1 Accepted for the 7th International Workshop on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2002), Delft, The Netherlands, June 12–13, 2002. Messages are Signs of Action – From Langefors to Speech Acts and Beyond Pär J. Ågerfalk Dept of Informatics (ESI) Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden pak@esi.oru.se Abstract Deciding on the elementary units used to understand and analyse the complex phe- nomena of information and communication is extremely important when communi- cation is to be performed through computerized information systems. The tradi- tional and still predominant view of information within the field of information sys- tems has been characterized as a ‘contents view’, representing a ‘descriptive per- spective’. This view, in which information systems are regarded as repositories storing representations of facts about the real world, has been challenged from a language action perspective. One such effort includes the formulation of the con- cept of an action-elementary message (ae-message), which is thought of as the most elementary unit that carries both information and communicational intent. Practical experience from working with this concept indicates that even though it is sound on paper, finding ae-messages in real-life situations is not as straightforward as it might appear at first. The aim of this paper is to re-examine critically and to clarify the concept of the ae-message, in order to bring about a deeper understanding of in- formation systems within organizations, and to provide a possible basis for formu- lating the ‘rules of thumb’ required for systems work. 1 Introduction It is perhaps needless to say that information and communication are complex phenomena, especially if the social action context is taken sufficiently into account (Allwood, 1976; Au- ramäki et al., 1988; Goldkuhl, 1995; Clark, 1996; Stamper et al., 2000; Dietz, 2001). None- theless, deciding on the elementary units by which to understand and analyse these phenom- ena is extremely important when communication is to be performed through computerized information systems. This is so because important properties of the social context that make communication successful, which are readily available in a face-to-face situation, must be formalized and encoded in these systems. The traditional and still predominant view of the concept of information within the field of information systems has been characterized as a ‘contents view’ (Goldkuhl, 1995), representing a ‘descriptive perspective’ (Holm, 1996; Ågerfalk and Eriksson, 2002). In such a view, the common interpretation of ‘information’ seems to be ‘linguistic sentences with the purpose of informing people’ (Goldkuhl, 1995, p. 64). In this view, information systems are regarded as repositories storing representations of objective facts about the real world. One influential theory of information systems embodying such a descriptive perspective is that formulated by Langefors (1973; 1995). His theory bears much resemblance to other important theories within the information systems field, such as the relational model of data (Codd, 1970) and the entity/relationship approach (Chen, 1976), as well as more recent object-oriented approaches (Jacobson et al., 1992; Booch et al., 1999).