THEORY & REVIEW

THEORIZING THE DIGITAL OBJECT1

Philip Faulkner
Clare College, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, CB2 1TL, UNITED KINGDOM {pbf1000@cam.ac.uk}

Jochen Runde
Cambridge Judge Business School and Girton College, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, CB2 1AG, UNITED KINGDOM {j.runde@jbs.cam.ac.uk}

Prompted by perceived shortcomings of prevailing conceptualizations of digital technology in IS, we propose

a theory aimed at capturing both the ontological complexity of digital objects qua objects, and how their iden-
tity and use is bound up with various social associations. We begin with what it is to be an object, the dif-
ferences between material and nonmaterial objects, and various categories of nonmaterial objects including
syntactic objects and bitstrings. Building on these categories we develop a conception of digital objects and
a novel “bearer” theory of how material and nonmaterial objects combine. The role of computation is con-
sidered, and how the identity and system functions of digital objects flow from their social positioning in the
communities in which they arise. Various implications of the theory are identified, focusing on its use as a
conceptual frame through which to view digital phenomena, and its potential to inform existing perspectives
with regard both to how digital technology per se and the relationship between people and digital technology
should be theorized. These implications are illustrated with reference to secondary markets for software, the
treatment of digital resources in the resource-based, knowledge-based, and service-dominant logic views of
organizing, and recent work on sociomateriality.

Keywords: Nonmaterial objects, digital objects, bitstrings, digital technology, social positions, resources,
resource-based view, service-dominant logic, sociomateriality, imbrication

Introduction 1 tegui, 2011; Susarla et al. 2012), 3D printers (Kyriakou et al.

One of the striking features of the digital revolution has been
the proliferation of what we will call digital objects, many of
which have transformed and become indispensable parts of
organizational life. Digital objects feature prominently in IS
research and include computer systems and peripherals (Hib-
beln et al. 2017; Xu et al. 2017), smart devices (Prasopoulou
2017; Yoo 2010), mobile apps (Boudreau 2012; Claussen et
al. 2013; Hoehle and Venkatesh 2015), emails (Barley et al.
2011; Wang et al. 2016), blogs (Aggarwal et al. 2012; Chau
and Xu 2012; Luo et al. 2017), electronic health records
(Kohli and Tan 2016), online videos (Kallinikos and Mariá-
1 “core subject matter—the information technology (IT) arti-
Suzanne Rivard was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Youngjin
Yoo served as the associate editor.
2017), and enterprise systems (Strong and Volkoff 2010;
Sykes 2015).
Illuminating as these and similar studies invariably are,
however, their principal focus is on the human and organi-
zational implications of the technology in question rather than
on the devices themselves. The result is that research of this
kind tends to invoke “pretheoretical understandings” (Ekbia
2009, p. 2555) of the entities involved, with the potential lack
of clarity, detail and nuance such understandings often entail.
This is not a new observation. Almost 20 years ago, Orli-
kowski and Iacono (2001) published a much-cited study
criticizing the IS field for its lack of engagement with its
fact” (p. 121). Despite the interest this paper generated,

DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2019/13136 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4, pp. 1-XX/December 2019 1

Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
various follow-up studies indicate that the situation has
changed little in the interim (Akhlaghpour et al. 2013; Ayanso
et al. 2007; Grover and Lyytinen 2015).
The need for a more thorough engagement with digital objects
is all the more acute for the difficult ontological questions that
arise about their structure, mode of being, and other basic
properties. In particular, the intangible, or what we will call
nonmaterial, nature of many digital objects raises questions
about how best to theorize this feature and the properties that
flow from it, about how the nonmaterial and the tangible or
material combine, and about how the same nonmaterial thing
can exist in many different forms. In addition, there is the
issue that, like other human artifacts, digital objects have
aspects that are community-dependent rather than intrinsic,
especially with respect to being the kind of thing they are, and
how new kinds emerge and existing kinds become obsolete.
Our aim in this paper is to propose a theory of digital objects
able to do justice to these issues. We begin with a literature
review that summarizes the current situation in Information
Systems with respect to the conceptualization of digital tech-
nology, first in general terms by focusing on empirical studies
documenting the lack of engagement with digital objects per
se in IS research, and then in more concrete terms by focusing
on specific shortcomings in how digital technology is concep-
tualized in the resource-based, knowledge-based, and service-
dominant logic views of organizing adopted in parts of IS
research.
We then present our theory, starting with what an object is in
the abstract, before distinguishing between material and
nonmaterial objects and introducing the important subset of
nonmaterial objects that are syntactic objects. These
categories provide the basis for our conceptualization of two
kinds of object at the heart of the digital revolution, the
bitstring and the more general category of digital objects.
One of our main theoretical innovations is the concept of
“bearers” of nonmaterial objects—the things a nonmaterial
object may be inscribed on, contained within, or borne
by—and we pay particular attention to the capacity of
bitstrings to serve as nonmaterial bearers of other nonmaterial
objects and the idea that there may exist many layers of such
bearers. Finally, following some brief observations on the
relationship between digital objects and processes of
computation, we provide an account of the social identity of
digital objects, what they are, so to speak, in the communities
in which they arise. The guiding idea here is that objects, no
less than people, occupy social positions that locate them as
components in larger systems, and where such positions are
deeply relational, performed, and, crucially, inform the social
identity of their occupants.
2 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
The remainder of the paper is devoted to some implications of
our theory. We begin with its role as a conceptual framework
for future IS research which we illustrate with the emerging
phenomenon of secondary markets for downloaded bitstrings.
We then consider its potential contribution to theoretical
perspectives and debates in IS, highlighting how it might
augment the conceptions of digital technology associated with
the resource-based, knowledge-based, and service-dominant
logic views, inform discussions between the sociomateriality
and imbrication perspectives regarding how the relationship
between people and technology should be theorized, and
serve as an illustration of the kind of “blue ocean” theorizing
advocated by Grover and Lyytinen (2015).
Conceptualizing Digital Technology
Support for the claim that digital technology is often por-
trayed in rather simplistic ways in IS, and for its corollary that
the field lacks theories rich enough to do justice to its unique-
ness and diversity, can be found in many places. We briefly
review two such sources, beginning with Orlikowski and
Iacono’s (2001) influential empirical study of the depiction of
the IT artifact in the IS literature and subsequent contributions
that update and broaden its findings. We then consider some
specific shortcomings of how digital technology is repre-
sented in IS, illustrated with reference to recent research
drawing on the resource-based, knowledge-based, and
service-dominant logic views of organizing.
The IT Artifact in IS Research
While perhaps best known for the debates it sparked about the
identity of the IS field and the place of the IT artifact within
it (King and Lyytinen 2006), the Orlikowski and Iacono
article is first and foremost an appeal for more sophisticated
theorizing of digital technology. Foreshadowing Ekbia’s
(2009, p. 2555) concerns about pretheoretical understandings,
Orlikowski and Iacono argue that IS research is over-reliant
on “commonplace and received notions of technology” (p.
121), a point they illustrate by examining the conceptuali-
zation of IT artifacts in articles published in Information
Systems Research during the 1990s.
Orlikowski and Iacono identify 14 distinct approaches to the
IT artifact in the articles in their sample, grouping these into
the 5 more general views summarized in Table 1.
According to Orlikowski and Iacono, the only one of the five
that is conceptually adequate and able to capture the com-
plexity, dynamism, and context dependence of IT artifacts is
 Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object

Table 1. Orlikowski and Iacono’s Five Views of IT Artifact Conceptualization

Nominal IT artifacts mentioned in name only or not at all.
Emphasis on the instrumental effects of IT artifacts; what they are and how they work regarded as
Tool technical issues and often black-boxed. Artifacts seen as discrete, unchanging, and independent of
social setting.
Emphasis on the computational powers of IT artifacts; their ability to represent, manipulate, store,
Computational
retrieve, and transmit information.
IT artifacts described in terms of one or more (usually quantitative) surrogate measure taken to
Proxy
represent the essential feature(s) of an artifact.
Emphasis on the interactions, and relationships, between IT artifacts and the groups involved in
Ensemble
their construction, implementation and use.

Table 2. Proportion of Articles Employing Each View of Artifact Conceptualization

Orlikowski & Iacono Akhlaghpour et al. Aysano et al. Grover & Lyytinen
2001 2007 2007 2015
Nominal 24.9% 39.6% 17.3% 30.8%
Tool 20.3% 16.0% 28.4% 21.7%
Computational 24.3% 5.8% 6.1% 11.9%
Proxy 18.1% 23.0% 26.6% 24.5%
Ensemble 12.4% 15.7% 21.7% 11.2%
Sample Period 1990-99 2006-09 2000-06 1998-2012
Sample Size 177 644 549 143
MISQ, ISR, JAIS, JIT,
Journals ISR MISQ, ISR, JMIS MISQ, ISR
EJIS, ISJ
Notes: EJIS = European Journal of Information Systems; ISJ = Information Systems Journal; ISR = Information Systems Research; JAIS = Journal
of the Association for Information Systems; JMIS = Journal of MIS; MISQ = MIS Quarterly.

the ensemble view. In all of the other cases, as they see it, the
IT artifact is under-theorized, “either absent, black-boxed,
abstracted from social life, or reduced to surrogate measures”
(p. 130).
The proportion of articles adopting each view found by
Orlikowski and Iacono appear in Table 2, along with those of
three more recent studies employing the same methodology
(Akhlaghpour et al. 2013; Ayanso et al. 2007; Grover and
Lyytinen 2015).
2007), with the other two studies reporting figures closer to
those of Orlikowski and Iacono. Despite evidence of shifts
over time within other categories, notably an apparent decline
in the computational view, the overriding impression remains
of a persistent under-theorization of digital technology in IS
research. In the meantime, the list of commentaries, opinion
pieces, editorials and calls for papers concerned about the
situation steadily continues to grow (e.g., Baskerville 2012;
Benbasat and Zmud 2003; Grover and Lyytinen 2015;
Zammuto et al. 2007).

Orlikowski and Iacono calculate that only 12.4% of articles
adopted the ensemble view, the vast majority, therefore,
relying on highly attenuated conceptions of digital tech-
nology. The fact that these results reflect research published
over twenty years ago raises the question of whether the
situation might not have improved in the interim. But the
answer appears to be no. Of the three further studies reported
in Table 2, even the highest reported proportion of articles
adopting the ensemble view is only 21.7% (Ayanso et al.
While painting a compelling picture of the situation in IS
research in general terms, the preceding studies say little
about specific features of the objects of digital technology
that, in a world of seemingly ever-expanding varieties of
digital technology, might warrant theorizing. To appreciate
some of these features and achieve a more finely grained
picture of the kind of problems our theory aims to address, we
now consider three prominent meta-theoretical perspectives
in which digital technologies come to the fore.

MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 3

Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
Digital Technologies As Resources
The three perspectives we will focus on are the resource-
based (Barney 1991; Barney and Clark 2007; Dierickx and
Cool 1989; Wernerfelt 1984), knowledge-based (Grant 1996;
Liebeskind 1996; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995; Spender 1989,
1996), and service-dominant logic (Lusch and Vargo 2014;
Vargo and Lusch 2004, 2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2016) views of
organizing. They are relevant to our purposes for three rea-
sons. First, in placing resources at the center of organiza-
tional performance, they have all had to pay attention to
distinguishing different kinds of resource, and then especially
with regard to the nonmaterial and fluid nature of certain
types of resource. Second, they are all well developed and
influential in IS research. The manner in which they render
digital technology is, therefore, highly relevant to the disci-
pline.2 Third, and finally, the problems we identify with the
three views are representative of weaknesses in the concep-
tualization of digital technology in IS research more widely.
Let us begin by observing that, in characterizing digital
technologies as resources, all three views devote considerably
more attention to IT-related competences in the form of
managerial and technical knowledge, skills, and processes,
than they do to the devices involved. This is especially true
of work drawing on the resource- and knowledge-based
views. Wade and Hulland’s (2004) typology of “key IS
resources,” in which seven of the eight main categories of
resource identified are different types of competences, is a
striking example. But more typical, perhaps, is the bipartite
classification employed by Melville et al. (2004), who distin-
guish between human and technological IT resources and
associate competences with the former and devices with the
latter. The subsequent emphasis is then overwhelmingly on
competences, this because most digital devices are seen as
lacking the characteristics—being difficult to imitate, transfer,
or substitute another resource for—associated with sustained
competitive advantage (Melville et al. 2004; Nevo and Wade
2010; Ravichandran et al. 2005; Santhanam and Hartono
2003; Stoel and Muhanna 2009). However, and while there
is no doubt about the importance of competences as a source
2
The resource-based (Bharadwaj 2000; Chuang and Lin 2017; Drnevich and
Croson 2013; Mata et al. 1995; Melville et al. 2004; Mithas et al 2012; Nevo
and Wade 2010; Ray et al. 2005; Santhanam and Hartono 2003; Wade and
Hulland 2004) and knowledge-based (Alavi and Leidner 2001; Choi 2018;
Choi and Ryu 2015; Mao et al. 2015; Pavlou et al. 2005; Reychav and
Weisberg 2009; Setia et al. 2013; Tanriverdi 2005) views have been widely
used in IS studies of IT-based resources as sources of competitive advantage
and the mechanisms through which this may occur. The service-dominant
logic view is particularly prominent in recent IS research on digital service
innovation (Eaton et al. 2015; Lusch and Nambisan 2015; Scherer et al. 2015;
Sriviastava and Shainesh 2015).
4 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
of IT business value, we contend there is more to be said
about the devices themselves.
Where devices are discussed explicitly in the three views,
they are often seen primarily as conduits of other, knowledge-
based, resources, such as when a microprocessor is viewed as
having embedded within it knowledge of various rules of
logic and, partly by virtue of this, the ability to apply
sequences of instructions to binary data. While consistent
with the emphasis on competences, the devices themselves
tend to be treated in an ontologically naïve and undifferen-
tiated way. Despite dealing with a vast range of digital
technologies, and while recognizing important differences
between technologies along various operational dimensions
such as function, scale, technical platform, and so on,
individual accounts typically fail to differentiate meaningfully
between things in terms of their mode of being and other basic
properties. Instead, digital devices, whether smart objects, IT
infrastructures, software applications, or media files, tend to
be grouped into a single, ontologically homogenous category
of IT resource, and where such resources are often portrayed
as straightforwardly physical things.
There is no shortage of examples. From the resource-based
perspective, categories such as IT assets (Nevo and Wade
2010), information technology (Barney and Clark 2007),
technological IT resources (Melville et al. 2004), IS infra-
structure (Wade and Hulland 2004), and tangible IT resources
(Bharadwaj 2000) all share this quality of ontological homo-
geneity. In some cases, the supposed material nature of the
category’s constituents is made explicit, as with Melville et al.
(2004) ) who describe technological IT resources as a subset
of physical capital resources and Bharadwaj (2000), who
describes tangible IT resources as “physical IT infrastructure
components” (pp. 171-172). In other cases, the mode of being
of the constituents is left implicit, although the usual impres-
sion is that such things can be readily understood as material,
physical, things.
While the service-dominant logic view exhibits a similar lack
of ontological differentiation, it does provide a concep-
tualization of the dual role of digital technologies as both
operand resources, capable only of enabling action, and
operant resources, capable of initiating action (Akaka and
Vargo 2014; Lusch and Nambisan 2015; Nambisan 2013).
This distinction might be thought to invite ontological reflec-
tion, since within the service-dominant logic view operand
resources are widely seen as material things (e.g., machinery)
and operant resources as nonmaterial (e.g., competences).
Yet despite provocative examples of the operant ability of
digital technologies to trigger exchange and even innovation,
there is little on the ontological status of the relevant devices,

whether nonmaterial as well as material entities are being
considered, and the link between this and the twin roles
ascribed to digital technology.
The consequences of ignoring ontological considerations of
this kind are significant, since it limits scope to account for
properties things possess by virtue of their mode of being and
for theorizing the relationship between ontologically distinct
kinds of entity. This problem is likely to be especially severe
in the digital context given that digital devices are typically
complex combinations of the material and the nonmaterial.
One area in which such issues come to the fore is with respect
to the informational aspects of digital technologies and the
unique ways certain kinds of entities are able to facilitate the
storage and transmission of information. It is significant here
that all three views embrace some notion of resource lique-
faction—“decoupling of information from its related physical
form or device” (Lusch and Nambisan 2015, p. 160)—seen as
central to the way digitization and digital communications
have affected knowledge management, collaboration, organi-
zational agility, innovation, and so on (Bharadwaj 2000; Choi
2018; Lusch et al. 2010; Lusch and Nambisan 2015; Lusch
and Vargo 2014; Mao et al. 2015). As things stand, however,
all three views require a more thorough theorization of this
idea to be able to fully explore its implications. While
relevant concepts are hinted at, for example Lusch and Vargo
(2014, p. 141) referring to “information resources” and
Barrett et al. (2015, p. 142) to resources “in which the primary
component is information,” these notions are usually left
unexplored. Claims to the effect that liquefaction enables
“intertwining the virtual and material layers of work in dif-
ferent ways to enhance organizational performance” (Lusch
and Nambisan 2015, p. 160), suggestive as they may be, are
thus left essentially metaphorical.
Our remaining comments concern the social aspects of digital
technology, particularly the identity of digital objects, their
use, and “fit” generally within the social world. The resource-
and knowledge-based views have done little to theorize these
aspects, save for what they say about social complexity: the
idea that certain kinds of resources are enmeshed in webs of
social relationships and so intrinsically dynamic, evolving
over time, and difficult for an organization to control or other
organizations to imitate (Barney and Clark 2007, Chen et al.
2014; Mata et al. 1995). This property is only rarely asso-
ciated with devices, however, digital or otherwise. Further,
and this is symptomatic of resource- and knowledge-based
views generally, there is minimal reflection on matters of
social ontology—the stuff of the social world, social rules,
relations, and the like—that would provide a conceptual
foundation for, and enable more detailed elaboration of, the
idea of social complexity.
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
In contrast, the service-dominant logic view has recently seen
theoretical developments that address some of the social
aspects of digital technology. These developments are in
relation to the notion of service ecosystems, understood as
systems of “resource-integrating actors connected by shared
institutional arrangements and mutual value creation through
service exchange” (Vargo and Lusch 2016, pp. 10-11; see
also Akaka et al. 2013; Vargo and Lusch 2011; Vargo and
Akaka 2012). Institutional arrangements here refer to the
kind of social structures mentioned above, and where these
are seen as both an important type of resource and a key part
of the context within which other resources exist and value
creation takes place (Akaka et al. 2013). But these develop-
ments have yet to take hold in IS research and so there has
been little progress so far in theorizing the social aspects of
digital technology from this perspective (although Akaka and
Vargo (2014) discuss some of the social aspects of technology
generally). Further, there remains considerable scope for the
development of the service-dominant logic view in this
respect, particularly in regard to the identity of digital objects
and how this is related to social positions and their social
positioning.
A Theory of Digital Objects
Objects
We now present our theory of digital objects, beginning with
a consideration of objects themselves. We start from a
general, high-level, conception of objecthood and then work
down to the main kinds of object germane to the digital world.
A Conception of Objects
Following Faulkner and Runde (2013), we take objects at
their most abstract to be entities that possess two charac-
teristics: first, that they endure, and second, save for those so
basic as not to be composed of constituent parts, that they are
structured. By an object enduring we mean that it is a type of
continuant, namely something that exists through time and is
fully present at each and every point in time over the period
of its existence. In this respect, objects may be contrasted
with things such as events, processes, and other kinds of
occurrent that take place and whose different parts occur at
different points in time.3 By structured, we mean that an
3
The terms continuant and occurrent, as well as some of the later distinctions
and categories we employ (e.g., the distinction between material and non-
material objects, the notion of syntactic objects), are closely related to a
variety of similar terms found in work in computer and information science
aimed at constructing formal and comprehensive taxonomies of the entities
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 5
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
object is composed of a number of distinct parts, objects in
their own right, that are organized in some way. Thus a typi-
cal flatbed scanner, for example, comprises a light source,
image sensor, glass panel, control circuitry, and various other
components, arranged in a way that renders the object as a
whole capable of converting an analog image into digital
form.
The category of objects is a broad one on this conception,
extending beyond the kind of physical objects just described
to things such as individual human beings and enduring
assemblages of humans and nonhumans. From this point on,
however, we restrict the term object to those that are
inanimate, in the sense of having exclusively inanimate com-
ponents and being, as a whole, inanimate things themselves.
This is a departure from Faulkner and Runde (2013) and one
we take for two reasons. The first is that it brings us closer to
ordinary language, where many are uncomfortable describing
humans and, sometimes, animals as objects. The second rea-
son is that it makes for a clear and more natural way of
maintaining the distinction between inanimate things and the
larger systems involving humans that feature in the discussion
of social positioning below.
Material and Nonmaterial Objects
The category of objects can be divided into material and
nonmaterial variants. While the term material has many
meanings (Leonardi 2010), we use it to refer specifically to
the physical mode of being of an object, a property we see as
necessarily involving the object concerned having spatial
attributes such as shape, volume, mass, and location, and
where this physicality is manifested in the structure of that
object, namely its component parts and how these are com-
bined or arranged. Examples of material objects include
scanners, smartphones, and servers. Nonmaterial objects have
a nonphysical mode of being and so lack spatial attributes of
the sort just mentioned. Examples here include syntactic
objects such as the news articles, operating systems and
application software examined below, as well as other kinds
of nonmaterial objects such as protocols, procedures and
conceptual schemes.
We use the term hybrid to refer to objects that comprise both
material and nonmaterial objects as component parts. Such
and relations found in a given domain. This work is also referred to as
ontology (see for example Lando et al. (2008) and Poole and Mackworth
(2010, Chapter 13)), although in this case primarily concerned with estab-
lishing vocabularies that can be shared across a range of different applica-
tions rather than the project of understanding and articulating constituents of
reality that we are concerned with in the present paper.
6 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
objects are commonplace, not least in the digital realm, and
we will have more to say about them when we discuss digital
objects and the idea of bearers of nonmaterial objects. For the
moment, the pertinent point about hybrid objects is that they
are necessarily material objects, with the physical mode of
being of their material components sustaining the materiality
of the hybrid object as a whole.
Syntactic Objects
While there exist many different kinds of nonmaterial object,
the most important for our purposes are syntactic objects.
These are objects that consist of symbols arranged into well-
formed expressions, where well-formed means that these
expressions adhere to the syntactical and semantic rules of the
language in which they are couched. Take for example a
news article such as that published in The Economist (January
13, 2018) entitled “Beyond Bitcoin: Bitcoin Is No Longer the
Only Game in Crypto-Currency Town.” Here the symbols
consist of letters and punctuation marks, the expressions are
words and sentences, and well-formed means that these words
and sentences conform to the rules of the English language
and convey the intended meaning of the author. Other
examples of syntactic objects include natural language texts
such as novels, manuals, and contracts, and textual entities in
artificial languages such as musical notation, Morse code, or
mathematics.
It is easy to see that the news article, and by extension any
syntactic entity, satisfies the two criteria for nonmaterial
objecthood set out above: that it is an object and that it has a
nonphysical mode of being. On the first criterion, the article
is an object by virtue of being both a continuant and struc-
tured. With respect to the former property, the article is a
continuant because, once created, it endures over time rather
than being something that takes place in time. With respect
to the second property, recall that an entity is structured if
composed of distinct parts organized in some way. In the
case of material objects, structure refers to their physical com-
ponents, spatial arrangement, interactions, and so forth. In the
case of nonmaterial objects structure again refers to their con-
stituent parts, arrangement, and interactions, but where these
are no longer physical attributes of the object. Returning to
our news article, the component parts are letters and punctua-
tion marks arranged to form words and sentences, and this
arrangement is a logical property insofar as the words and
sentences conform to the rules of the language in which it is
written and capture what the author intended to convey.
On our second criterion, the news article is a nonmaterial
object by virtue of its nonphysical mode of being. That is, as
an entity consisting solely of symbols it has none of the

intrinsic spatial qualities associated with the material entities
described above. While it may be printed or otherwise
inscribed on various material objects such as magazine pages
and computer screens, the article itself is at bottom nothing
more than an aspatial series of letters and punctuation marks.
Bitstrings
As the examples already mentioned illustrate, syntactic
objects are ubiquitous in the digital world. However, one type
of syntactic object stands out as fundamental. This is the
bitstring, a type of syntactic object made up of bits, the 0s and
1s employed in a binary numbering system, where these bits
are structured according to an appropriate file format so as to
be readable by the kind of computer hardware for which they
are intended.
Bitstrings, often called computer files, are one of the corner-
stones of the digital revolution, since the information stored
and manipulated on almost all silicon-based von Neumann
computers, including traditional transistor-based digital PCs,
is encoded in bitstrings. Bitstrings divide into two categories:
program files and data files. Program files encode sequences
of logical operations, with iterations and conditions, that con-
stitute the instructions for carrying out particular kinds of
computation on a given class of hardware. Examples include
operating systems, applications such as spreadsheet and word
processing software, browsers, smart phone apps, and games.
Data files encode the data used by a computer program or
system, including documents, datasets, images, videos, and
audio recordings.
The Picture So Far
The categories of object introduced so far are summarized in
Figure 1, a Venn diagram in which the rectangular boundary
denotes the universe of objects and where the two largest
circles represent the set of material and nonmaterial objects.
Since any object must either be material or nonmaterial, there
are no elements lying outside of these two circles. Further-
more, since an object cannot be both material and non-
material, these sets are disjoint and the two circles therefore
nonintersecting. The circle denoting material objects contains
a smaller circle that depicts hybrid objects as a proper subset
of material objects.4 The circle denoting nonmaterial objects
4
While it is tempting to think that hybrid objects should be represented as an
intersection of the set of material objects and the set of nonmaterial objects,
this would make them at once material and nonmaterial objects, which is not
possible. Instead, and notwithstanding their also having nonmaterial compo-
nents, hybrid objects necessarily have a physical mode of being by virtue of
their material components.
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
contains four smaller circles, with the largest of these
depicting syntactic objects as a proper subset of nonmaterial
objects and the next largest depicting bitstrings as a proper
subset of syntactic objects. The two smallest circles then
depict the set of bitstrings as comprising two proper subsets:
program files (PF) and data files (DF).
Digital Objects
The final category of object we single out is digital objects,
which we define as objects whose component parts include
one or more bitstrings. The set of digital objects, therefore,
includes individual bitstrings as a limit case, but generally
refers to a far broader category of objects, usually hybrids, in
which bitstrings are combined with various types of material
and nonmaterial components. Thus, in addition to individual
programs and data files, the set of digital objects includes
relatively small-scale physical devices, ranging from com-
puter systems, components, and peripherals, including the
kinds of material and nonmaterial bearers of bitstrings dis-
cussed below, to everyday artifacts with embedded computing
capabilities, as well as larger assemblages such as information
systems, computer networks, and digital ecosystems in which
the component parts may be widely spatially distributed, and
complexes of predominantly nonmaterial objects, such as
software suites, web sites, and digital archives. As these
examples illustrate, digital objects may be either material or
nonmaterial objects, with hybrids acquiring the physical mode
of being of their material components.
Bearers of Nonmaterial Objects
Our description of the basic constitution of digital objects in
place, we now turn to a topic we regard as fundamental to the
place of digital, and other kinds of, objects in the digital
domain. This is the idea that nonmaterial objects may be
inscribed onto, contained within. or borne by other objects,
something we capture with the general notion of bearers of
nonmaterial objects.
Material Bearers
A basic feature of nonmaterial objects is that in order to be
accessed—to be used, stored, passed to others, etc.—they
must in some way be inscribed onto, contained within, or
borne by a material object of some kind. Thus, for a news
article to be read by a human being, for example, it must be
displayed on a suitable material object, whether this be the
screen of a computer monitor, tablet, or smartphone, or the
page of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Similarly, if that
article is to be archived, lent to another person, edited, and so
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 7
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
Universe of Objects
Material
Hybrid
Figure 1. Types of Objects
on, it must be held or maintained on an appropriate material
object. Generalizing, we call any material object on which a
nonmaterial object is so inscribed a material bearer of that
nonmaterial object. Notice that a material bearer is neces-
sarily a hybrid object according to our earlier characterization
of objects.
Two features of the object–bearer relation warrant emphasis
here. The first is the ontological distinction it implies be-
tween a nonmaterial object and the material objects on which
it is inscribed. That is to say, however much access to a
nonmaterial object may depend on its material bearers, that
nonmaterial object is distinct from any and all of these
material things by virtue of possessing its own particular and
separate attributes. One such property is its nonmaterial mode
of being, from which flow others such as its not degrading
with repeated use and what economists call the property of
non-rivalry that its use by one person in no way impinges on
its simultaneous use by any number of others. The distinction
is also essential if we are to recognize the separate properties
of material bearers, something of considerable import not
least because an object’s suitability as a material bearer
depends in part on the properties of that thing. Thus where an
object is intended to serve as a material bearer for the
purposes of archiving a nonmaterial object, properties such as
durability and portability are likely to be important attributes
of the material object concerned. If instead the primary role
of the bearer is to enable a nonmaterial object to be read,
visual clarity is likely to be a more important property.
The second feature is that, barring physical, legal, or other
constraints, there is no limit to the number of different (kinds
of) material objects on which a given nonmaterial object may
be borne at any point in time or to the range of locations these
various bearers may occupy. Thus many nonmaterial objects,
the aforementioned news article being a prime example, are
nowadays borne concurrently on a vast range of different
8 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
Nonmaterial
Syntactic
Bitstrings
PF
DF
(kinds of) material bearers, whose location is largely con-
strained only by the limits of international travel and
communications technology.5
Material bearers are, of course, ubiquitous in the digital realm
and represent an important type of digital object. We have
already mentioned one example, namely the various kinds of
screens found not only in laptops, tablets, and smartphones,
but also in many industrial and household devices, vehicles,
and so on. Another is the numerous different kinds of media
device used to store bitstrings in machine-readable form,
including CD- and DVD-ROMs, hard disk and solid-state
drives, and memory cards.
The main ideas involved here are illustrated in Figure 2, in
which three different material objects (each denoted by a grey
rectangle)—a hard disk drive, microSD card and DVD-
ROM—serve as the material bearer of the same nonmaterial
object (denoted by a white rectangle), a particular bitstring.
In each case the object–bearer relation is illustrated by
showing the nonmaterial object located on top of the relevant
material object, with the bearer in each example being the
digital (and hybrid) object comprising the bitstring and the
relevant material object (i.e. the combination of white and
grey rectangle in each case).
5
The term copies is often used in relation to the instances of what we are
calling material bearers of a nonmaterial object, for example, when a maga-
zine page on which a news article is inscribed is described as being a copy of
that article. We avoid the term copy, however, because it risks collapsing, or
at least obscuring, the distinction between a nonmaterial object and its
material bearers. For example, the page of the magazine (a material object)
on which an article (a nonmaterial object) is inscribed is not literally a copy
of that article.

Bitstring
microSD card
Figure 2. Three Material Bearers of the Same Bitstring
Our earlier emphasis on the ontological separation between a
nonmaterial object and its material bearers—in essence, that
they are separate entities with their own distinct properties—
should in no way be taken to imply a more general separation
that prohibits causal interactions between the two kinds of
entity. To the contrary, such interactions lie at the heart of
our account. Thus, and as we have already made clear,
material bearers are vital to practical engagement with non-
material objects: to be accessed, a nonmaterial object must be
borne on a material object. Another example arises in relation
to the creation of new nonmaterial objects, a process that may
involve its author reflecting on the nature of the material on
which an object will subsequently be borne. Thus whether an
author opts to include charts, tables, or other figures within a
news article may well be influenced by their expectations
regarding the kinds of material bearer(s) on which that article
is likely to be displayed—for example, whether it will be pub-
lished online as well as in hard copy and, if so, whether most
online readers will read it via a smartphone or via a larger,
static, computer monitor.
Nonmaterial Bearers
In addition to material bearers there are also nonmaterial
bearers of nonmaterial objects. These are cases in which a
nonmaterial object is borne by or contained within a syntactic
object of some kind. Consider a software testing protocol, a
nonmaterial object consisting of a series of procedures aimed
at verifying the functionality of some piece of software. The
protocol is not itself a syntactic object as it is not composed
of symbols. However, the protocol may be given linguistic
expression in a variety of ways, such as when it is docu-
mented as text for the pages of a training manual. The latter
text, a syntactic object in its own right, is also a nonmaterial
bearer of the protocol. Generalizing, we call any syntactic
object in which a nonmaterial object is so borne or contained
a nonmaterial bearer of that nonmaterial object.
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
Bitstring
Hard disk drive
Bitstring
DVD-ROM
The idea of nonmaterial bearers is fundamental to the digital
world, particularly with respect to the role played by bitstrings
and thus digital objects. We have already noted that modern
computing is founded on the manipulation of information
encoded in binary form. The significance of bitstrings can
then be understood in terms of their role as nonmaterial
bearers of the various kinds of nonmaterial object corre-
sponding to the different types of information employed in
computing. Thus a program file is the bearer of a set of
instructions associated with a particular series of computa-
tions, while a data file is the bearer of an image, document,
dataset, or some other kind of data.
Many of the points made earlier in relation to material bearers
apply to nonmaterial bearers as well. Again, it is necessary to
be clear about the ontological distinctions involved: just as it
is important to avoid conflating a nonmaterial object with its
material bearers, it is important to avoid conflating a non-
material object with its nonmaterial bearers. Thus a news
article may be borne by a variety of different bitstrings
corresponding to different file formats such as DOCX, TXT,
and XML. Yet the article is distinct from any and all of these
bearers since, while the sequence of words that comprise it
will be the same in each case, the bitstring bearers differ, each
with their own distinct structures and properties. As before,
the properties of these different bearers matter, one illustration
of which is the way creation of a nonmaterial object may be
influenced by the attributes of its intended bitstring bearer.
Thus the producer of an audiovisual recording is likely to be
influenced by the properties of the particular multimedia
format to be used, for example what kinds of information can
be included (e.g., single or multiple audio streams, subtitles,
metadata, etc.), whether the encoding involves lossless or
lossy data compression, and so on.
The introduction of nonmaterial bearers also brings additional
features of the object–bearer relation into focus, the most
significant of which is that there may be many layers of
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 9
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
nonmaterial bearers involved, such that a nonmaterial object
may be borne by a nonmaterial object, which is itself borne by
a nonmaterial object (and so on). This idea holds particular
significance in relation to the information stored in bitstrings.
Continuing our earlier example of the software testing proto-
col, consider what happens when a bitstring bearer of the text
to be used in the training manual is created in MS Word. The
resulting DOCX file is itself a nonmaterial object, but at the
same time also a nonmaterial bearer of the syntactic object
that is the linguistic expression of the protocol, which is itself
a nonmaterial bearer of the original nonmaterial object, the
protocol. If that DOCX file is compressed as a ZIP file, that
ZIP file is then the bearer of a bearer of a bearer of the
protocol.6 In principle, such layering may be repeated
indefinitely. However, all such layers must ultimately bottom
out on a material bearer of some kind, since, as we noted
earlier, to be used, stored, or communicated, a nonmaterial
object must ultimately be borne on a material object. Figure
3 summarizes our conception with (layers of) nonmaterial
bearers now included.
This idea of the repeated layering of nonmaterial objects,
facilitated by the capacity of bitstrings to act as bearers, seems
to us one of the defining features of digital technology and a
major factor in what makes contemporary digital objects
unique. Notice that the layering involved here is quite dif-
ferent from the more familiar notion usually referred to as the
layered architecture of digital technologies. This latter idea
refers to the hierarchical structuring, within devices, of layers
of heterogeneous kinds (such as contents, services, network,
device), and where each layer constitutes a distinct, and
largely separable, design hierarchy (Yoo et al. 2010).
We use the term translational actions to refer to practices
associated with movement from one layer of bearer to
another. Thus, in the preceding example, moving downward
from the top of Figure 3, the original protocol is first captured
in text (e.g., is written up), this text then encoded in a DOCX
file (e.g., is input via keyboard or speech-recognition), this
file then converted to ZIP format (e.g., using compression
software), before finally being stored on a material bearer
(e.g., saved on a hard disk drive). Moving in the opposite
direction, accessing the ZIP file from its material bearer, and
subsequently the DOCX file from the ZIP file, involves
retrieval using relevant software, while converting the non-
human-readable DOCX file to a human-readable bearer (the
6
Another example of this kind of layering occurs in relation to computer
programming, where a given set of logical operations may be encoded in a
variety of different higher-order programming languages, each giving rise to
a syntactic object, the source code, that is a nonmaterial bearer of that instruc-
tion set. Each of these syntactic objects could then be encoded in binary as
machine code for a variety of different processors, giving rise to multiple
bitstring encodings of the same source code.
10 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
textual expression of the protocol) involves displaying, and
perhaps subsequently printing, the relevant text.
Computation
We now offer some brief observations on computation, the
real-time processes performed by digital computers that
involve the algorithmic manipulation of information borne by
bitstrings. These processes, largely implicit in our account so
far, are relevant here for their existential relationship with
digital objects. This relationship is two-way, the existence of
computation at once depending on and contributing to the
existence of digital objects.
Consider first how the existence of computation depends on
certain kinds of digital object. Recall that we described pro-
gram files as the bitstring bearers of sets of logical operations
corresponding to the instructions for carrying out particular
types of computation. Whenever a program file is executed
on appropriate hardware this results in a real-time (series of)
process(es) of computation, with sequences of events trig-
gered according to the semantics of the instructions encoded
in that program file.7 There are then two ways that the exis-
tence of computation depends on digital objects, including
program files and computer systems. The first concerns the
initial coming into existence of a computational process, the
second with its ongoing existence over the period it runs.
Recognition of this connection brings many issues into focus,
and the shift to distributed computing provides a particularly
salient example here. Consider something as seemingly
simple as visiting a website. The website, a digital object in
its own right, comprises bitstring encodings of content such
as text, images, and audio, as well as scripts governing its
appearance and user experience. Actually accessing the web-
site, however, requires a much larger assembly of other,
mostly digital, objects, including desktop and handheld
devices on the user side, servers, routers, switches, and the
like on the server side, and the networking equipment linking
the two. Many of these objects are themselves capable of
computation, and visiting a website accordingly involves a
host of separate but interconnected processes of computation,
both concurrent and sequential, of variable length and
complexity, running on a range of distinct platforms across
different locations. The distributed nature of the computation
here, increasingly reflected in devices designed for an Internet
of Things, flows from continued growth in internet access,
7
In ordinary language, the term computer program often refers to both the bit-
string object and the processes of computation involved in its execution,
conflating the two kinds of entity and thereby obscuring the relationship
between them.
 Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object

Nonmaterial object (e.g., software testing protocol)

Nonmaterial bearer (e.g., textual expression of the protocol)

Nonmaterial bearer (e.g., DOCX encoding of the textual expression)

Nonmaterial bearer (e.g., ZIP encoding of the DOCX file)

Material bearer (e.g., hard disk drive)

Figure 3. Layers of Nonmaterial and Material Bearers

coupled with technical developments, particularly in relation
to mobile and smart devices, in terms of miniaturization,
performance, and cost.
Now consider how the existence of digital objects might
depend on computation rather than the other way around. The
basic point here is the simple one that processes of com-
putation are to varying degrees involved in the creation of
many types of digital object. Bitstrings are an obvious
example, not least the bearers of the ceaseless flow of emails,
texts, and tweets, news articles and blogs, audio, still images,
and video on the Internet. But the point applies much more
widely once we recognize the role of computation in the
conception, design, and production of many manufactured
digital objects, including computers themselves and the
various ancillary devices and equipment involved with their
use. However, in contrast to how computation depends on
existing digital objects, the ongoing existence of new digital
objects in most cases, once they have been created, no longer
depends on computation.
Again, recognition of the existential dependence of digital
objects on computation brings a variety of issues into focus,
and we will mention two that arise in relation to the creation
of new bitstrings. The first concerns the difference between
bitstrings that are the intended outcome of a task and those
that are not. Examples of the former include the cases in
which a set of media files is compressed to create a single
archive file, or an audio track ripped from a CD to create an
MP3 encoding. Here computation is about the use of existing
digital objects to combine and recombine existing nonmaterial
objects to achieve the desired outcome. Yet in other cases,
and perhaps more typically, new bitstrings arise during com-
putation as a by-product of the use of digital objects. Cookies
generated while visiting a website are a familiar example, or
when an activity tracker generates bitstring encodings of
metrics such as steps taken, calories burnt, and heart rate.
New bitstrings of this kind often have a short life span,
intended only as temporary files, and may be subject to
continued modification as computation and use of the relevant
digital object proceeds.
The second issue concerns bearers, building on the fact that
the creation of new bitstrings usually also entails the creation
of new material and nonmaterial bearers. This might be
because the new bitstring is itself a bearer of a nonmaterial
object (of text, audio, etc.) and/or because the new bitstring
must itself be borne in some form (e.g., stored on a local
drive, transferred to the cloud and so on). What this points to
is that computation typically involves the creation not simply
of new bitstrings—perhaps short-lived, perhaps not; perhaps
located in various places reflecting the distributed nature of
computing—but also a variety of additional digital objects in
the form of new material and nonmaterial bearers. Transla-
tional actions feature heavily here, all to do with the computa-
tion involved in moving between layers of bearers, as when
the HTML code sent by a website’s server is converted to
text, images, and so on by the web browsing client, or when
data input by a user is transmitted back to the server and
stored.
The Social Positioning of Digital Objects
Thus far we have concentrated on the intrinsic features of
digital objects, portraying them as discrete entities with innate
properties that exist and endure independently of their setting.
In this last part of our theory, we turn to their context-
dependent aspects, in particular the way in which the kind of
thing they are—smart phone, search engine, banking app, or
whatever else they may be—depends on their social
positioning.
Social Positioning: Overview
The perspective on social positioning we draw on is part of a
broader social theory developed by Tony Lawson (1997,
2003, 2012, 2015, 2016; also see Faulkner et al. 2017). The
guiding idea is that, in being assigned a position within some
system by some community, an entity acquires the social
identity associated with that position. A social position is a
specific status within a system that locates its occupant as a

MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 11

Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
component of that system. The social identity of any entity is
then the kind of thing that entity is by virtue of the social
position it occupies. Social positions typically exist indepen-
dently of, and usually prior to, any individual occupant,
something which therefore applies also to the identities they
inform.
Perhaps the most familiar examples of social positioning are
those that involve the employment of human beings within the
systems we commonly refer to as organizations, such as the
position of thoracic surgeon within a hospital. This position
denotes a particular status within the hospital and where it is
by virtue of being assigned that status, and so occupying the
relevant position, that its occupant acquires the associated
social identity and so is a thoracic surgeon both within the
hospital and the wider community.
The Case of Digital Objects
One of the features of Lawson’s view is that it applies also to
the organization of systems that include, or are composed
entirely of, inanimate entities (Faulkner and Runde 2013;
Lawson 2012, 2015, 2016). Of particular relevance here is
the case of positioned objects, where the positions concerned
have to do with the practical use to which objects are put.
Take the class of devices we know as MRI scanners. In the
same way that the social position of thoracic surgeon locates
its human occupant as a component of the larger system of a
hospital and confers on them the social identity of thoracic
surgeon, the social position of MRI scanner likewise locates
its object occupant as a component of the larger system of a
hospital and confers on it the social identity of MRI scanner.
Similarly, the position of electronic medical records (EMR)
software locates its bitstring occupant as a component of a
larger health care system and confers on that bitstring the
social identity of EMR software.
Aspects of the Social Positioning of Digital Objects
We will briefly note these three key aspects of the social
positioning of digital objects: system functions, rights and
responsibilities, and the reproduction and transformation of
social positions.
System Functions: Every social position carries with it an
expectation that its occupant will contribute to the perfor-
mance of the relevant system in certain ways, something we
call a system function. This observation applies equally to
positioned humans and positioned objects: just as whoever
occupies the position of thoracic surgeon within a hospital is
expected to treat patients suffering from thoracic disorders, so
the digital object that occupies the position of MRI scanner is
expected to produce detailed images of the inside of the body.
12 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
In assigning an entity to a particular position within a system
the goal is, in general, to achieve a close fit between the
intrinsic capacities of that entity and the requirements of the
system function associated with that position. Where an
entity’s capacities are well suited to fulfilling its system func-
tion, the positioning is likely to endure. Where the match is
a poor one, however, the positioning is unlikely to be sus-
tained. Most human artifacts, digital or otherwise, are of
course designed and manufactured with the position they are
to occupy in mind, so that they possess capacities tailored to
the specific system functions they are intended to serve. But
it may happen that an object designed with one system
function in mind may nevertheless be repositioned and
acquire a different identity and system function as a result
(Cardinale and Runde 2019; Faulkner and Runde 2009).
Rights and Responsibilities: Social positions are also the
locus of numerous rights and responsibilities, which position-
occupants become subject to on entering a position. Again,
the point is familiar in the context of employment-related
positions, with the occupant of the position of thoracic sur-
geon having the right to decide clinical priorities within their
department, as well as the responsibility to keep patients
informed of treatment options, associated risks, and so forth.
While objects do not themselves enjoy rights or bear respon-
sibilities in the way humans do, the positions they occupy are
also the subject of rights and responsibilities pertaining to
their use, maintenance, and so on. Thus, the right to order
MRI scans may be restricted to particular physicians and
imaging conducted only by suitably qualified radiographers
within a hospital, while the scanner’s warranty imposes
obligations on its manufacturer and might restrict aspects of
its installation, modification, and so on.
As these examples show, the rights and responsibilities asso-
ciated with social positions are typically two-sided, with the
rights (responsibilities) of one position matched by corre-
sponding responsibilities (rights) associated with other
positions. This feature reflects the internal-relatedness of
social positions, where the existence of any one social
position presupposes the existence of others (and vice versa).
Relationality of this sort is common in the digital realm,
whether between social positions occupied by digital objects
alone (e.g., MRI scanner and digital MRI image), between
social positions occupied by digital objects on the one hand
and humans on the other (MRI scanner and MRI technician),
or between social positions occupied by humans alone (e.g.,
surgeon and surgery patient). All of these cases exhibit a
form of mutual, or co-, constitution between the entities
concerned, arising at the level of the social positions they
occupy and the social identities they acquire.
The Reproduction and Transformation of Social Posi-
tions: Social positions, as well as the relations in which they

stand and the social identities they inform, exist through being
continuously enacted or performed, and thereby reproduced,
in the practices associated with them. Thus, the social posi-
tion of MRI scanner, as well as its relations to other social
positions and its associated social identity, exists and endures
through practices such as physicians ordering, radiographers
carrying out, and radiologists reporting on the images pro-
duced by MRI scans of patients. Computation is involved in
many of these practices, and the social positions associated
with digital objects, together with their associated relations
and identities, would not, therefore, generally exist but for
processes of computation.
Social positions may, of course, also be transformed through
human practices, driven by any manner of things including
technological developments, accidents, and novel practices
elsewhere. They may atrophy over time (e.g., the position of
floppy disks associated with legacy IT systems), mutate (e.g.,
the position of camera as digital photography became wide-
spread), and new ones emerge (e.g., the position of activity
tracker). The view on social positioning we are advocating
can, therefore, accommodate both continuity and change in
the digital realm, always mindful of the relational and
performative aspects of the positioning, identity, and use of
digital objects, but never so as to lose sight of their intrinsic
properties.
The exposition of our theory now complete, we move on to its
potential value to IS research.
Implications
Given the abstract level at which it is pitched, we believe that
our theory could be fruitfully applied in many areas of IS
research. In what follows, we focus on demonstrating its
utility as a conceptual framework for investigating phenom-
ena in which digital objects predominate and its potential to
inform existing theoretical perspectives in IS.
Bitstrings, Bearers and Markets for
Secondhand Software
We begin with an empirical example: the recent emergence
of secondary markets for pre-owned downloaded bitstrings
such as application software and media files. Currently
organized around a small number of web-based firms oper-
ating as online intermediaries, these markets make it possible
for owners of legally downloaded bitstrings to resell them
over the Internet. While such markets are in their infancy—
with intermediaries only willing to deal in certain kinds of
bitstrings and where the legal status of even this trade is
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
keenly contested—continued growth in both the number and
variety of bitstrings available to download suggests such
markets are likely to become an increasingly important feature
of digital commerce. Indeed, companies such as Amazon,
Apple, and Microsoft already hold patents on technologies
aimed at enabling secondary trade of this sort (Streitfeld
2013).
The advent of these markets raises a host of theoretical and
practical issues, ranging from technological challenges
associated with designing suitable online platforms to eco-
nomic consequences that might flow from the monetization of
end-users’ intangible digital “assets.” Our present interest,
however, lies in how our theory may facilitate study of this
phenomenon and to this end we will concentrate on two
particular aspects. The first is ways in which the intrinsic
properties of bitstrings render their secondary markets dif-
ferent from those for pre-owned material objects. The second
is the role of material bearers, particularly with respect to
some of the main legal issues associated with the resale of
downloaded bitstrings. Both aspects highlight the importance
of ideas contained in our theory, first, in being able to account
for the characteristics of nonmaterial objects such as bit-
strings, and second, in providing the ontological basis for
distinguishing nonmaterial objects from their material and
nonmaterial bearers, and for capturing the relationship
between the two.
There are various ways that the intrinsic properties of bit-
strings render markets for pre-owned, downloaded, applica-
tion software and media files different from those for second-
hand material items such as motor vehicles, furniture, or
clothes. We highlight two here. The first is that, by virtue of
their nonmaterial mode of being and combined with the
availability of low-cost bearer technologies and the reach and
speed of the Internet, the storage and distribution costs asso-
ciated with their online exchange are negligible. It follows
that secondary markets for downloaded bitstrings have the
potential to be highly efficient, with low transaction costs
ensuring that most opportunities for trade between potential
buyers and sellers can be achieved. By comparison, the phy-
sicality of material objects can imply larger transactions costs
and thus less efficient secondary markets. Thus while the
potential buyer of a secondhand piano may value it more
highly than its current owner, if the cost of transferring that
object from seller to buyer is too great the exchange will not
occur.
The second way in which the intrinsic features of bitstrings
make a difference is that, unlike most material objects, they
do not degrade with use or age. Pre-owned bitstrings can,
therefore, genuinely be sold as being in like-new condition,
with there being no difference in quality between a file
purchased direct from a retailer such as the iTunes Store or
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 13
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
one bought from an existing end-user. This has at least two
important implications. The first is that these markets avoid
the classic lemons problem often associated with markets for
used material goods (Akerlof 1970), where trade may be
reduced or fail to take place entirely simply because buyers
are unable to distinguish high from low quality items, and
where sellers and buyers may have to invest in costly
signaling and screening activities to overcome these
informational asymmetries. The second is that the non-
degradability of bitstrings is a key factor in media and
application software companies’ concerns about secondary
markets and their motivation for challenging the legality of
such trade. For if pre-owned bitstrings are like-new, their
resale provides direct competition to new sales, threatening
profits to a greater degree than would be the case for a
product that wears out over time.
What will be evident, we hope, is that the preceding obser-
vations presuppose a conception of digital objects that
explicitly recognizes bitstrings, and nonmaterial objects
generally, as separate objects with their own distinct and
characteristic properties. For it is these properties, in this case
their nonmaterial mode of being and non-degradability, that
the points above rely on. Such phenomena, in other words,
simply cannot be understood without the kind of ontological
distinctions we have been urging.
The second aspect of this case we want to highlight—the
disputed legal situation surrounding the resale of lawfully
downloaded bitstrings—puts the spotlight on the material
bearers of bitstrings and some of the main translational
actions, particularly the uploading and downloading of files,
associated with their online exchange. The two sides
involved in these legal disputes are typically the inter-
mediaries, on one hand, who wish to facilitate trade, and the
media and software publishing companies, on the other, who
wish to prevent those in possession of lawfully downloaded
bitstrings from reselling them. That the current situation is
unsettled is hardly surprising since trade of this kind is
relatively new and the technologies involved are still devel-
oping. There are also strong and conflicting economic
interests involved, with the intermediaries as well as the
potential buyers and sellers of bitstrings standing to gain from
secondary trade, while, as we have already noted, the pub-
lishing companies are at risk of erosion of their profits if
reselling is allowed.
The main legal principle at stake here is the First Sale Doc-
trine (FSD),8 a set of rules originating in the pre-digital era
that limit a copyright owner’s exclusive right to distribute
8 The courts reached a quite different conclusion in an other-
The same principle is usually referred to as the Exhaustion Doctrine outside
of the United States.
14 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
copies, or what we call material bearers, of a copyrighted
work. As usually understood, the FSD creates an exception
to this right such that ownership of a lawfully acquired
material bearer of a copyright-protected work permits distri-
bution of that particular material bearer. Thus the owner of a
legally purchased paperback copy of a novel is permitted to
dispose of, for example resell, that item as they wish.
The key issue in relation to the legality of secondary markets
for downloaded bitstrings is whether or not the FSD applies
in this setting. To the extent that bitstrings mirror the paper-
back example just described, the FSD has transferred to the
digital realm with little difficulty. Thus in the case of some-
one having originally purchased a software application borne
on a specific material object such as a DVD-ROM, the FSD
permits that person to resell that material object without
infringing the copyright associated with that application. In
the case of a bitstring purchased online as a download, how-
ever, the situation is rather different, with the link between
that bitstring and the material bearer on which it resides being
significantly looser. For although a downloaded bitstring
must be borne by a material bearer of some sort, in contrast to
when it is purchased on an object such as a DVD-ROM, in the
case of a download there is no specific material object to
which the bitstring is inherently tied at the point of purchase.
Two recent legal cases illustrate the issues that can arise as a
result (Hamilton 2015; Huguenin-Love 2014; Serra 2013;
Soma and Kugler 2014). In January 2012, Capitol Records,
a music publishing company, sued ReDigi, an online inter-
mediary allowing users to buy and sell audio files previously
downloaded from iTunes, for copyright infringement in the
United States. In March 2013, the courts ruled in favor of
Capitol (Capitol Records LLC v. ReDigi Inc, U.S. District
Court, Southern District of New York, 112-00095), finding
that ReDigi’s activities were not covered by the FSD and so
violated the music publisher’s copyright. Central to the
courts’ ruling was its interpretation of ReDigi’s online plat-
form, whereby those who wish to resell an audio file first
upload that file to the ReDigi “Cloud Locker” (a remote
server located in Arizona), from which it can then be sold to
and downloaded by a new purchaser. Although ReDigi’s
software ensures that any uploaded file is removed from a
user’s own computer, the courts deemed that uploading a file
to the Cloud Locker necessarily involves the creation of a new
material bearer of that file rather than the transfer of an
existing one. Since the creation of a new bearer violates the
copyright holder’s reproduction rights, the file stored on the
Cloud Locker is unlawful and not, therefore, subject to the
FSD. Thus any exchange of an audio file that takes place via
the ReDigi platform was judged unlawful.
wise similar case heard in Europe. In 2012, the European

Court of Justice considered a case brought by Oracle Inter-
national, a producer of enterprise software, against UsedSoft,
a German firm trading online in pre-owned downloaded
application software. Like Capitol Records, Oracle argued
that the FSD did not apply to downloaded software, since its
resale over the Internet would necessarily violate copyright in
much the same way as in the ReDigi case. Yet in this case the
court found in favor of UsedSoft, on the grounds that the FSD
did apply so long as the originally downloaded copy of the
software was deleted or rendered unusable (UsedSoft v.
Oracle, ECJ, C-128/11, subsequently confirmed by the
German Federal Supreme Court, 17 July 2014, IZR129/08;
case note in English (2014)).9 While recognizing that resale
would involve the creation of a new material bearer, the court
deemed this lawful reproduction by virtue of it being nec-
essary for the use of the software by its lawful owner.
As things stand, then, the U.S. and European rulings on online
trade in pre-owned bitstrings conflict on a fundamental point,
namely the legality or otherwise of the new material bearers
created as part of the process. These decisions, and the
resulting jurisdictional differences, are likely to have signi-
ficant consequences for issues ranging from publishers’
distribution, license and maintenance models and how they
position themselves in regard to non-transfer restrictions, the
design of online platforms employed by intermediaries, all the
way through to the perverse incentives they may create for
buyers, who may forego downloading in favor of purchasing
material bearers of nonmaterial objects with an eye to their
potential resale. ReDigi’s own response has been to redesign
its software in such a way that the resale of audio files no
longer involves the creation of new material bearers, with a
view to overcoming the legal objections raised against its
original platform. Instead, newly purchased files are imme-
diately stored on ReDigi’s own servers, from where its owner
can either play the music directly or, if they wish to sell,
ownership of the file can be transferred to the buyer without
the creation of a new material bearer (Crooks 2015). A judg-
ment in their appeal of the original ruling, and consequently
the legality of this new arrangement, has been pending since
August 2017.
As with our earlier discussion of the intrinsic properties of
bitstrings, the central role of material bearers in the legal
arguments surrounding secondary trade in downloaded bit-
strings offers a similarly clear illustration of the use of our
theory as a conceptual basis for enquiry. Without the
distinction between bitstrings and their material bearers, and
an account of the relationship between the two, it would be
impossible to make sense of the events we have described.
9 representations of the structure—themselves nonmaterial
The ruling also required that if the license originally sold covered multiple
users, the reseller did not divide the license and resell only part of it.
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
The legal aspects of this case also remind us of what is
arguably the single most important feature of the bitstring: its
capacity to bear nonmaterial objects such as application pro-
grams, audio recordings, and text. Indeed, the legal situation
regarding secondary trade is itself likely to depend on the
particular type of nonmaterial object a bitstring bears, since
different law(s) may apply to bitstring bearers of application
software than apply to bitstring bearers of, for example,
audio- or e-books. More broadly, this feature highlights that
the demand for bitstrings is a derived one, arising from
demand for the nonmaterial object inscribed into a bitstring,
rather than for the bitstring itself, and where multiple layers
of nonmaterial bearer may exist between the bitstring and the
ultimate object of value. It is this feature that has played, and
will continue to play, such an important role in the shaping of
digital markets and in the impact of bitstrings generally, and
why it is so important to be clear about the distinct properties
of the various kinds of objects involved and the relations in
which they stand to each other.
Although we have focused on secondary markets for bit-
strings, there are many other cases in which similar concep-
tual issues arise and for which our theory might offer an
appropriate foundation. One of these concerns the tendency
among certain consumers to value physical versions of a
given item—a magazine, audio recording, or film, say—more
highly than its digital variants, despite the advantages the
latter offer in terms of storage, transportation, and non-
degradability (Belk 2013; Giles et al. 2007; Petrelli and
Whittaker 2010). We have already highlighted one possible
explanation for this, namely the legal difficulties associated
with the resale of digital goods. A second possibility, how-
ever, is that the strength of psychological ownership that
consumers feel toward a good, and thus the value they attach
to it, depends on their ability to interact and (re-)form asso-
ciations with that good in a physical way. Questions of mode
of being are central here, the nonmaterial nature of digitized
goods, at least in certain cases, contributing directly to their
being valued less than their material counterparts (Atasoy and
Morewedge 2018).
A somewhat different example concerns the Internet of
Things, where physical devices with embedded digital sen-
sory and actuation capabilities are linked over networks, and
which turns on the coming together of material devices (the
things) with a variety of nonmaterial entities such as software,
protocols, data, and the like (Gubbi et al. 2013; Miorandi et
al. 2012). Similarly, 3D printing, which enables the produc-
tion of three-dimensional material objects from their digital
representations (Barnatt 2013; Lipson and Kurman 2013) and
constitutes a particularly novel form of translational action,
revolves around bitstrings that are the nonmaterial bearers of
objects—of the material object to be produced.
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 15
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
Our final example concerns the impact of robotics and AI on
labor markets and differs from the preceding ones in
extending the focus from objects to social positions. Perhaps
the most salient issue here, one that threatens to become one
of the most pressing organizational and social challenges of
the age, is the displacement of workers by automation and the
use of material and nonmaterial objects (Brynjolfsson and
McAfee 2012; Ford 2015; Kaplan 2015), that is, of digital
objects moving into social positions formerly occupied by
humans.
The Resource-Based, Knowledge-Based, and
Service-Dominant Logic Views
We now return to the three meta-theoretical views on
organizing reviewed at the beginning of the paper, with the
aim of highlighting some specific implications of our theory
for their conceptions of digital technology and of resources
generally.
Recall that while all three views distinguish between the
material and the nonmaterial at the level of resources, they fail
to do so adequately at the level of objects. Instead, non-
material objects such as bitstrings tend to be treated in one of
two ways, neither of which is satisfactory. The first and most
common is to interpret them as equivalent, or reducible, to the
material things involved in their use. The problem here is that
this conflates nonmaterial and material objects, thereby ob-
scuring the distinct properties of, and relationships between,
each. The second is to interpret them as forms of knowledge.
While this potentially captures the intangibility of nonmaterial
objects, the problem again is that this conflates two different
things, nonmaterial objects and knowledge. Our theory
avoids these conflations by offering a more finely grained
understanding of nonmaterial objects as types of resource.
We will illustrate some of the resulting benefits with
reference to the idea of resources being embedded and the
possible revision of some widely adopted categories.
As noted earlier, in one way or another all three views regard
knowledge-based resources as embedded in, and transmitted
through, other kinds of resources such as an organization’s
culture, routines, employees, and physical devices. While
there is a clear analogy here with the idea of nonmaterial
objects being borne by other material and nonmaterial objects,
we would add two refinements in light of our theory. The
first is that nonmaterial objects, and bitstrings in particular,
can serve as bearers of knowledge-based resources just as
much as material objects can. The second is that nonmaterial
objects can be embedded in other material or nonmaterial
objects just as much as knowledge can.
16 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
These refinements become especially valuable when con-
sidering embeddedness in relation to digital technology, this
for the clarity they bring in disentangling the various elements
involved—knowledge, nonmaterial, and material objects—
and the relations between them. Take Bharadwaj’s (2000, p.
175) example of a “lessons learned” database built by a firm
to capture “the unstructured knowledge of its design team in
the form of wisdom, experience, and stories.” While cap-
turing perfectly the general notion of one resource (knowl-
edge) being embedded in another (the database), there are
important nonmaterial objects in play here too, notably the
text that captures employees’ wisdom, experience, and stories,
and its bitstring bearers embedded in the database. We would
say that the knowledge is embedded in the text, which is in
turn borne by the bitstring. This level of detail seems to us
crucial to capturing the nuances, in particular the unique
features of the digital objects, involved.
On similar lines, our theory also provides a source of useful
adjuncts to the concept of resource liquefaction advanced by
the three views, and especially the role of digitization in
enabling “resources to be unbundled, rebundled, integrated,
and created” (Lusch and Vargo 2014, p. 141). Here we
suggest that our account of nonmaterial objects, bearers,
layers, and digital objects in particular provides the concepts
to develop such ideas coherently in relation to the idea of
resources advanced in the three views—both the basic idea of
information embedded in, and then separated from, physical
things, and also the idea of unbundling and rebundling, inte-
grating and creating.
A second benefit of our theory is that it suggests potentially
useful revisions of categories used in the three views. We
will concentrate on the distinction between operand and
operant resources in service-dominant logic, where the former
are static things requiring “other resources to act on them to
provide benefit” (Lusch and Vargo 2014, p. 57), and the latter
are dynamic in the sense of “capable of acting on other
(potential) resources to create benefit” (Lusch and Vargo
2014, p. 57). There are two points we wish to make in this
connection, the first of which is that, while operand resources
are usually thought of as material appliances, nonmaterial
objects such as software, media files, and protocols are often
similarly inert and reliant on other resources to be used. In
short, while recognizing the possible operant aspects of soft-
ware (Lusch and Nambisan 2015), on our account the
category of operand resource should be expanded to include
nonmaterial as well as material objects.
Our second point concerns the relationship between operand
and operant resources. Service-dominant logic typically
emphasizes the embedding of operant in operand resources

(Vargo et al. 2008), as when competences are viewed as
transmitted through material devices. But the refinements
mentioned earlier introduce new possibilities. One of these is
of operant resources being embedded in nonmaterial rather
than material operand resources, such as where knowledge of
tax law and the ability to complete and submit a valid tax
return are embedded in tax software (Vargo et al. 2008).
Another possibility, epitomized by our notion of bearers of
nonmaterial objects, is of operand nonmaterial objects being
embedded in other operand objects. And yet another possi-
bility, one that inverts the usual formulation, is where a
nonmaterial operand object such as an organization’s fire
evacuation protocol or a clause within a product’s license
agreement is embedded in operant knowledge of some form.
Indeed, the idea that there may be many layers of bearers
opens the way to longer permutations of both operant and
operand resources.
We close with two points that illustrate how our theory might
facilitate the articulation of social aspects of resources,
particularly digital technology, within the three views. The
first is in connection with the observation by proponents of
service-dominant logic that resources are “a function of how
something (tangible or intangible) is or can be used and not a
function of things per se” (Lusch and Nambisan 2015, p.
159). There are likely many facets to this claim but one of the
most important, we contend, is that resources are usually
positioned things, such that the qualities of being a particular
type of resource and having the associated system functions,
are bound up with the position that an entity occupies, with
how it is related to other (socially positioned) things, and its
actually being deployed in accordance with its social posi-
tioning, in the context in which it arises. Our theory provides
the means to incorporate these and related ideas into service-
dominant logic, and then in a way that complements recent
efforts to theorize social structure in relation to service
ecosystems generally.
Our second point concerns the notion of social complexity, an
idea that the resource-based view has yet to adequately
theorize and that it arguably lacks the concepts required to do
so. Our theory suggests that the positioning of a resource
represents one possible source of social complexity, particu-
larly where the positions concerned involve complex internal
relations, where entities simultaneously occupy multiple
positions within one or more communities, and where posi-
tions and positionings change over time. Thinking about the
issue in this way may be of particular relevance to digital (and
other kinds of) objects, where the orthodox view that devices
are rarely socially complex is at odds with the ubiquitous
positioning of such things, and where this approach may
highlight factors that make it difficult for an organization to
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
control, or to copy, a resource that would otherwise be
neglected.
How People and Technology Come Together
Our theory of digital objects is a contribution to a wider
literature in IS about how the relationship between people and
technology should be theorized (e.g., Cheikh-Ammar 2018;
Grover and Lyytinen 2015; Leonardi et al. 2012; Markus and
Silver 2008; Silver and Markus 2013). We will now indicate
one way our theory might add to this literature with reference
to two influential perspectives within it: sociomateriality
(Orlikowski 2007, 2010: Orlikowski and Scott 2008, 2014,
2015; Scott and Orlikowski 2014; see also Cecez-
Kecmanovic et al. 2014; Jones 2014; Riemer and Johnston
2017) and what we will call imbrication theory (Leonardi
2011, 2012, 2013, 2017; Leonardi and Rodqriguez-Lluesma
2012).
While there is some overlap between the two and both are
considerably more nuanced than we have space to detail here,
they differ unambiguously on a fundamental aspect of
ontology: while sociomateriality denies the existence of
discrete things with intrinsic properties (e.g., Scott and
Orlikowski 2014, p. 878) and therefore also digital objects as
we have theorized them, imbrication theory affirms the oppo-
site and reserves a central place for technological artifacts
with intrinsic properties that are “fixed,” even if only tem-
porarily, and that impact causally on what people do with
them (e.g., Leonardi 2012, p. 32).
This difference is dramatic and of a piece with how the two
perspectives depict organizing processes in technology-rich
environments. According to sociomateriality, the world
bottoms out in relations and everything within it is the product
of intra-action, a “mutual constitution of objects and agencies
of observation within phenomena” (Barad, 2007, p. 197).
Organizing processes, in this view, are ones in which the
boundaries between things flow from “agential cuts” made by
“agencies of observation” rather than from inherent properties
of the things concerned (Orlikowski 2010, pp. 135-136; Scott
and Orlikowski 2014, pp. 877-880), and where whatever
emerges is co-constituted by agencies of observation just as
such agencies are co-constituted by whatever it is they are
observing.
In contrast, the focus in imbrication theory—where imbricate
means “to arrange distinct elements in overlapping patterns so
that they function interdependently” (Leonardi 2011, p.
150)—is on organizing processes in which preexisting tech-
nological artifacts and mediating “perceptual affordances and
MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019 17
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
constraints” of human actors interact causally (although not
deterministically) in successive imbrications. While the
human and material agencies implicated at each stage may be
transformed in their interactions, the emphasis is on a chrono-
logical to and fro between interacting agencies, rather than a
melding of the two.
It is not our intention to criticize either perspective here or to
question the undoubted value of the empirical work they have
guided. Our aim instead is to suggest that one of the benefits
of our own theory is to provide a bridge between the two. In
our view, there is no contradiction between committing to a
world full of discrete things with intrinsic properties while
accepting that the emergence, social positioning, and,
accordingly, identities and system functions of such things
involve high degrees of relationality, performativity, and even
something like localized intra-actions (e.g., the positioning,
identity, and associated activities of MRI technician co-
constituting the positioning and identity of MRI scanner, and
vice versa). To this extent, our account offers an alternative
for those attracted by the emphasis on relationality and
performativity in sociomateriality but who nevertheless have
reservations about committing wholesale to intra-action tout
court and the “ontological fusion” (Orlikowski and Scott
2008, p. 456) of humans and technologies that this entails. At
the same time, our account offers an alternative for those
attracted by the view of a world of at least temporarily stable
things with intrinsic properties described in imbrication theory
and the role it ascribes to affordances (Gibson 1986; Hutchby
2001; Markus and Silver 2008; Norman 1990, 1999), but who
may also be interested in a thoroughgoing account of the
social positioning, social identity, and system functions of
digital objects, and the possibility of remaining open to a role
for at least some form of intra-action.
A Push to the Edge
Much of our theory is the product of an attempt to think
through the ontology of digital objects from first principles
and is to this extent an example of what Grover and Lyytinen
(2015) call a “push to the edge,” away from middle-range
theorizing drawing on ideas imported from reference disci-
plines, toward a more abstract and unfettered “blue ocean”
theorizing. One of the benefits of this kind of work is that it
avoids the imprecision or ambiguity that can arise when
concepts intended for use in one domain are carried over to
another, such as where key properties of digital objects are
lost via their being equated with other forms of resources as
they are understood in fields such as strategy or marketing.
But there are other advantages and we close by mentioning
four of them.
18 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
The first is to help foreground digital objects and call atten-
tion to them as things worthy of investigation in their own
right. In their seminal paper, Orlikowski and Iacono (2001,
p. 130) describe this task, that of “making the implicit visible
and turning attention to the taken for granted,” as the principal
challenge in achieving a more thorough engagement with the
IT artifact. One of the main aims of ontological analysis is to
meet this kind of challenge, which we sought to do by indi-
viduating digital objects and their components analytically,
and revealing their properties and ontological preconditions.
A second advantage is that, in providing a conception of
digital objects as structured ensembles of components that are
themselves objects, our theory provides the means to drill
down to whatever level any of their organizationally relevant
properties might emanate from. We regard this as a crucial
aspect of our theory because the organizational consequences
of technology often depend causally on, and therefore cannot
be fully understood without reference to, such properties. So,
just as our understanding of how the gramophone turntable
became a musical instrument in the New York hip hop com-
munity in the late 1970s is deeper for knowing something
about the properties of the Technics SL1200 turntables used
without which it would likely never have occurred—for ex-
ample, the direct drive that made it possible to manipulate the
platter manually without damaging the device, and where the
motor had sufficient torque to bring the platter up to speed
again quickly on being released (Faulkner and Runde 2009)—
so our understanding of the organizational consequences of
something like blockchain technology might turn on knowing
about the properties of (nonmaterial) data structures, crypto-
graphic keys, consensus mechanism protocols, and the many
elements of the material infrastructure required to maintain a
geographically distributed ledger. Our theory provides a
framework within which such properties can be captured in a
systematic and, since it applies equally to material, non-
material, and hybrid objects, unified way.
A third advantage of our theory is that it captures important
specific features of digital objects, of which two in particular
stand out. The first is the nonmaterial nature of computer
files, a precondition for much of the digital world as we know
it. We hope to have captured this property in a straight-
forward way that is consistent with how most engineers and
programmers on the ground think about it, and also dispels
some of the apparent mystery reflected in descriptions of the
“dubious” (Allison et al. 2005) or “ambivalent” (Kallinikos et
al. 2013) ontology of bitstrings. The second feature is the
object–bearer relationship and the capacity of bitstrings, and
digital objects generally, to support multiple layers of bearers
of a nonmaterial object. We see this part of our theory as an
addition to the literature on nonmaterial objects (Allison et al.

2005; Bhattacharjee et al. 2011; Ekbia 2009; Kallinikos et al.
2010, 2013; Leonardi 2010; Matook and Brown 2017; Quah
2003; Rayna 2008) and as a potential source of building
blocks for further theorizing hybrid complexes ranging from
relatively simple smart devices (Yoo 2010) to larger digital
infrastructures and ecosystems (Henfridsson and Bygstad
2013; Tilson et al. 2010).
The final advantage we want to mention is a key by-product
of our theory, namely that it offers an object-based definition
of “digital object” that is theoretically grounded in flowing
from a general conception of objecthood, able to account for
why digital objects are specifically digital, and that covers
both hardware and nonmaterial objects. This definition meets
the usual criteria of a sound definition in using predefined
terms that are simpler than the term defined, and in giving an
if-and-only-if condition for when an entity satisfies the defi-
nition. There are many ways in which definitions may be use-
ful, ranging from providing points of departures for, guiding,
and lending rigor to empirical research, to contributing to the
project of providing distinctive foundations for the IS field as
an independent discipline.10
Conclusion
Given their influence on organizations and organizing
processes, there is a pressing need for more sophisticated
understanding of digital objects. We have sought to respond
to this need by articulating a theory of such objects that does
justice both to their inherent properties and to their social
aspects. In the process, however, we largely bypassed recent
debates in IS about the nature and role of theory, debates that
reflect a considerable variation in views on what counts as
theory, how it should be used, and how much emphasis
should be put on it (e.g., Alter 2015, 2017; Avison and
Malaurent 2014; Grover and Lyytinen 2015; Markus 2014;
Silverman 2014). While this is not the place to enter these
debates, we close by noting Alter’s (2015) concern about the
rapid pace of technological change undermining the long-term
value of theorizing in IS and the questions this raises about
whether and to what extent future developments in computing
might render our theory obsolete.
10
The debate Orlikowski and Iacono precipitated about the identity of the IS
field and whether the IT artifact was core to this (King and Lyytinen 2006),
was fueled by concerns at the time about the future of IS as an independent
discipline (Benbasat and Zmud 2003; Weber 2003). While these concerns
have since waned (Baskerville 2012, p. 587), the associated boundary issues
have never fully gone away and therefore neither have questions about how
digital objects, IT artifacts, and so on should be defined (Akhlaghour et al.
2013, p. 155).
Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
Our view on this issue is that, due to the presently over-
whelming preponderance of binary encoding and the bitstring,
our framework will be able to accommodate most IT
innovations—ranging from continued advances in the design
and manufacture of integrated circuits to seemingly more
radical changes such as the use of DNA as a new form of
material bearer (Church et al. 2012)—for the foreseeable
future. In some cases, however, it may well become neces-
sary to extend our theory in particular ways. For example, if
something like ternary computing were to catch on, this
would require recognizing the tritstring as a further basic non-
material bearer, which would in turn require a generalization
of our notion of a digital object. And it is at least conceivable
that new forms of computing will emerge in which the basic
entities employed in the storage and manipulation of infor-
mation are quite different from those we have described. At
present, however, such developments seem some way off and,
while it is interesting to speculate about how advances in
areas such as quantum or biological computing may impact on
our theory, we trust that it is robust enough to remain of
relevance for some time yet.
Acknowledgments
This paper is a distant descendant of a paper called “The Social, the
Material and the Ontology of Non-material Technological Objects”
that has been circulating on the Internet for many years (Faulkner
and Runde 2010). We would like to thank the following people for
their input to the many subsequent versions that culminated in this
one: the senior editor, associate editor, and anonymous referees of
this journal; Aleksi Aaltonen, Michael Burcher, Tom Carrell, John
Clarke, Ola Henfridsson, Matthew Jones, Jannis Kallinikos, Clive
Lawson, Tony Lawson, Paul Leonardi, Kamal Munir, Bonni Nardi,
Katherine Rock, Mark Thompson, Georg von Krogh, Youngjin Yoo,
and, especially, Wanda Orlikowski whose work first led us into this
fascinating area.
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Faulkner & Runde/Theorizing the Digital Object
About the Authors
Philip Faulkner is Reddaway Fellow, Director of Studies and
Senior College Teaching Officer in Economics, at Clare College,
Cambridge, and a Fellow of Cambridge Judge Business School. His
research focuses on issues in social ontology, primarily the nature of
technology, and decision making under extreme uncertainty, and he
has published on these and other topics in journals including
Academy of Management Review and MIS Quarterly. He presently
serves as co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
24 MIS Quarterly Vol. 43 No. 4/December 2019
Jochen Runde is Professor of Economics & Organisation and
Faculty Dean at Cambridge Judge Business School, and Professorial
Fellow and Director of Studies in Management at Girton College,
Cambridge. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of
Economics, an Associate of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group,
and his main areas of research are the ontology of technology,
decision making under extreme uncertainty, and explanation in the
social sciences.
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