When analyzing empirical phenomena, the implicit or explicit assumptions we have of relationality guide what we take as the primary units of analysis and how we study them. This paper investigates and expands on the notion of relationality and relational explanations in the Critical Realist (CR) paradigm of Information Systems (IS) research. As digital technologies are becoming increasingly adaptive to the social and socio-technical structures they are embedded in, it is necessary to expand the field's conceptual tools in its study of digital phenomena. Therefore, to explain why the digital seems more tightly coupled to social phenomena than other types of technologies, the concept of transformational emergence is introduced. The key argument is that the malleability of digital entities entails that they are disposed to transform by emergence, which is key to understanding the constitutive relationality between the social and the technical in contemporary digital phenomena. This has fundamental implications for CR-based theories in the IS field, most notably Affordance theory and Representation theory.

在分析经验现象时，我们对关系的隐含或明确假设指导我们将什么作为主要分析单位以及我们如何研究它们。本文调查并扩展了信息系统 (IS) 研究的批判现实主义 (CR) 范式中的关系和关系解释的概念。随着数字技术越来越适应它们所嵌入的社会和社会技术结构，有必要在其对数字现象的研究中扩展该领域的概念工具。因此，为了解释为什么数字技术似乎比其他类型的技术更紧密地与社会现象耦合，引入了转型涌现的概念。关键论点是，数字实体的延展性意味着它们倾向于通过出现而转变，这是理解当代数字现象中社会和技术之间的构成关系的关键。这对 IS 领域中基于 CR 的理论具有根本意义，尤其是可供性理论和表征理论。