When Is an Affordance? Outlining Four Stances
Affordance has emerged as a core concept in information systems (IS) research during the last decade. This relational concept is applied to understand and theorize the relationship between the social and the technical. In the works of the concept originat
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Interact Research Unit, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000 90014 Oulu, Finland [email protected] 2 Department of Information Systems, University of Agder, Postboks 422 4604 Kristiansand, Norway [email protected] 3 School of Business, University College of Southeast Norway, P.O. Box 235 3603 Kongsberg, Norway [email protected]
Abstract. Affordance has emerged as a core concept in information systems (IS) research during the last decade. This relational concept is applied to understand and theorize the relationship between the social and the technical. In the works of the concept originator James Gibson, the relation was mainly portrayed as an ever-existing fact between the natural environment and an animal. In contrast, IS research focuses on relationships in-the-making between artificial things and human beings. In the IS context, we have identified vagueness in temporal and relational ontology: when do affordances exist and between whom or what? In this paper, we delve into the temporal and relational questions that have been omitted in much of the IS literature. What kind of a relationship is an affordance and when does it occur? Based on our hermeneutic understanding, we identify four stances from the existing literature. We classify those stances as canonical affordance, designed affordance, potential affordance, and affordance as completed action. We further argue that each stance has its own assumptions, consequences, and thus strengths and weaknesses. Keywords: Affordances · Ontology · Relational · Temporal · Information systems
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Introduction The central question for the theory of affordances is not whether they exist but whether infor‐ mation is available in ambient light for perceiving them (Gibson [1], p. 140).
Affordance is a highly influential yet controversial concept [2]. It originates from the writings of James J. Gibson and has been a source for inspiration in many fields of research [3]. It has also found its way into our field of information systems (IS) [4, 5]. As a relational concept, it has provided a promise of a middle ground between techno‐ logical determinism and voluntarism/constructionism [6]. For example, Majchrzak, Markus, and Wareham [7] recently positioned affordance theory as “a lens that is partic‐ ularly well suited to help IS scholars build theory about ICT use” (p. 272). © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved L. Introna et al. (Eds.): IS&O 2016, IFIP AICT 489, pp. 125–139, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-49733-4_8
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The trouble of affordances as “relational” is that a “relation” has many different meanings [8, 9]. For example, is affordance a relation between the natural environment and animal, artifact and designers, designers and users, artifact and artifact, artifact and users, or among everything in a particular context? And how does that relationship emerge, when does it expire, or is it always present? Proponents of the “relational turn” in many discipline
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