Organizations and Technical Change

Strategy, Objectives and Involvement

David Preece

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000088434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

First published in 1995, Organizations and Technical Change examines the key changes that have taken place in the external and internal contexts of organizations which have experienced technical change. It reviews and assesses major elements of new technology, including: the development of strategy; the setting of objectives; employee involvement; and the management of the adoption process. Through four case studies, the book considers in detail a variety of approaches and shows how the adoption of technology and the issues involved have changed since the 1980s.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Why does new technology come to be used in organizations in particular ways, influenced by the particular objectives and strategies developed by certain people? The central thesis of the book is that the key to understanding this is to study what happens before the new technology comes to have a physical presence within the organization. This adoption phase, as I have termed it, presents a range of choices for the actors involved with respect to a number of matters relating to the form of new technology utilization which occurs after implementation. As has been implied here, however, this choice is not so obviously available to those organizational actors who, for one reason or another, are not involved. (Of course, their wishes may be taken into account by those who are involved, but that is another matter, and is certainly at best an indirect form of involvement.)

The book explores these issues through two main routes. Part I, consisting of three chapters, provides an overview and commentary upon what the recent research record tells us has been happening when new technology has been adopted in organizations in the areas of, respectively, strategy, objectives and employee involvement. Part II consists of four case study chapters which provide a detailed examination of new technology adoption in two building societies and two engineering companies. Each chapter considers these organizations’ early experience of new technology adoption during the 1980s, as well as subsequent adoptions during the 1990s. The concluding chapter attempts to draw together the main findings and issues identified by the primary and secondary data collection processes, and presents some pointers for further research into, and the management of, new technology adoption.

Before we move on to these considerations in the following chapters, however, it is necessary first of all to offer an explanation of our understanding of the nature of new technology, of the adoption phase, and of the contexts within which new technology adoption occurs. The chapter concludes with a section on methodology.

In using the term ‘new technology’ we refer to microelectronics and microprocessors as computing technologies, defining the latter as a ‘miniature integrated electrical circuit on a wafer of semi-conducting silicon or gallium arsenide which performs functions of a computer’s central processing unit’.¹ To date they have found their main applications in the following areas:

1 Production/engineering/design machinery or processes (sometimes termed ‘Advanced Manufacturing Technology’, or AMT).

2 Information capture, storage, transmission, analysis and retrieval (‘Information Technology’, or IT), whether allied to AMT or used separately in the office environment in manufacturing companies, or used in non-manufacturing organizations, or, indeed, the home.

3 The provision of services to customers, clients or patients.

4 Products themselves, that is, the new technology is the product.

See Table 1 for an illustration of the varieties of new technology captured by the above.

Of course, there is some overlap between a number of the above categories, and the list is by no means exhaustive, but it is sufficient to illustrate the varieties of new technology available. In the chapters which follow we will be looking at applications of the first three categories, that is to say, new technology as applied in design and production processes, in communication and administration, and in service provision; we will not be examining new technology as a product, however.

A few points of clarification are necessary. The first one is that we will be studying only the social, economic and political processes surrounding new technology adoption into organizations; there is no consideration here of the processes connected with the invention, design and development of the new technology in the first place. (The closest we will get to this is where software is amended or developed internally within the organization.) Putting it another way, to all intents and purposes the computer hardware and software are taken as given and as being generally available to any organization which can afford it — this is one of our starting points.² Secondly, it should be borne in mind that there may be ways other than new technology through which managers can achieve their objectives: a ‘magical waving of the new technology wand’ at a problem or challenge is by no means always going to be the best solution: organizational changes per se may be sufficient in themselves, albeit an investigation into the possibility of introducing new technology (that is, the beginnings of an adoption process) could have been the spark which led to that conclusion.

Table 1 Examples of new technology

Advanced manufacturing technology

Computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools

Robotics

Computer-aided design/draughting (CAD)

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS)

Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM)

Computer-aided production planning and control

Materials requirements planning (MRP I)

Manufacturing resource planning (MRP II)

Information technology

Word-processing/personal computers

Intelligent knowledge-based systems

Mainframe, mini, microcomputers, used in a stand-alone mode or networked

Tele-conferencing

Video-conferencing

Service provision

Cash dispensers (or automated teller machines, ATMs)

Electronic funds transfer (EFT)

Electronic data interchange (EDI)

Electronic point of sale (EPOS)

Teletext

Patient monitoring systems

Products

Pocket calculators

Electronic games

Digital watches

Programmes for washing machines, television sets, etc.

It will be apparent that the ‘new’ in new technology does not mean ‘recent or very recent in time’, for, clearly, on this definition some ‘new’ technology would be quite old; NC and CNC machines, for example, having been around since the 1940s and ‘50s. The reference is to microelectronics and microprocesses, but in practice it is also to the fact that new applications are being developed all the time, and the take-up rate of various forms of new technology is expanding continuously as more organizations become aware of new technology’s potential.³ It has been argued by Friedman and Cornford, for example, that computer systems have undergone three main phases of development: from their beginnings in universities and defence industries in the 1940s, dominated by hardware problems, and lasting until the mid-1960s, through the second phase, which lasted from then until the early 1980s, and was dominated by software development, to the third phase, which is centred upon user relations. The coming fourth phase, they argue, is likely to be focused upon exploiting the strategic potential of new technology, which will be realized through installing computer networks, i.e. telecommunications between different people, offices, organizations and locations.⁴

On the basis of the above clarification of the meaning of new technology, let us now explain why our focus in the book is upon the adoption as against the introduction phase. There are two main reasons. First, the adoption phase has been neglected and under-researched by scholars of technology management and deployment; the great majority of writers interested in the social, economic, political and managerial issues and consequences associated with new technology utilization in organizations have concentrated upon what happens after the new technology has been introduced into the organization. In many respects they have been correct to do so, for if one wishes to understand the consequences or ‘outputs’ of the process, that is where one must look. However, it is to neglect the formative (and, in some cases at least, constraining) influence of what has happened before that phase is reached: this is where the present book comes in, and provides the second main reason for the focus which it takes.

The starting point is the observation that new technology is inherently flexible, and therefore potentially allows of a wider range of choice with regard to how, and for what purposes, it is employed in the organization. This flexibility is a result of four main characteristics:

1 Its compactness or very small size. Compare an old, non-new technology mainframe computer of 1960s vintage, which took up the space of a large room yet had a processing power considerably less than that of a modern microcomputer.

2 Its low energy use, and hence low per-unit running costs.

3 The decreasing cost of new technology in relation to processing power — a trend which has continued for a number of years.

4 Its software, or programs, which are, of course, reprogrammable.

In addition, in an environment where a number of organizations are moving to open systems and away from an environment where they are ‘locked into’ the product(s) of a particular computer manufacturer, flexibility is also coming from this ability to interlink different makes and models of computers, both within and across the same and different organizations via telecommunications and area networks.

The upshot of this flexibility is that the actual way in which the new technology is utilized in the organization has much to do with social (e.g. decision-making) processes within (and, occasionally, outside, as we shall see in the case study chapters) that organization. In other words, social choice is important, and this immediately alerts us to the observation that it is important to know who is making that choice: who gets involved in the ‘design space’ which is opened up by the new technology? At the same time, I do not wish to imply that ‘anything goes’ — that is, that new technology has no constraining influence upon matters such as working practices and skill requirements. I am not able to discuss here the variety of ways in which technology has been conceptualized over the years — the reader is referred to the literature for that purpose. Suffice it to say that, on the basis of my own and other people’s work, I have found it helpful to employ a rather narrow definition, but one which is sensitive to the immediate people and job-related implications. This perspective on technology has been put most forcibly and effectively by Clark et al. through their concept of an engineering system, which sees all technologies as ‘not just pieces of hardware and software, but systems based on certain engineering principles and composed of elements which are functionally arranged in certain ways’ (see Figure 1).⁵

It will be seen that an engineering system has two primary and two secondary elements. The former is composed of an architecture, that is, the design principles and their functional arrangement, and the technology, i.e. hardware and software. The latter consists of the dimensioning, or the ways in which the system is adapted for a particular organization, and the appearance to the user of the engineering system. In a book on new technology adoption we shall not, of course, be looking at the relative impacts of the technology per se (and the wider engineering system of which it forms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Adopting new technology
• Part II Case studies in new technology adoption
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index