Performativity and Information Technologies: An inter-organizational perspective

The concept of performativity holds that discourses are more than mere representations of external realities. Instead, discourses constitute reality; even a simple speech act is constitutive of "something". Under certain conditions ("felicity conditions"), the enunciation of a simple word or sentence can create a new social status or a new social condition (i.e. the process of being married or arrested). Discourses related to information technologies, be they organizational or inter-organizational, are thus active elements of what IT is, can do, or can assist with in an organization. Through three case studies of IT trade shows (TS) in France (which focused on the mechanical industry and the domains of logistics and e-commerce), we show that inter-organizational discourses about IT can perform IT in very different ways. More specifically, our research illustrates that the various relationships between discourses about IT and the materiality of IT depend on the industry and its culture. IT speech acts are perlocutionary utterances that are reliant on industry-related contexts and their specificities. In continuation with this general thesis, our fieldwork gives way to two key theoretical contributions. Firstly, IT performativity can be exerted at the level of material artifacts, activities, processes or integrative managerial concepts, depending on the industry. Secondly, the felicity conditions of this performativity are largely grounded in a sociodiscursive network (of which TS are key stakeholders) that loosely relies on coupled, interorganizational networks. In line with these two contributions, we also consider the implications of organizations' IT purchases, the strategic scanning of IT (i.e. what should be the semantic focus of scanning activities), the understanding of IT fashions and their emergence, and the everyday management of IT in organizations.