Markus and Robey 1988 Keep Showing Up

I am about seventy papers into my comps reading and I have stopped being surprised when Markus and Robey 1988 shows up. It shows up in the theory section of day one where I first read it. It shows up in the strategy guide for the oral exam where the delegation chain is described as following the emergent view. It shows up in the systems thinking section where complexity, emergence, and coevolution all point back to the same causal stance. The funny thing is that the paper itself is about causal structure in theory and research, and it has become the causal structure of my entire study process. Every new paper I read, I find myself asking before I even reach the conclusion: is this making the technological imperative assumption, the organizational imperative assumption, or the emergent assumption? Almost always the author thinks they are making the emergent assumption, and the paper is actually the first or second one.

Markus and Robey gave IS three ways to think about causation. The technological imperative treats technology as an exogenous force that determines organizational outcomes. The organizational imperative treats humans and organizations as autonomous agents who fully choose and control technology. The emergent perspective treats outcomes as arising from the ongoing interaction among technology, organizational structures, and human agency. I have this classification memorized because it is on the flashcards page, on the ten-hour strategy page, on the oral preparation page, on the theory page, on every page of the study hub. It is the single most cited paper in my entire study surface and there is a reason for that.

The reason is that almost every wrong IS answer is wrong because it defaults to one of the deterministic imperatives. The correct IS answer is almost always the emergent one. This is not my claim. It is Markus and Robey's claim, and the study hub repeats it as a trap warning across six different HTML pages: do not default to the technological imperative, do not default to the organizational imperative, the emergent view is almost always the correct IS answer. It is not a suggestion. It is a rule.

Here is what I have started to notice. When a paper studies technology adoption and treats the innovation attributes as the main drivers of the adoption rate, it is mapping to the technological imperative even if the paper does not say so explicitly. The attributes are relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability, and the logic is that if you build a technology with the right attributes, it will spread. That is a technology-determines-outcome story. It is useful for describing adoption patterns but dangerous as an explanation because it leaves out the organizational field, the institutional pressures, the power dynamics, and the local work practices that determine whether a given innovation actually gets used or just purchased. The study hub notes Rogers maps to the technological imperative, and once I read that line, I could not unsee it. Every paper that lists technology features and claims those features explain organizational outcomes became visible to me as a technological imperative paper, whether the author acknowledged it or not.

The organizational imperative is harder to catch because it sounds more progressive. It says people are in control, organizations choose, leaders decide. But it is still deterministic, just in the other direction. A paper that treats technology as a tool that organizations can shape however they want, as if the material properties of the technology do not push back, is making the organizational imperative assumption. I read a paper about AI implementation that argued the main barrier was lack of top management support. That is partly true, of course. But the paper treated the AI system as infinitely flexible, as if any set of organizational goals could be imposed on it as long as executives were engaged. It never considered that the AI system itself might produce outputs that conflict with existing routines, that it might change the nature of the work in ways nobody authorized, that the technology has its own material agency. The organizational imperative is seductive because it centers human agency, but it overcenters it. It pretends technology does not push back.

I think this is what having a theoretical lens means. Before I internalized Markus and Robey, I read papers and evaluated them on whether the arguments seemed reasonable and the methods seemed sound. Now I read papers and I see the causal structure first. I see whether the paper specifies its level of analysis, whether it uses variance logic or process logic, whether it attributes outcomes to technology, to people, or to their interaction. And a surprising number of published papers fail this test. They blend variance and process without acknowledging the difference. They start at the individual level and draw conclusions at the organizational level without an aggregation logic. They default to the technological imperative in the introduction, switch to the organizational imperative in the discussion, and never once say the word emergent.

The study hub makes this point in its favorite theory answer template. Every theory answer must specify level of analysis, causal agency, logical structure, constructs, and boundaries. These five dimensions come directly from Markus and Robey 1988, and reading through my old study notes I realize I had left out boundaries every single time until the oral prep page flagged it as the most common oral exam error. I had been treating causal agency as the whole story. It is not. The emergent view is almost always correct, but only if you also say what level you are talking about, what logical structure your explanation follows, and when the theory stops working. Markus and Robey are not just about picking the right imperative. They are about specifying the whole causal structure.

The deeper lesson for me is that a good theoretical framework does not just give you an answer. It gives you a way to see why other answers are wrong. The technological imperative is not wrong because the paper is poorly written. It is wrong because technology never acts alone, and that claim is not about scholarship, it is about how the world actually works. Technology creates possibilities and constraints, but the outcome always depends on how people, structures, and contexts interact with those possibilities and constraints. Rogers attributes innovation attributes explain some of the variance in adoption rates, but they do not explain why the same technology diffuses differently in different industries, countries, or time periods. That difference comes from the interaction, not from the attributes. The emergent view is the only perspective that holds both sides at once.

I keep expecting to reach a paper where Markus and Robey do not apply, where the topic is so new that the causal structure framework does not fit. It has not happened yet. Generative AI, agentic systems, cybersecurity, digital platforms, each time I start reading I think maybe this one will break the pattern. And each time, by the second paragraph of the theory section, I can see the causal assumptions the author is making, and they map to one of the three imperatives. Markus and Robey 1988 keep showing up because the fundamental question they asked, who or what causes outcomes when technology enters organizational life, is the same question every IS paper is trying to answer, whether the author knows it or not.