How Information Technology Matters in Societal Change: An Affordance-Based Institutional Logics Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While there has been much work on the relationship between information technology (IT) and organizational change, there has been limited research that theorizes the relationship between IT and societal change. This paper draws on institutional theory, in particular institutional logics, to develop a model of IT and societal change, which we argue is critical in an era of large-scale digital transformation. Our approach is based on a view of society as an interinstitutional system, reflecting the multiplicity of logics at the societal level. We conceptualize societal change as shifts in the multiplicity of logics, with a focus on changes in the levels of centrality and compatibility. Our model relates these changes to the materiality of technology through the concept of IT affordances. We propose three mechanisms (sensegiving, translating, and decoupling) through which IT affordances become elements of societal change. We identify three corresponding carriers through which IT affordances gain scale and stability (objects, networks, and platforms). We discuss the implications of our theoretical developments for future research on IT and societal change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".