IS Theory

Data governance fails not because the technology is wrong but because the politics of institutional arrangements make real enforcement impossible. Decoupling ex...

Three posts on ERP failure, and none of them applied structuration theory. Giddens and Orlikowski explain exactly why the same SAP instance produces different o...

The productivity paradox asked whether IT creates value. Thirty years later, the real question is what organizations delegate, to whom, and whether they can mea...

Why 88% of organizations use AI while only 7% scale it is not a lag. It is a paradox built into exploration and exploitation.

PMT shows up in seven of my posts, all about security. A theory about threat and coping appraisal should apply far beyond phishing.

AI handles the ostensive routine beautifully. But organizational value lives in the performative, where people improvise around what the process diagram never a...

Shadow IT was about unauthorized tools. Shadow AI is about unauthorized autonomous agents making decisions on your behalf. Delegation theory explains why that d...

Spence showed that markets only work when signals are costly enough to separate quality from noise. AI vendor signals are cheap and unverifiable. That is the wh...

Eleven blog posts on agentic AI market sizing, and not one about what happens to decision authority and middle management when algorithms take over routines.

When OpenAI restricted GPT-4's function calling, it made a governance decision disguised as a product update. Boundary resources are where platform power actual...

The productivity paradox keeps showing up because we keep measuring the wrong thing. Use is a proxy. Delegation is the mechanism. With agentic AI, the paradox r...

Orlikowski and Iacono asked IS to theorize the IT artifact. Agentic AI makes that question unavoidable. The artifact is now an actor.

Cybersecurity spending keeps rising while breach costs keep climbing. Transaction cost economics, externality theory, and moral hazard explain why. IS researche...

Two organizations buy the same analytics platform. One extracts real value. The other gets dashboards nobody reads. The difference is not the technology. It is ...

Lee and See gave us trust calibration for automation. But AI systems are opaque, non-deterministic, and evolving. The framework breaks, and IS research needs ne...

Most delegation theory assumes humans delegate to AI. Stelmaszak et al. (2025) reverse it. When algorithms hand control back, accountability, trust, and organiz...

Most organizations adopted AI. Almost none scaled it. Absorptive capacity is the theory that explains the gap between buying a tool and learning from it.

AI does not just automate tasks. It atrophies the very expertise organizations need to evaluate whether AI is any good. Absorptive capacity theory saw this comi...

Marketing departments spend billions on martech stacks but study none of it through an IS lens. TAM explains adoption, but not why the same Salesforce instance ...

Gartner puts worldwide IT spending at $6.31 trillion for 2026, growing 13.5%. After thirty years of IT value research, the question of what it all produces is s...

McKinsey puts the transformation failure rate at 70%. Only 16% improve performance and sustain it. IS research is very good at predicting adoption and much quie...

Gartner puts worldwide AI spending at $2.5 trillion for 2026. The number is real. Whether it produces commensurate value is a different and harder question.

Organizations buy expensive analytics platforms and learn nothing. The theory of absorptive capacity explains why prior knowledge, not capital, determines wheth...

Activity theory says you cannot understand tool use without the full activity system around it. The same tool in two systems means two completely different thin...

ANT treats software, databases, and infrastructure as actants with the same analytical standing as humans. In IS research, that changes everything about how we ...

Affordance actualization explains why two organizations using the same system get completely different results. The technology affords possibilities. People and...

An affordance is not a feature. It is an action possibility for a specific actor with a specific goal in a specific context. Most IS papers get this wrong.

The AI alignment problem is principal-agent theory with a new degree of freedom: the agent can act faster than human oversight can keep up.

Thirty percent acceptance is adoption, not effective use. Burton-Jones and Grange defined effective use as faithful domain representation, not output.

Multiagent AI systems are not just tools being used. They act, and their outputs become part of the organizational structure that shapes the next cycle.

Training AI models consumes staggering amounts of energy. Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 why optimizing only the technical subsystem creates a collapse.

AI outperforms radiologists at detection but hospitals do not adopt it. Identity theory explains why. The tools that succeed will verify professional identity, ...

Bostrom and Heinen said in 1977 that MIS failures are sociotechnical. Half a century later, AI implementation fails the same way.

Gartner's May 2026 finding that AI layoffs free up budget without delivering returns is the most important warning CIOs are not taking seriously.

Gartner says two-person AI-augmented teams will deliver what twenty-person teams do today. Baird and Maruping predicted this years ago. The real question is not...

Star and Griesemer defined boundary objects in 1989. AI output fits the definition perfectly. And that is why every governance policy that treats it as a single...

Alter's work system framework already has a slot for AI. It is not the technology element. It is the participant element.

Gartner forecasts $2.5T in AI spending for 2026. McKinsey estimates GenAI adds 0.1-0.6% annually to labor productivity through 2040. Brynjolfsson saw this patte...

AI safety warnings raise threat appraisal sky high. Without coping appraisal, they produce fear control, not safety.

When 80% of unauthorized AI use is internal policy violations, AI security platforms are governance products, not security products.

Every major cloud vendor now sells GPU clusters. The hardware is commodity. The capability to use it is not. Here is what Carr and Barney teach us about AI moat...

Star and Griesemer's boundary objects are plastic enough to serve local needs but robust enough to hold shared identity. That is why the spreadsheet survives.

Coevolution means the relationship between technology and organizations is recursive and ongoing. What you build changes how you work, which changes what you ne...

Complex adaptive systems exhibit emergence, coevolution, and chaos. Modern IS is one of them. Designing for predictability alone is the wrong goal.

I had read Orlikowski and Iacono before. Three hours on one page taught me what I had missed about the five views of the IT artifact.

Each reread of the same foundational IS papers reveals something new: the claim, then the evidence, then the limits, then the connections across decades.

I rolled my eyes when a study partner said critical realism was important. Three reads later I apologized, at least internally.

Studying institutional theory for comps changed how I read the news. Every AI-first press release is mimetic isomorphism. I cannot unsee it.

The further I get into comps, the more I see Markus and Robey's three causal stances in every paper. It is not just one paper anymore. It is the lens.

My comps notes are a wreck of sticky notes, marginalia, and inconsistent filenames. The mess is not a sign of failure. It is how real understanding happens.

I confused structuration theory's three modalities with institutional theory's three pillars for months. A study partner caught it, and getting corrected was th...

One page of sticky notes became a wall of connected IS theories. RBV, dynamic capabilities, structuration, affordances, institutional theory: the connections be...

Reading Sarker et al. (2019) for the third time during comps prep, the 56% stat finally hit me: more than half of IS papers do not theorize technology at all.

Critical realism says reality has layers we cannot fully observe, and most IS research ignores the deepest one.

Dashboards fail when they are built for reporting instead of decision-making. DeLone and McLean show why, and Torres and Sidorova show what to do about it.

Building a working artifact is necessary but not sufficient for design science research. The real question is whether your artifact produces generalizable knowl...

Hevner et al. (2004) argued that IS should not only explain and predict but also build and evaluate artifacts. Twenty years later, the paper still shapes how we...

Most companies claiming digital transformation are doing digitization. Vial, Wessel et al., and Bharadwaj et al. give you the tools to tell the difference.

Digital artifacts are both material and semiotic at once. You cannot study the system without studying its social life, and you cannot study the social without ...

When AI runs on a factory sensor or hospital monitor instead of the cloud, the technical subsystem becomes physically distributed and harder to monitor. STS the...

Ninety percent login rates tell you almost nothing about whether a system is doing its job. Burton-Jones and Grange showed why measuring adoption instead of eff...

The person who signs the check never has to use the tool. That structural gap explains more about enterprise adoption than any UX framework ever will.

Ethnography means embedding yourself in a setting long enough to see what is really happening, not the version people perform for a survey.

TAM was built for email and word processors. Now it explains AI agents, blockchain, and VR. The IS field knows how to replace theories, so why does it keep choo...

Cohen, March and Olsen showed that in real organizations, solutions arrive before problems. The AI strategy wave is the clearest recent example.

McKinsey estimates $2.6T-$4.4T in annual GenAI value. McKinsey also reports only 7% of organizations have fully scaled AI. That gap has a name in IS research.

AI investments are growing 35%+ year over year. Boards want ROI. The measurement frameworks for GenAI ROI barely exist yet.

Gartner puts global IT spending at $5.43 trillion in 2025, growing to $6.31 trillion in 2026. IS researchers study the most consequential investment category in...

Most technology resistance is not about the technology. When a tool threatens who someone believes they are, rejection is identity-consistent, not irrational.

Galbraith (1974) said organizations design themselves to handle the information their tasks demand. IS exists to close the gap between what a task requires and ...

Different institutional logics give people different definitions of rational. Market logic says grow fast; clinical logic says do no harm. When they clash in he...

IS borrows from almost every social science discipline. That flexibility is the field's strength and the source of its deepest ongoing argument.

IS draws its theories from economics, sociology, psychology, and computer science. The result is a discipline with a persistent identity problem and an unusual ...

DeLone and McLean's IS success model applies to AI systems when you expand 'user' to include both humans and the downstream systems that consume AI output.

DeLone and McLean built the most cited IS success model for transactional systems. Most software today is something else entirely.

The productivity paradox asked why IT spending didn't show up in productivity data. The answer turned out to be about capability, not spending.

Markus and Robey gave IS three ways to think about causation. Two of them are traps. The third is where almost every real phenomenon lives.

McKinsey's GenAI economic potential estimate is real and grounded in methodology. The way it gets used in boardrooms strips out the conditions that make it mean...

Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 that optimizing only the technical subsystem destroys the social one. Silicon Valley rediscovered this lesson and called it a ...

Gartner says multiagent systems inquiries surged 1,445% but the real gap is not better agents. It is coordination architecture.

Smith and Lewis (2011) built a theory around organizational tensions that are simultaneously contradictory and interdependent. The goal is not to resolve them. ...

Warehouse robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones make affordance theory literal in a way that software never could. Misreading what a robot affords is not a UX...

Platforms are not pipelines. When you confuse the two, you miss who actually holds the power and why the rules are never neutral.

Bhattacherjee's ECM shows continuance is driven by confirmed expectations, not by initial adoption drivers. The expectation gap is what kills systems at month s...

People share data on fitness apps but panic about Facebook. The so-called privacy paradox disappears once you realize the calculus includes factors researchers ...

Most IS papers are improvements dressed as inventions. Sun et al. say you need novelty, rigor, and relevance, not two out of three.

Most IT purchases fail the VRIN test. The interesting question is what IT-related resources actually are hard to imitate.

Pfeffer and Salancik said dependence on external resources shapes power relationships. In IT sourcing, that means vendor lock-in is not a contract problem. It i...

RLHF mirrors Giddens' duality of structure, creating a recursive loop where human preferences shape AI outputs and reshape human preferences.

Weick's sensemaking theory says people act first and make sense later, preferring plausibility over accuracy. That explains everything from the Twitter rebrand ...

Ferneley and Sobreperez's workaround types explain why employees bypass official AI tools. Shadow AI is task-technology fit failure, not compliance failure.

Spence (1973) showed that costly observable signals communicate unobservable qualities. Technology choices do this constantly. What you run says something beyon...

The origin story of sociotechnical systems theory is not a feel-good tale about teamwork. It is a cautionary tale about what happens when you optimize only the ...

Why 'use' is the wrong construct for agentic AI, and what delegation theory actually means for how we study human-AI interaction.

Giddens built structuration theory around structure and agency being mutually constitutive. Orlikowski pointed it at technology, and IS has never been the same ...

Why the same ERP or Slack deployment thrives in one department and collapses in another, explained through structuration theory, Orlikowski's duality of technol...

Most adoption models treat resistance as the absence of adoption. But resistance is its own construct with its own causes, and ignoring it means your model is d...

56% of IS papers study the social side without theorizing technology at all. The field's identity crisis is not rhetorical. The numbers show it is real.

We keep spending more on technology and expecting more productivity. The same trap keeps catching us. Here is why the IS research community saw this coming deca...

IS research tests existing theory more than it builds new theory. There is value in testing. But after hundreds of TAM extensions, we should be honest about how...

Venkatesh added hedonic motivation, habit, and price value to UTAUT for consumer contexts. Enterprise software still runs on the utilitarian-only version. That ...

Trust, trustworthiness, reliance, and delegation operate at different levels with different antecedents. Treating them as interchangeable is not a measurement c...

Mohr warned us in 1982 that variance and process theories answer different questions and need different evidence. Most IS research still evaluates process stori...

AI-native platforms let anyone generate code from a prompt. Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 why optimizing only the technical subsystem creates a maintenance ...

Technically correct IS papers fail all the time. The difference between a paper that passes review and one that advances the field is harder to name than it sou...

References, data, variables, diagrams, and hypotheses are not theory. But then what is? A tour through the papers that shaped how IS researchers answer that que...

A digital object is more than code on a server. Faulkner and Runde show that bit strings occupy social positions with rights and responsibilities, and that chan...

Weick said people prefer plausible stories over accurate ones. XAI built tools for accuracy. It has been solving the wrong problem since 1995.

Positivist, interpretive, and critical realist research each carry assumptions about what is real and how we can know it. None of them is just a method choice.

Zero-trust architecture is not about eliminating trust. It is about institutionalizing the calibrated trust that IS researchers have studied for decades.