Exploring Configurations of Affordances: The Case of Software Development
Aron Lindberg, James Eric Gaskin, Nicholas Berente, Kalle Lyytinen · 2014
Affordances have been increasingly used in the information systems literature to account for the usage and effects of information technology. However, a review of the literature shows that the construct has remained nebulously defined, rarely used in anything but singular forms and with little consideration of context. This has resulted in a lack of cumulative research on affordances. We propose that affordances need to be considered not only individually, but also as configurations of multiple affordances. Through a sociomaterial sequence analysis of two software development teams – one waterfall and one agile- we build a framework for the study of affordance ecologies. We highlight four dimensions of affordance ecologies: clustering, spread, concentration, and alignment. As such, we develop a general grammar for describing interactions between multiple technologies and actions in the form of affordance configurations that can aid scholars in analyzing variance in practice intertwined with technology.