Semiotics, Virtual Organisations, and Information Systems

Abstract

Traditional information system methods and organisation theories fail to give a clear account of virtuality, virtual organisations, horizontal organisation structures and governance forms, and multiple active representations. Semiotics helps us in finding new approaches for analysis and design of virtual organisations and information systems at the social level, the pragmatic level, and the semantic level. At the social level, the perspective on the role of information systems in organisations has shifted from a problem of the application of information and communication technology to an opportunity for constructing a virtual domain. In the elaboration of the basic idea on which an information system or virtual organisation is based, information system metaphors can be used. At the pragmatic level, the perspective on work and coordination has shifted from integrated planning and design to communication, cooperation, and coordination in multi-actor systems. The definition of the behaviour of information systems in terms of use cases, semiotics and language action theory gives us levels of interaction and patterns of interaction that can be used as norms of behaviour. At the semantic level, the perspective on the use of symbol structures has shifted from central processing of data to the self-organisation of multiple active representations.