The many failures of IT-based information systems give rise to a strong imperative for researchers in information systems and neighbour disciplines to create a better understanding of the nature of such systems and their organizational use. Just viewing an information system (IS) as a technical black box having some social and organizational effects is not enough. We must understand information systems in a deeper sense than just as one kind of technical artefact. What special kind of artefact is an information system? The semiotic perspective offers great possibilities for such a deeper understanding (Stamper, 1994; 2001). Starting from the notion of sign, we can focus on different aspects of information systems as sign systems, ranging from pure technical to social and organizational issues. In classical semiotics, three levels (or aspects) are distinguished: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Stamper (ibid.) adds some more levels and constructs a'semiotic ladder', with the following steps from bottom to top: physical world, empirics, syntactics, semantics, pragmatics and social world. The pragmatic dimension of human communication has been studied and conceptualized within speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Habermas, 1984). A'language action'perspective on information systems has been articulated by several scholars, taking their main inspiration from