**3. Practice theory**

As mentioned earlier, practice perspective view how people interact with technology in their ongoing practices to enact structure that shape emergent and situated use of the technology [12]. This implies that practice theory emphases the latent connection of material aspects of social reality [22]. Golsorkhi et al. [22] argues that practice enables a researcher to deal with the most fundamental issues in contemporary social analysis by showing how social action is linked with structure and agency. Furthermore, they suggest practice perspective has potential to explain why and how social action sometimes follows and reproduces routine, rules and norms and sometimes it does not (ibid). The underlying belief of practice theory is that activities of social life are carried out through ordinary acts of life.

Halkier [23] suggests that practice theory is not a coherent theory, but it attempts to synthesize conceptual elements regarding the performing of social action. Thus, practice theory is concerned with performativity, meaning that activities of any kind in human life are continuously carried out and through ordinary life performance organized through multiplicity of shared practice (ibid). Thus, practice theory offers a way to explain why a social phenomenon comes to be the way it is, making it a better way to understand how strategy is enacted.

Within the IS field it is believed that technologies embodied structure with them, and the structures were appropriated when the technology was in use [24]. However, Orlikowski [12] proposed a practice theory which advances the notion of embodied structure with enactment of structure and the notion of appropriation with emergent use of technology. This means that practice theory acknowledges that structure is enacted when technology is used, and consequently when there is recursive use of technology a structures of technology use emerge. Hence, Orlikowski [12] made a distinction between technology in practice (use) and technology as artifacts. The practice theory thus focuses on the use of technology, which makes it useful means of exploring how people organize themselves when interacting with technology. Thus, the practice theory explains organizing phenomena as interweaving of social and material. In this way, and by focusing on activity the practice theory does not distinguish social and material as there is no social without material and no material without social [25]. Therefore, practice theory acknowledges that social activities depends on material arrangement in which the activity is taking place (Ibid). Furthermore, practice theory has been used in the study of social media, for instance Kwayu et al. [2] used practice theory to explore how social media is a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organizational practice and strategy. Likewise, Huang et al. [26] used practice theory to study social media used in a ticketing company in china. The theory was useful to explain the phenomenon of site-shifting and how practices where bundled to produce emerging, dynamic and fluid nature of ambidexterity. Considering this, practice

theory becomes a suitable theory for explaining how the social media ecosystem affects the strategy of a small business.
