Jens Lauterbach

Adopt, Adapt, Enact or Use?

Information Systems (IS) are omnipresent in today’s organizations. While much research has been performed on adoption, implementation, and use of IS, still many practitioners are faced with IS change endeavors in organizations that equal “death march” projects and fail before or directly after go-live. Research with a positivist stance has thoroughly studied factors that describe individuals’ intentions to adopt or use technology, while largely ignoring social and organizational contexts. Researchers with a constructivist view, on the other hand, have studied how social processes and structures change or emerge in the light of the new IS. We suggest that there is a need to combine what we know from these two streams in an attempt to clarify terminological bafflement that seems to be caused by the different philosophical stances. Our paper contributes by suggesting a framework and methodology for collecting and re-assembling scattered conceptual pieces of organizational and individual IT adoption and integrating them into a coherent understanding.