Affordance-Based Information Technology Sensemaking (ABITS)

Information Technology (IT) use gives rise to a wide variety of outcomes. This stems in part from the divergent ways in which individuals understand technology. While the sensemaking literature unveils how meaning is attached to organizational phenomena via cognitive and social processes, it overlooks the discovery dimension of making sense, that is detecting the role of the IT artifact in bringing about outcomes. In other words, there is a need to explain how the IT artifact contributes to technology sensemaking and its outcomes. This paper presents a framework that enables scholars to analyze the IT artifact’s role in technology sensemaking and its outcomes. We propose an Affordance-Based IT Sensemaking (ABITS) framework that explicates IT sense-made as a distinctive ontological arrangement among the users’ perceptions of technology affordances, the affordances that users actualize, and the user characteristics that underpin optimal adaptation. We show how these sense-made configurations lead to outcomes for individuals and organizations. This conceptual combination allows for the examination of user appropriations of new technology, as well as the integration of the IT artifact into accounts of IT sensemaking and its outcomes.