Affordance Theory

1. Affordance approach: attributes of an object that are not common to every individual that come across them, the affordance of the object are not. Affordance are peculiar to the specific way in which an actor or a group of actors thinks of and use the artifact. Researchers who study the relations between social practice and new technologies have discovered huge usefulness in the affordance approach since it helps in explaining why individuals using the same technology might involve in a related or unrelated interaction or work practice. Nowadays, greatest degree of writings on the relations between technology and corporate change stress more on the relational attributes of affordance. In this regard, affordance are not absolutely properties of people or objects they are created in relations between individual and materiality of things with which they come across. In this scenario ‘materiality’ means the attributes of the technological object whether that object is a part of hardware or software. An affordance concept support organization to achieve communicative accomplishment allowed by the relations between corporation and technology functionality. For instance, in [13], IBM’s SNS SocialBlue (previously Beehive) has an attribute called “About You” this is a feature via which users can choose to enter information that will be visible to other people as a portion of employees profile on the page. With affordance concept, the organization and researchers can ask “what does the ‘technology’ attribute can afford peoples opportunities to do? In that case the organization could investigate the attributes of other Web 2.0 tools in order to discover whether these technologies have attributes that are distinct from others.

2. Visibilit...

... middle of paper ...

...68 microblogging users (Yammer), interviews, data usage analysis, and content analysis of post. [15] conducted a research and found out some factors that affect people’s intention to adopt an information technology, which in turn end up influencing their technology use. They classified these factors as benefit perception (the rate at which people think or believe that using the technology would aid in enhancing their work performance), cost perception (the rate to which people believe that using the technology would cost them a lot such as difficulty in using the tool, risk and privacy concern etc.), social influence (organization or individual perception that superior others believe that they should utilize the innovative technology). Social influence covers both descriptive norm (what others do), and injunctive norms (what other individuals think you should do).