control how IT is used? To formulate the question a little differently: does agency (the capacity to make a difference) lie predominantly with machines (computer systems) or humans (...

Over the course of analyzing data from a series of socio-technical ICT studies, we have developed a multi-dimensional concept of a social actor to guide qualitative data collection and analysis. Three information and communication technology (ICT) studies have been used to develop and refine the concept: a mid-1990's study of online information services use, a 4year study of intranet developmen...

The need for appropriate interpretative and evaluative frameworks for understanding groupware and related technologies is discussed. Structuration is employed to examine some aspects of an implementation of groupware within one organization and various interpretative outcomes