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10h00: Dr. Vlasislav Fomin, Vytautas Magnus University,
Regulations Of, Through and Around Information IT artifact (IT) in organizations

Recent discussions on the development and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ITs) has revealed a growing interest in the mechanisms of IT artifact-mediated rule-setting and the elaboration of rules related to IT use – i.e., socio-technical regulation. Confusion prevails, however, with regards to a IT artifact’s ability to mediate during a regulatory process, and an organization’s capacity to combine socio-technical regulations when several are at work at the same time. In this paper, we adapt concepts imported from French labor sociology Reynaud’s Joint Regulation Theory- (‘JRT’) and innovation sociology to account for the multiplicity of regulations in organizations and to illuminate the increasingly pivotal role of IT in these regulations. We argue that these concepts offer a robust sensitizing device to account for, and to integrate the plurality of, socio-technical regulations within organizations. We conduct an exploratory case-study on the implementation of an e-learning IT artifact to illustrate how the lenses of JRT and innovation sociology can be adapted to understand IT-related regulations. Our work sheds light on various facets of socio-technical regulation and on various operative mechanisms, condensed by a taxonomy of socio-technical regulations (functionality, status, procedures, tool, and social-processes oriented). It also highlights the conflictual nature of socio-technical regulations in organizations, and the importance of making a distinction between regulation of and regulation through IT artifact (sometimes conflated at what we call here the second level of socio-technical regulation).