Contextualization and problematization, gamification and affordance: a traveler’s reflections on EJIS

In a recent editorial, EJIS editors got together to draw out the philosophy, vision, and practices of our current view of the journal (Te’eni et al, 2015). We called for submissions in a diverse set of genres, for contextualizing and problematizing, and for interesting and impactful research. Hopefully, these ingredients should promote a lively and continuing academic discourse that leads to meaningful consequences to theory or practice or both. In this editorial, I want to revisit the quest for problematizing and contextualizing, using two issues, affordance and gamification, that are being adapted to the organizational context of using IT.

The beauty of a sabbatical is the chance to meet new people and experience new ways of thinking and living. On my recent sabbatical I wore my editor’s hat. Officially, I was a ‘Vellux visiting professor’ at IT University in Copenhagen. Practically, I was thinking of EJIS, juxtaposing everything I experienced with the journal‘s practices and plans. What better place than Scandinavia with its influential Nordic traditions of research?

I started writing this editorial after a visit to Ordrupgaard, a Danish museum exhibiting paintings of London and Venice by French artist Monet. Monet painted forty-one enormous paintings of Waterloo Bridge from the same angle, varying the time of the day and the colors. What an incredible and painstaking effort to produce so many distinct impressions of the same spot from different perspectives. Impressionism, with its concern with subjective perceptions of the world, got me to think of affordance.

We are beginning to see studies of affordance in EJIS (indeed there is one in this issue) but we do not see enough problematizing of the term and its use. It is a little amusing to consider affordances in Scandinavia of all places. Scandinavia is known for its minimalistic design where you sometimes spend long minutes figuring out how to switch on the lights or turn on a water tap in a hotel room. Affordances in Scandinavian design may differ from affordances in a British design of lights and taps, which stresses visible indications of how to control the lights or manipulate the taps. Problematization is meant to identify and challenge assumptions that underlie existing theories and, on that basis, generate research questions that lead to the development of more interesting and influential theories. Nevertheless, problematizing is not an end in itself but rather a means to produce a theory with useful consequences to some stakeholders.

Take the affordance example. In the past few years, researchers have extended the idea of affordances in IS well beyond Gibson’s original idea of a relationship between creatures and their environment in which the creature perceives and reacts to attributes of the environment, an idea that was later adopted in human–computer interaction, separately, by Norman and by Gaver to improve interface design. Researchers in IS and related fields have employed several frameworks, extant theories, and self-developed models to extend the concept of affordance. For instance, differentiating between levels of interaction with the technology, e.g., the physical level of interaction versus the task level, can be matched to affordances that require different combinations of physical versus cognitive resources, an extension that enables a classification of affordances. Similarly, the differentiation between affordances aimed at automatic behavior and affordances aimed at mindful behavior reveals different underlying processes that determine the user’s reaction to affordances. Then, of course, there is the problematizing necessary to extend the mostly individual perspective of affordances to an organizational perspective, perhaps even a societal perspective of affordances. This extension brings with it the dynamic interplay between users and technology in the changing organizational context that forces us to think of how particular patterns of using technology, potential or actual, change organizational structure and practice to affect future behavior and to design new systems. Problematizing often involves using received theories such as structuration theory to discuss the dynamics of affordances or new theories to go further in challenging the received knowledge.

While EJIS seeks interesting directions of problematizing the concept of affordances, it also seeks meaningful and useful outcomes of the exercise. A useful outcome for the researcher is a convincing explanation of system usage that relies on the new conceptualization of affordances. Another outcome useful to designers is a design method that leverages a new operational definition of affordances. In contrast, I have heard the following examples of affordance: a user who accidently found out that he could stand on his computer to arrange some ornaments on a high shelf, or a user who sought and found that she could use an online dating system to collect information about lonely women in order to seduce them. What value does this latter meaning of affordance hold for the designer? In fact, from the designer’s viewpoint, the broader view of affordances lacks the design implications of the narrower view.

To reiterate, papers submitted to EJIS should problematize, i.e., develop a dialectical interrogation of familiar positions, develop other stances, and challenge the domain of literature targeted for assumption (Rowe, 2014), but also demonstrate the value of problematization. For more on problematization, see Alvesson & Sandberg (2011).

Gamification is a good example of why we need to contextualize (Te’eni, 2015). Researchers are talking about it and beginning to address it in the IS field, catching up with the recent burst of research on gamification in human–computer interaction and education, and in management too. Gamification is the use of elements of designing games in a non-game context. EJIS would be especially interested in studies that investigate gamification in organizational and related contexts, but, at the same time, EJIS expects such studies to be contextualized. Contextualizing begins with planning the research, continues with its implementation, and reappears in the discussion. We contextualize to better understand certain phenomena of gamification in a particular context and later we are better equipped to determine what might be generalized to other contexts. Tools are associated with work and toys with play but we also see tools that are also toys (coined by others as ‘tooltoy’) like a toothbrush in the shape of Minnie Mouse. The same shape may invoke different reactions in different contexts but, more interestingly, the shape of Minnie Mouse may change the context for the users by triggering emotions. Studying the context is therefore essential.

Contextualizing and problematizing can work hand in hand, stimulating each other. Say we take certain fun elements of games and plug them into a work context in which the worker must complete some task. Can we use the same assumptions that were developed in the context of explaining how people play games to explain the effect of the fun elements on work? Similarly, can we use motivation theory developed in the organizational context to explain the effect of gamification on improved performance at work when the fun element developed in the play context has nothing to do with the work goals? Problematizing will become essential when we devote more effort to contextualization in our studies. Studying the effect of adding contests with prizes (gamification) to social media in organizations that wish to promote participation seems to be a promising idea. I would hope to see such a paper investing significant effort in contextualizing and problematizing.

The discussion and examples of problematizing and contextualizing are most often associated with theory development and literature reviews. Nevertheless, these elements can be found in almost all genres we publish in EJIS, albeit in different ways and with different weights. Indeed, different and complementary methods of research make problematizing more plausible (Ågerfalk, 2013). In design science research, for example, a new IT or a new way to use the technology in itself constitutes a form of problematizing that is formalized in its justificatory knowledge. Reality is undoubtedly a powerful source of problematizing and contextualizing – a bite of the reality sandwich, if you will. EJIS is interested in publishing research that talks to and matters to organizations at different, not necessarily all, stages of the research.

I intentionally neglected to cite any of the papers written or being written about affordances and gamification that have triggered these thoughts. This is an editorial not a review paper, which is a genre we encourage greatly at EJIS. Should anyone submit papers on these topics, I will gladly share these sources. I am grateful to all my colleagues who have inspired the thoughts or commented on this editorial.

When finishing this editorial, I heard the outcome of the US 2016 election along with the dismal performance of the majority of political analysts who predicted, and explained convincingly, the wrong outcome with the highest level of confidence. While I doubt that IT is responsible for the outcome as some suggest, it certainly affected the process and the way IT enabled alternative patterns of communication between the candidates and the people. IT not only produced or enabled new forms of computer-mediated communication but also restructured the cultural context. There are several lessons for the researchers and analysts in the field of IS. The first is the dramatic demonstration of the powerful structuration of IT and social orders, particularly in the changing interplay between the roles of all parties involved and the extensive use of various forms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook as well as the use of big data analytics. Social media clearly mitigated the dominance of conventional media as the main channel of news, especially for the younger generations. The second is our responsibility to continuously revisit our research methodologies in light of the intricate relationships between IT and users in changing and diverse contexts. One conclusion may be to encourage multi-method studies and triangulation when possible to detect the effects of context. Another conclusion is to take advantage of problematizing the obvious and the received knowledge. The last lesson for me personally was a reminder of our need for responsibility and humility as analysts.

This issue

This issue demonstrates a variety of genres and diversity of viewpoints. Curiously, it also includes two papers with explicit reference to contextualization and affordance, in their titles. Gabe Piccoli in “Triggered Essential Reviewing: The Effect of Technology Affordances on Service Experience Evaluations” demonstrates the value of considering specific affordances. He begins by defining affordances as actions with IT that are intended to accomplish tasks, and he uses this perspective to show how triggered reviewing leads to shorter opinions that are contributed closer in time to the event they refer to. Interestingly, he concludes that people orient themselves to functionalities of IT rather automatically without cognitive effort, but unlike affordances of physical objects, digital technology affordances allow evolving and unforeseen experiences that go way beyond the ‘original’ functionality designed to accomplish a task.

Guy Paré, Mary Tate, David Johnstone, and Spyros Kitsiou in “Contextualizing the Twin Concepts of Systematicity and Transparency in Information Systems Literature Reviews,” an Issues and Opinion piece, put the twin concepts into the context of literature reviews, in fact, different types of literature reviews. The very practical outcome is a step-by-step method of doing literature reviews that leverage systematicity and transparency at every step.

Yong Liu, Hongxiu Li, Jorge Goncalves, Vassilis Kostakos, and Bei Xiao present an extremely innovative view of our field in “Fragmentation or Cohesion? Visualizing the Process and Consequences of Information System Diversity, 1993–2012,” which is a research essay. They present a set of visuals that describe the intellectual map of our field. I agree fully that these maps will contribute to ongoing discussions on the changing structure of our field and possibly the action we should take. This is the kind of article that helps EJIS fulfill its role as an enabler of continuous academic discourse around important issues. Looking at their map of concepts and journals/conferences of the field, I find it interesting that EJIS appears far from the madding crowd of other journals but curiously it seems to be rather high on centrality and cohesion. It is certainly a nice position to set out when you embark on problematizing an issue to produce new theories.

We have two empirical articles that demonstrate the diversity of empirical methods in our journal that manage, each in its own way, to stay in touch with the real world. Arno Nuijten, Mark Keil, and Harry Commandeur in “Collaborative partner or opponent: How the messenger influences the deaf effect in IT projects” conduct a laboratory experiment that ties closely in its motivation and implications to the real world of systems implementation. And they arrive at very interesting recommendations for practice in an area of IT known for rather disappointing performance. I will not spoil the story.

Last but not least, Bernhard R Katzy, Gordon Sung, and Kevin Crowston in “Alignment in an inter-organisational network: the case of ARC transistance” present a theory-building case study, which is a beautiful example of contextualizing and problematizing, and again, with important recommendations in an important area of IS, namely strategic alignment. Fascinating to me is the realization that the ‘old’ assumption of one governing strategy is ‘dumped’ for the more realistic complexities of changing worlds and flexible affordances, perhaps closing a circle with our first paper on evolving affordances.

Or is it simply about an affordance to change affordances?

Enjoy!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Frantz Rowe and Michel Avital for their valuable comments.