User creativity in the appropriation of information and communication technologies : a cognitivist-ecological explanation from a critical realist perspective.

TL;DRAbstract

A fundamental process in many important research foci in information systems is the appropriation of IT artifacts in creative ways by users. The objective of this thesis is to develop a theoretical explanation of that process. An embedded multiple-case study of incidents in which users, in a variety of field settings, developed creative ways to apply IT artifacts, was conducted. Employing theoretical lenses drawn from cognitive science (dual-process theory, distributed cognition), and Markus and Silver’s (2008) variant of adaptive structuration theory, a novel theoretical framework was developed to analyze the data. This framework – Affordance Field Theory – was used to abstract away the context-specific details of each case, so that the events in each could be compared and analyzed using a common conceptual vocabulary. Applying critical realist assumptions, the initial retroductive analysis was done with narrative networks, then the cases were re-analyzed using framework matrices. The

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