Organizational Members’ Enactment of Organizational Environments and Media Use: A Study of ICT Practices in Norway and the United States

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of scripts to couple Weick’s notion of enactment and Langer’s theory of mindfulness/mindlessness with empirical data on the use of ICTs in organizations. Our research is based on 72 in-depth interviews of advanced ICT users in the United States and in Norway. The findings: (1) show that the notion of clear-cut boundaries between an organization and its “environment” is problematic, and illustrate how organizational members indeed enact—or co-create—the environments of their organizations; (2) validate the assertion that mindfulness is required for media richness theory to be predictive; and (3) illustrate how organizational members construct the richness of one media through the use of other media. This study not only enriches our understanding of Weick’s theories but also has important implications for organizational practice since it expands media richness and social-information-processing theories.