Technological Change and Organizational Action

Juha Laurila, David Preece

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134502004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In recent decades an extensive array of changes and innovations have taken place in and across work organizations and networks of organizations and workers, facilitated by new technologies and technological forms. This has initiated an interest in technological change as one of the conditions for organizational action and researchers have begun to draw inspiration from a wider spectrum of conceptual issues, perspectives and theoretical traditions.
This book is interested in the level of praxis and how this might be understood and theorized. It brings together a comprehensive collection of empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed research projects from studies of organizational practice which explore a number of technological changes in a variety of contexts. These are informed by contemporary debates within and across theoretical approaches including the sociology of technology, work and organizations, actor network theory, technology as text and metaphor, processual and political perspectives, social and business network-based approaches to the analysis of technology and innovation, and the social construction and shaping of technology.
This book will be essential reading for researchers and advanced students within the field of technology, work and organizations and also organization studies and management studies.

1 Looking backwards and sideways to see forward
Some notes on technological change and organizational action

Juha Laurila and David Preece

Introduction

Technology in its various forms is an extensively studied phenomenon within the field of management and organization studies. In this chapter we examine actor-focused approaches to technological change. Our main concern is to identify and highlight some of the most prominent work in both this and related streams of literature in order to provide some fruitful starting points for this volume. We recognize that there are numerous ways in which technology has been conceptualized in management and organization studies (see e.g. Roberts and Grabowski 1996; Scott 1998; Preece et al. 2000 for reviews). Consequently, it is impossible to do justice to the diversity of this research within this short chapter. We, therefore, aim merely to highlight some of those features which appear to us to be the most significant for understanding why the research field in focus has transpired in its current form.

At the outset, it is necessary to define the focus and background assumptions of this chapter. First, in our theme of technological change and organizational action we remain mainly within the boundaries of contemporary management and organization studies. We do not, therefore, for example, refer to economics-based research traditions which have examined the role of technology in economic growth, its relations to structures of industrial organization and path-dependencies in their development (see e.g. Dosi et al. 1992). We also do not draw upon innovation studies, which forms a considerable body of literature within the contemporary social sciences (see e.g. Slappendel 1996). Second, in our conceptualization of technology we accept that it includes both hardware, such as machines or technical devices, and software, such as knowledge and work practices. Such a definition recognizes the open-ended nature of technology and related work practices. We also consider technology to be both socially constructed and as forming part of our lived experience. This means that we do not enter the post-structuralist realm, in the sense that we would then abandon the distinction between action and structure (cf. Reed 1997). Moreover, we consider hardware to be a more elementary form of technology than software, especially in the sense that technology always involves hardware but not necessarily software (cf. Orlikowski 2000). Moreover, while acknowledging that technology is often an outcome product (cf. e.g. Rosenkopf and Tushman 1994), here it is more typically seen as a tool to accomplish organizational tasks. As far as organizational action is concerned, we acknowledge that it takes place simultaneously at various hierarchical levels and functions. This does not mean, though, that we view organizations as isolated entities. Rather, we see them as being in constant interaction with their technical, political, economic and cultural environments, within which technologies and technological change form but one distinct embodiment.

This chapter consists of four sections. Following this brief introduction we next review some of the classical conceptualizations of the nature of the relationship between technological change and organizational action in management and organization studies. We then examine some more recent work on similar issues. We also refer to some recent attempts to develop actor-focused approaches, subsequently extending these frameworks via recent research on organizational networks. Finally, we offer some concluding observations on the current state of actor-focused research on technological change and organizational action.

Looking backwards: the incremental incorporation of organizational actors into the study of technology

Organization-oriented research on technology and technological change has, over the past few decades, only incrementally paid direct attention to the contribution of organizational actors in the construction and shaping of socio-technical configurations or ensembles (see e.g. Bijker et al. 1987; Bijker 1995; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999). Initially, it ignored such matters more or less totally. The classical works here include Thompson (1967) who made a distinction between the so-called technological core of organizations and its peripheral elements. The latter were, in his view, arranged in relation to the degree of complexity, uncertainty and interdependence of the technologies employed in a given organization; in particular he distinguished between pooled, sequential and reciprocal technical processes. The strength of this perspective, and its main legacy for contemporary research in this domain, is that organizational technologies are seen to differ significantly from each other, and, consequently, organizational practices (including, for example, demands for information production and dissemination (Galbraith 1974; Huber 1990)) and the programmability of the technological processes (Sproull and Goodman 1990) also differ.

This structurally determinist stream of research, based on the work of Thompson (1967) and others (e.g. Blauner 1964; Woodward 1965; Perrow 1967), has not produced coherent results on the relationship between technologies and organizations. It has not proved possible to establish clearly stated universal relationships between the characteristics of technologies and organizations, as claims for unilateral relationships between technology and organizations have not held. Common reasons for this include differing operationalizations of the ‘technology’ concept, and variations in the levels of analysis (Burkhardt and Brass 1990; Roberts and Grabowski 1996). Instead, research findings have been interpreted to show that technologies and organizations are interrelated in a much more complex way, with a number of intermediary dimensions (Meyer et al. 1993), including industry (e.g. Barley 1986) and country-specific ones (e.g. Lincoln et al. 1986; Sorge 1991).

Early actor-focused studies and their recent extensions

Until the early 1980s, the mainstream of research concentrating on the relationship between technology and organizations thus suffered from conceptual weaknesses and paid too little attention to the contexts in which technologies were being applied. It also paid insufficient attention to the role of organizational actors in technological change. The emergence of actor-focused approaches on technologies and technological change (Pettigrew 1973; Buchanan and Boddy 1983; Wilkinson 1983; Weiss and Birnbaum 1989) was related to the emergence of a strategic choice perspective on organizations (Child 1972). Also influential were social action approaches within the sociology of organizations (e.g. Goldthorpe et al. 1968), and labour process approaches (Braverman 1974; Noble 1979, 1984) which looked at how technologies were constructed and used for certain political purposes. From these positions, it was quite elementary to incorporate actors into the concepts and models which were developed to analyse technological change and organizations.

The above-mentioned studies drew attention to such matters and issues as socio-economic contexts, legitimacy and the interests of the organizational actors shaping and guiding technological change. The cognitive orientations, skills and professional background of managerial actors were shown to influence the content of technological change (Daft 1978). Technological change came to be seen as an outcome of political negotiation and practices (e.g. Kanter 1988; Barley 1990; see also Clausen et al. 2000). Others (e.g. Burgelman and Sayles 1986; Day 1994; Laurila 1998) argued that the mobilization of collective co-operation is necessary, especially in producing radical change and innovation in the core technologies of organizations. Thus, in addition to political manoeuvring, emotional involvement and voluntary co-operation are implicated in (especially) major technological change. Further, managerial succession can be an important source of actor-driven technological change (Child and Smith 1987; Langley and Truax 1994; Boeker 1997; Zucker and Darby 1997).

Actor-focused studies have thus shown that people are central to the adoption (Preece 1995) and implementation of technological change. This is notwithstanding the fact that managerial actors do not always learn from their experiences, but tend to repeat previously used recipes for managing technology (Pennings et al. 1994; Tyre and Orlikowski 1994). What is more, managers have been found to oppose new technologies which destroy their existing competencies (Tushman and Anderson 1986) or to make obsolete previous technologies to which they are emotionally committed (Burgelman 1994; Stuart and Podolny 1996). None the less, organizational actors make a difference, as they decide on which forms of new technology to introduce (Laurila 1997) or the specific ways to implement externally initiated technological change (Boisot 1995; Argyres 1996). But how do actors actually influence technological change? Help in moving forward in this direction is at hand from those co-evolutionary approaches on technological change and organizational action which were first developed at the ecological and organizational levels of analysis.

Recent co-evolutionary and structurational approaches

The above-mentioned approaches are similar in that they consider either technology or organizational actors to be the main source of change. In contrast, co-evolutionary approaches have emphasized the ever-enduring interplay of technologies and organizations over time. At the ecological level, the work by Michael Tushman and his collaborators on technological discontinuities has been influential (Tushman and Anderson 1986; Anderson and Tushman 1990; Rosenkopf and Tushman 1994). This research has shown how technological change is produced by and influences organizational communities formed around technological innovations. Specific technologies and the relevant organizational communities have their own developmental trajectories which are, at specific phases, connected to each other. A distinctive characteristic of these approaches is the emphasis placed upon the cycli-cality of change (cf. Van de Ven and Poole 1995). Technological and organizational change, it is argued, occurs in the form of successive cycles including continuous and discontinuous periods. Technological change is an outcome both of intentional action and serendipity. The origins of technological change reside both inside and outside individual organizations. Most importantly for research on technological and organizational change in general, however, these studies problematize not only the relationship between technology and organizations, but also its nature as a continuous and mutually entwined process.

A number of other researchers (e.g. Child 1997; Zucker and Darby 1997) have also had an interest in the cyclical change of technologies at the inter-and intra-organizational levels. These approaches assume that not only do people make choices between alternative technologies, but also that their interests and the competencies involved in making these choices alter during the course of the change process. Organizational actors learn while gathering and applying experiences from a specific technology. Conceptualizations of the evolutionary change of technologies at the intra-organizational level (e.g. Burgelman 1996; Lovas and Ghoshal 2000) have shown that actors at different levels of the organizational hierarchy continuously initiate change. The mechanisms through which these initiatives are processed, however, differ between individual organizations and over time.

A number of recent studies take the position that technological change and organizational action should be examined as an inherently inseparable and incrementally unfolding phenomenon (e.g. Barley 1986; DeSanctis and Poole 1994; McLoughlin and Dawson, Chapter 2, this volume). Orlikowski (1992, 2000) distinguishes between what she labels the ‘core’ and ‘tangential’ characteristics of technology and, on the other hand, technology as an artefact and technology in use. Here, technology is seen as a behavioural product which is constructed in use, influenced largely by the characteristics and interests of the user. Thus, in contrast to technology as text or metaphor perspectives (see below), for example (Grint and Woolgar 1997), the core of technology as a materially factual phenomenon is preserved.

Co-evolutionary approaches demonstrate that technologies and organizations evolve in continuously changing and unanticipated ways (cf. e.g. Hänninen, Chapter 6, this volume). Technological discontinuities are typically considered to be an outcome of intentional collective action, while periods of incremental technological change encourage organizational actors to adapt themselves to current technologies. None the less, organizational action always includes unanticipated consequences and opportunities for innovation that cannot be attrib...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Looking Backwards and Sideways to See Forward: Some Notes On Technological Change and Organizational Action
• 2. The Mutual Shaping of Technology and Organisation: ‘Between Cinema and a Hard Place’
• 3. Company Intranets, Technology and Texts
• 4. ERP Software Packages: Between Mass-Production Communities and Intra-Organizational Political Processes
• 5. ‘Push People’s Balls and Push People’s Balls and Push People’s Balls Until Something Comes Out’: Understanding Implementation As a ‘Configurational Practice’
• 6. Normalization of Risks: A Stream of Bow Visor Incidents and the Estonia Ferry Accident
• 7. Kicking Against the Pricks: Corporate Entrepreneurship In Mature Organizations
• 8. Experimentation As a Boundary Practice In Exploring Technological Development Processes In Chemistry
• 9. Regional Technology Systems or Global Networks?: The Sources of Innovation In Opto-Electronics In Wales and Thuringia
• 10. ‘We Have Crossed the Rubicon’: A ‘One-Team’ Approach to Information Technology