Chapter 11: Technology

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Chapter 11 Technology
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Chapter aims

• Introduce mainstream and critical perspectives
  that explore the relationship between technology
  and organization
• Present major studies which apply key concepts in
  these approaches
• Evaluate the assumptions and values about
  technology, management and organizations that
  underpin these perspectives

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Overview of the approaches

• Mainstream
• Technological determinism

• Critical
• Social shaping of technology
• Social construction of technology
• Actor-network theory

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Defining technology

• A basic definition
• A set of devices which facilitate the adaptation
  of humans to their environments
• This hardware definition ignores the human
  activities needed to activate the devices
• i.e. technology includes what people do as well
  as what they use
• To understand technology in a broad sense we must
  consider
• Devices
• Human activities
• Knowledge and skills

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Mainstream perspectives

• Technological determinism (TD)
• Technology an autonomous force that causes social
  and organizational changes
• Focus on the impacts of technology on
  organization and action
• Key question is how can organizations best adapt
  to new technologies?
• Has achieved common-sense status

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TD Implications

• Is appealing because it
• Fits well with mechanistic views of organization,
  which dominate mainstream thinking
• Suggests that almost all problems can be
  eradicated by means of a technological fix
• E.g. key to solving poverty is to give every
  child a computer (Newt Gingrich, former US
  politician)
• Enables opponents to technological change in
  organizations to be dismissed as Luddites

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TD Criticisms

• Reification
• Tendency to treat technology as having its own
  independent existence rather than being the
  product of human thought and action
• TD fails to account for the fact that
• technologies cannot adapt themselves onto
  unwilling organizations
• impacts of the same technology can vary across
  different contexts
• Technical, economic, social etc. phenomena are
  both causes and effects in the relationship
  between technological and organizational change

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Overview Critical approaches

• Reject the mainstream view that technology
  represents an autonomous force
• View technology as a political tool that can be
  used by management to justify unpopular decisions
• we cant stand in the way of technological
  progress
• Ask the question why do particular technologies
  take the form they do?

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Social shaping of technology (SST)

• Argues that social, organizational and cultural
  processes shape technologies
• Technologies do not just have impacts, they are
  themselves outcomes of social processes
• Cowan (1985) Many technologies abandoned for
  non-technical reasons
• E.g. gas fridge was technically superior but
  electric fridge had powerful backers

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Social shaping of technology
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Assessing SST

• Strength
• Addresses the problem of TD
• Criticisms
• Underplays the facts that the opportunities to
  shape technologies are not freely available
• Has little to say about the technical
  characteristics of technologies

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Social construction of technology (SCOT)

• Key questions
• How and why do technologies take the form they
  do?
• How might they have been otherwise?
• More radical than SST
• Argues the technical characteristics of a
  technology cannot be separated from the
  frameworks that people use to make sense of it
• Technical choices are vehicles for the expression
  of worldviews and ideologies of those who have a
  stake in their development
• Technologies the result of conflict and compromise

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Assessing SCOT

• Strength
• Highlights how the social is constitutive of
  technology
• Criticisms
• Accused of replacing technological determinism
  with social determinism
• Technologies are not infinitely interpretative
• Largely ignores the social consequences of
  technological choices

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Actor-network theory (ANT)

• Argues that TD, SST and SCOT flawed because they
  view technology and society as separate domains
• ANT sees them as different phases in the same
  action
• Key question
• How can we best explain the processes whereby
  relatively stable networks of aligned actors are
  created, maintained and dissolved?

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ANT key ideas

• Technology and organization involve the creation
  and maintenance of actor-networks
• Actors can be human and non-human
• Any technological device is dependent on a
  network that supports the ways in which the
  device is used
• Elements in the network are held together by
  chains of translations.

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Stages in the translation process

• Problematization
• Interessment
• Enrolment
• Mobilization

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Assessing ANT

• Strengths
• Helps understand technological and organizational
  innovations
• Provides a rich interpretation of situations
• Criticisms
• Jargon-ridden, largely descriptive accounts
• Reduces people to the status of objects
• Views networks from a managers perspective