AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EMERGENCE OF THE DIGITAL AFFORDANCE GAP

: (Alternative Format Thesis)

Abstract

Although organisations increasingly depend on digital systems to support their operations, realising their intended benefits remains difficult in practice. This thesis addresses this challenge by examining the emergence and evolution of the digital affordance gap (DAG), the misalignment between what digital systems make possible and what organisations are able to enact in practice. Although existing research in operations management and information systems has advanced understanding of adoption barriers, resistance, and implementation challenges, much of this work treats technology assimilation and usage as static.

The thesis explains how digital affordances are perceived, negotiated, actualised, and inhibited across organisational and temporal contexts. It does so by: conceptualising the digital affordance gap; examining everyday affordance enactment; analysing the structural and institutional conditions that shape affordance emergence; tracing their evolution during system integration; and identifying strategies to govern affordance gaps in multi-actor settings. These aims are explored through three interrelated empirical studies.

Study 1, a sequential multi-case study in healthcare and manufacturing, examines day-to-day system use. It demonstrates how tensions between worker goals and system design trigger divergent system enactments, adaptation, bypassing, avoidance, and reorganising, which accumulate as operational spillovers across interconnected technologies.

Study 2, a 30-month longitudinal study of multi-system integration in an SME manufacturer, traces how affordance possession and actualisation shift across six phases of system expansion and contraction. It reveals that affordances evolve not only from technical design but from recursive interactions between users, providers, and interdependent systems, creating both functional and dysfunctional affordance gaps.

Study 3, an embedded multi-site case study of inter-organisational systems in four Australian public hospitals, identifies technological, organisational, resource, and environmental impediments that constrain early assimilation. It shows how macro-level structures and supply network dependencies reinforce local constraints, producing affordance gaps at the outset of implementation.

Collectively, the studies advance a multi-level, processual, and socio-technical explanation of how digital affordance gaps form, persist, and evolve. The thesis extends affordance theory within operations management, demonstrates the value of in-depth qualitative inquiry for tracing the nuanced dynamics of digital transformation, and provides actionable guidance for governing these processes in complex, resource-constrained, multi-stakeholder environments.

Date of Award	20 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Vaggelis Giannikas (Supervisor) & Alistair Brandon-Jones (Supervisor)