Artifact or Equipment? Rethinking the Core of IS using Heidegger's Ways of Being

摘要

The IT artifact, conceived as a bundle of features or properties, is frequently seen as the core object of interest in IS. This artifact view of IT is deeply grounded in a Cartesian worldview that stresses a duality between the individual and the external world. We challenge this view by drawing on Martin Heidegger's analysis of equipment in Being and Time (1927/1962). Using a stylized account of an IT implementation project we illustrate how the focus of attention shifts under this post-Cartesian worldview from IT as artifact to IT as equipment. This latter view conceptualizes IT as interwoven with other equipment, user practices, and individual identities, and highlights the need to appropriate new IT as equipment into an existing world of user practices. Applying Heidegger's analysis of equipment to IT, we are able to systematically re-think what are the core and peripheral concepts and phenomena in the IS discipline.