CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 1,889Information Systems Theories and ImplementationManagement and Organizational StudiesInnovative Education and Learning Practices

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 70 of the 72 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 2 are not checked yet.

When Flexible Routines Meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies1

Leonardi, Paul M.·2011·MIS Quarterly
DOI 10.2307/23043493
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Employees in many contemporary organizations work with flexible routines and flexible technologies. When those employees find that they are unable to achieve their goals in the current environment, how do they decide whether they should change the composition of their routines or the materiality of the technologies with which they work? The perspective advanced in this paper suggests that the answer to this question depends on how human and material agencies—the basic building blocks common to both routines and technologies—are imbricated. Imbrication of human and material agencies creates infrastructure in the form of routines and technologies that people use to carry out their work. Routine or technological infrastructure used at any given moment is the result of previous imbrications of human and material agencies. People draw on this infrastructure to construct a perception that a technology either constrains their ability to achieve their goals, or that the technology affords the possibility of achieving new goals. The case of a computer simulation technology for automotive design used to illustrate this framework suggests that perceptions of constraint lead people to change their technologies while perceptions of affordance lead people to change their routines. This imbrication metaphor is used to suggest how a human agency approach to technology can usefully incorporate notions of material agency into its explanations of organizational change.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2307/23043493

Cites

70 of 72 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 72 references

Research works printed but not linked: 10

  1. Barley, 1988, Technology, Power, and the Social Organization of Work: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Skilling and Deskilling, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 33
  2. Cyert, 1963, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm
  3. Giddens, 1998, Conversations with Anthony Giddens
  4. Heidegger, 1959, An Introduction to Metaphysics
  5. Jones, 1998, Information Systems and the Double Mangle: Steering a Course between the Scyla of Embedded Structure and the Charydbis of Strong Symmetry, 287
  6. Latour, 1992, Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts, 225
  7. Latour, 1999, Pandora’s Hope
  8. Pickering, 2001, Practice and Posthumanism: Social Theory and a History of Agency, 163
  9. Tabrizi, 2005, Accelerating Transformation: Process Innovation in the Global Information Technology Industry
  10. Taylor, 2007, Communication as the Modality of Structuration, 391

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 801–900 of 1,001

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Leonardi, P. M.
Affiliations
Northwestern University (US)
Corresponding author
Leonardi, Paul M.
ORCID
Leonardi, Paul M.
Venue
MIS Quarterly
Publisher
MIS Quarterly
Published
2011-03-01
Volume
35
Issue
1
Pages
147-167
ISSN
  • 0276-7783 (ISSN-L)
  • 2162-9730
DOI
10.2307/23043493
OpenAlex
W3121575000
Semantic Scholar
b2ef038546d35ce422ea14dd8b4f7aa828276e7b
Cited by
1,889
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 294 · 2025: 171 · 2024: 151 · 2023: 100 · 2022: 134 · 2021: 121 · 2020: 137 · 2019: 138 · 2018: 115 · 2017: 101 · 2016: 91 · 2015: 103 · 2014: 92 · 2013: 79 · 2012: 43
FWCI
246.62
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
MIS Quarterly (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management Information Systems › Information Systems Theories and Implementation
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Management and Organizational Studies
  • Social Sciences › Education › Innovative Education and Learning Practices
Keywords
flexible technology, human agency, material agency, imbrication, affordances, constraints, organizational change, computer simulation, automotive design, technological change, routine change

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review