Advances in digitalization have changed our apprehension of technology from discrete devices and application software as bounded artifacts, to dynamically evolving social-material entanglements in Digitalized Work Arrangements (DWA). This development makes studying DWAs increasingly difficult and challenges us to advance our methods that define how we can study, observe, and conceptualize DWAs. In this essay, we draw on the mathematical-logical formalism of the Laws of Form (LoF) (Spencer-Brown, 1969) to analyze how six illustrative IS studies conceptualize the social and the material to arrive at distinct perspectives on DWAs. Our analysis reveals three archetypes that capture these studies' conceptualizations and that inform a discussion of how IS research can extend qualitative methods beyond those six works. We offer two contributions. First, we provide novel insights and explanations to key conceptualizations in the study of DWAs. Second, we present the LoF as a pre-ontological and pre-theoretical formalism that enables commensurability of methods and development of novel qualitative empirical methods. Specifically, we demonstrate how the formalism helps articulating the distinctions we draw to refine our object of study and to critically examine and reconstruct other researchers' reasoning.

数字化的进步已经改变了我们对技术的理解，从离散设备和应用软件作为有限的工件，到动态发展的数字化工作安排 (DWA) 中的社会材料纠缠。这种发展使研究 DWA 变得越来越困难，并挑战我们推进定义我们如何研究、观察和概念化 DWA 的方法。在本文中，我们利用形式法则 (LoF) (Spencer-Brown, 1969) 的数学逻辑形式主义来分析六项说明性 IS 研究如何将社会和材料概念化，从而得出关于 DWA 的不同观点。我们的分析揭示了三种原型，它们捕捉了这些研究的概念化，并为关于 IS 研究如何将定性方法扩展到这六种作品之外的讨论提供了信息。我们提供两个贡献。首先，我们为 DWA 研究中的关键概念提供了新颖的见解和解释。其次，我们将 LoF 呈现为一种前本体论和前理论的形式主义，它能够实现方法的可公度性和新的定性经验方法的发展。具体来说，我们展示了形式主义如何帮助阐明我们为完善我们的研究对象并批判性地检查和重建其他研究人员的推理而得出的区别。