The communicative constitution of IT innovation

Abstract

This paper contributes to studies of IT innovation, by approaching discourse and technology not as alternating causalities of change, but rather as constitutive to processes of change. Drawing on a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective, the paper provides an analysis of oral and written evidence on innovations in the English National Programme for IT (NPfIT) from 1998 to 2011. The paper makes two key contributions to the literature. First, it offers a longitudinal empirical understanding of how IT innovation is constituted in the triadic relationship between human and nonhuman actors, and the narrative texts in which the delegation between the first two occurs. The paper explores the implications of this renewed understanding of IT innovation for IS research in sociomateriality. Second, the paper contributes to CCO-informed research by adopting a methodological approach that draws on both a historical analysis of the constitution of material objects in specific narrative texts and a rhetorical analysis of communicative actions. The paper explores the methodological implications of this approach for addressing the challenge of understanding the scaling-up of micro communicative actions to macro actions towards the constitution of IT innovation.