Material-epistemic evaluative work in goal-based category emergence: The case of digital therapeutics

Abstract: Market categories increasingly emerge through the recombination of digital and physical elements, yet we know little about how category producers establish legitimacy when the existing categories they draw on rely on divergent ways of evaluating knowledge. Goal-based categorization theory holds that categories cohere around the purposes audiences ascribe to them, but it assumes that once goals are specified, audiences can readily assess their attainment. Drawing on a six-year longitudinal study of digital therapeutics, software-based interventions promoted as a new form of medicine, we show that this assumption breaks down when material novelty destabilizes the evaluative practices through which goal achievement is made legitimately knowable. Category producers confronted material-epistemic contentions arising at the intersection of three dimensions: the material configuration - combining physical (biochemical) anddigital elements, the boundary permeability of digital artifacts as compared to pharmaceutical therapeutics, and the incommensurable evaluative commitments in goals inherited from pharmaceutical and software domains. We trace how producers managed these contentions through three cumulative practices of material-epistemic work, namely, mirroring evaluative practices to secure category recognition, stretching evaluative practices to accommodate material resistance, and harmonizing evaluative practices to recalibrate evidence expectations around digital materiality itself. Our process model repositions goal evaluation as a contested accomplishment within goal-based categorization and shows that digital category emergence depends not only on agreement about what a category is for,but on the reconstruction of the material and epistemic practices through which that goal can be credibly demonstrated.

 

 

About Michael Barrett

 

Michael Barrett is Vice Dean for Strategy and University Engagement and Professor of Information Systems & Innovation Studies at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS). He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of Innovation at the House of Innovation, Stockholm School of Economics. Michael is Academic Director of Cambridge Digital Innovation and conducts research focused on digital innovation and transformation. Key projects include: trajectories of emerging digital technologies, digital health and new models of healthcare, and how digital innovation is enabling financial and social inclusion in developing countries. Professor Barrett is Editor-in-Chief of Information and Organization and has held senior editorial roles at MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Information and Organization, and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems. Michael has served as Vice Dean of Research, Vice Dean of Programmes, and was the founding Head of the Organization Theory and Information Systems group at CJBS. 

For more about Professor Barrett’s research and academic work, please see his full biography HERE.