Call for Papers MISQ Special Issue on Information Systems for Symbolic Action: Social Media and Beyond Guest Editors Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University (aakhus@rutgers.edu) Pär J. Ågerfalk, Uppsala University (par.agerfalk@im.uu.se) Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University (kalle@po.cwru.edu) Dov Te'eni, Tel Aviv University (teeni@tau.ac.il) Submission Deadline: February 1, 2012 Motivation and Overview Across all walks of life, from the personal to the public to the technical–professional, during the past few decades IT has become a ubiquitous technological underpinning to communication and collaboration that has transcended its starting point as a tool for information processing and decision support. The recent onslaught of so-called social media has continued this trend, sometimes in unexpected ways. Richer and more versatile information and communication technologies are increasingly becoming embedded in our lives. The very grounding for communication appears to be shifting in ways that are not yet well understood while the possibilities are being exploited in business, law, medicine, science, and policy with a plethora of digital traces left behind. How, then, do we make sense of these shifting technological and digital grounds for communication and collaboration? Many features in today’s computerized media were anticipated in the collaboration technologies of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and even earlier. When pioneers of convivial computing introduced the idea of computer-supported collaboration in the late 1960s, this concept was truly new and different. The pioneers recognized that computer-based information systems are not just calculative machines but fundamentally systems for social (symbolic or sign mediated) interaction; they are “social systems only technically implemented” (Goldkuhl and Lyytinen 1982). The recent developments in social media further emphasize that information systems are not just passive information channels in terms of transfer efficiency and calculation, but that information systems and information are grounds for human activity and symbolic action whereby humans build identities, coordinate their relationships, and make sense of their environment. Indeed, symbols are central to all types of human relationships and activities including decision-making and information. Information cannot be understood as just a signal but must also be understood as a symbol that is consequential for managing organizational identities and legitimization of actions (Feldman and March 1981). At the same time, symbols are manipulable and involve semiotic relationships—either fictional or real. Symbols are simul- taneously a form of physical reality and a representation of reality. Therefore, manipulating symbols is different from manipulating physical reality. Hence, information systems are part of both social and physical reality and as such are constitutive of both social and material action. Symbols enter also as part of complex relations to other signs in information systems which, in turn, affects how information systems can and are being used and mobilized in social contexts (Hirschheim et al 1995). Yet, the distinction between the material and social, between signifier and signified, is increasingly being blurred as information systems are used not only to represent physical reality but also to create the digital materiality out of which organizations and society are increasingly constructed and construed. Step by step the physical world is becoming a representation of the information as action that constructs institutional facts where both the signifier and the signified may reside inside as well as outside information systems (Eriksson and Ågerfalk 2010). The digitization of goods also blurs the distinction between communicative action and material action, between communication and distribution, which calls for new conceptualizations and approaches to analysis and design. This special issue aims to foster Information Systems research in understanding, illustrating, and explaining how IS forms an inherent aspect of human activity and a means of symbolic action. We invite submissions that advance IS theory and research on the intersection of information systems and symbolic action through theoretical review, analysis, and development, empirical Special Issue — Call for Papers —Information Systems for Symbolic Action— MIS Quarterly 1