Addressing the Technical in Socio-Technical Systems Research: A Review of Social Informatics Literature

Social informatics (SI) is a socio-technical approach for studying information and communication technologies (ICT) that makes explicit the interconnectedness of technical artifacts and their social contexts. However, there have been claims that limited attention has been paid to the technical in SI research. Using a modified framework for studying technological artifacts in information systems literature (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001; Sawyer and Chen 2003), this review of SI literature explores how technology has been viewed, how its material and structural natures have been considered, and at what levels of analysis technology has been studied. This study finds that further work is needed in SI for studying ICT as socio-technical ensembles; that attention should be paid to ICT development and use at macro- and individual-levels of analysis; and that it should engage with approaches from other sociotechnical domains for studying the technical and non-technical material components of ICT.

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