Paul M. Leonardi

When flexible routines meet flexible technologies: affordance, constraint, and the imbrication of human and material agencies

Employees in many contemporary organizations work with flexible routines and flexible technologies. When those employees find that they are unable to achieve their goals in the current environment, how do they decide whether they should change the composition of their routines or the materiality of the technologies with which they work? The perspective advanced in this paper suggests that the answer to this question depends on how human and material agencies-the basic building blocks common to both routines and technologies-are imbricated. Imbrication of human and material agencies creates infrastructure in the form of routines and technologies that people use to carry out their work. Routine or technological infrastructure used at any given moment is the result of previous imbrications of human and material agencies. People draw on this infrastructure to construct a perception that a technology either constrains their ability to achieve their goals, or that the technology affords the possibility of achieving new goals. The case of a computer simulation technology for automotive design used to illustrate this framework suggests that perceptions of constraint lead people to change their technologies while perceptions of affordance lead people to change their routines. This imbrication metaphor is used to suggest how a human agency approach to technology can usefully incorporate notions of material agency into its explanations of organizational change.

Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing

Researchers have had difficulty accommodating materiality in voluntaristic theories of organizing. Although materiality surely shapes how people use technologies, materialitys role in organizational change remains under-theorized. We suggest that scholars have had difficulty grappling with materiality because they often conflate the distinction between the material and social with the distinction between determinism and voluntarism. We explain why such conflation is unnecessary and outline four challenges that researchers must address before they can reconcile the reality of materiality with the notion that outcomes of technological change are socially constructed.

Social Media Use in Organizations: Exploring the Affordances of Visibility, Editability, Persistence, and Association

The use of social media technologies - such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging - is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of computer-mediated communication. In this chapter, we argue that social media are of important consequence to organizational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were difficult or impossible to achieve in combination before these new technologies entered the workplace. Our review of previous studies of social media use in organizations uncovered four relatively consistent affordances enabled by these new technologies: Visibility, persistence, editability, and association. We suggest that the activation of some combination of these affordances could influence many of the processes commonly studied by organizational communication theorists. To illustrate this point, we theorize several ways through which these four social media affordances may alter socialization, information sharing, and power processes in organizations.

What’s Under Construction Here? Social Action, Materiality, and Power in Constructivist Studies of Technology and Organizing

Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology’s affects on organizations are socially constructed. Constructivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology’s constraints and affordances, as well as to each other. Although most students of technology and organizing generally agree on the ontology of constructivism, there are considerable differences in what scholars mean when they say that a technology’s affects are socially constructed. We show that research on the social construction of implementation clusters into five coherent perspectives, which we call perception , interpretation , appropriation ,

Transformational technologies and the creation of new work practices: making implicit knowledge explicit in task-based offshoring

Studies have shown the knowledge transfer problems that arise when communication and storage technologies are employed to accomplish work across time and space. Much less is known about knowledge transfer problems associated with transformational technologies, which afford the creation, modification, and manipulation of digital artifacts. Yet, these technologies play a critical role in offshoring by allowing the distribution of work at the task level, what we call task-based offshoring. For example, computer-aided engineering applications transform input like physical dimensions, location coordinates, and material properties into computational models that can be shared electronically among engineers around the world as they work together on analysis tasks. Digital artifacts created via transformational technologies often embody implicit knowledge that must be correctly interpreted to successfully act upon the artifacts. To explore what problems might arise in interpreting this implicit knowledge across time and space, and how individuals might remedy these problems, we studied a firm that sent engineering tasks from home sites in Mexico and the United States to an offshore site in India. Despite having proper formal education and ample tool skills, the Indian engineers had difficulty interpreting the implicit knowledge embodied in artifacts sent to them from Mexico and the United States. To resolve and prevent the problems that subsequently arose, individuals from the home sites developed five new work practices to transfer occupational knowledge to the offshore site. The five practices were defining requirements, monitoring progress, fixing returns, routing tasks strategically, and filtering quality. The extent to which sending engineers in our study were free from having to enact these new work practices because on-site coordinators acted on their behalf predicted their perceptions of the effectiveness of the offshoring arrangement, but Indian engineers preferred learning from sending engineers, not on-site coordinators. Our study contributes to theories of knowledge transfer and has practical implications for managing task-based offshoring arrangements.

Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality

This paper compares two alternative theoretical foundations upon which the study of sociomateriality can be built: agential realism and critical realism. It begins by providing a brief overview of the sociomaterial perspective on organizational practices and considers why this perspective holds great appeal at this point in time. I then engage with Mutchs (2013) critique of the agential realist foundation upon which most current discussions of sociomateriality are constructed to highlight what practical problems are generated when authors attempt to map agential realisms philosophical discussion onto empirical phenomena. Next, I attempt to make explicit what Mutch leaves implicit in his paper: how building studies of sociomateriality on the theoretical foundation offered by critical realism can, potentially, overcome some of the practical problems created by a footing on agential realism. Finally, I push Mutchs arguments one step further to compare what practical consequences arise when researchers attempt to construct studies of sociomateriality on either of these two theoretical foundations. I suggest that there are important implications for what one can study, how one can study it, and how scholars can contribute to theory on technology and organizing based on the theoretical foundation they choose to build upon.

When does technology use enable network change in organizations? a comparative study of feature use and shared affordances

The goal of this study is to augment explanations of how newly implemented technologies enable network change within organizations with an understanding of when such change is likely to happen. Drawing on the emerging literature on technology affordances, the paper suggests that informal network change within interdependent organizational groups is unlikely to occur until users converge on a shared appropriation of the new technologys features such that the affordances the technology enables are jointly realized. In making the argument for the importance of shared affordances, this paper suggests that group-level network change has its most profound implications at the organization level when individuals use the same subset of a new information technologys features. To explore this tentative theory, we turn to a comparative, multimethod, longitudinal study of computer-based simulation technology use in automotive engineering. The findings of this explanatory case study show that engineers used the new technology for more than three months, during which time neither group experienced changes to their advice networks. Initially, divergent uses of the technologys features by engineers in both groups precluded them from being able to coordinate their work in ways that allowed them to structure their advice networks differently. Eventually, engineers in only one of the two groups converged on the use of a common set of the technologys features to enact a shared affordance. This convergence was necessary to turn the technology into a resource that could collectively afford group members the ability to compare their simulation outputs with one another and, in so doing, alter the content and structure of the groups advice network. The implications of these findings for the literatures on technology feature use, affordances, social networks, and post-adoption behaviors in organizations are discussed.

Innovation Blindness: Culture, Frames, and Cross-Boundary Problem Construction in the Development of New Technology Concepts

This paper has three goals. The first is to understand why members of one organizational department are blind to the reasons why members of another department do not share their ideas for a new technology---what I call a “technology concept.” The second is to understand what consequences this “innovation blindness” has for the development of technology concepts across organizational and occupational boundaries. The third is to uncover strategies organizations might use to successfully develop a new technological artifact from the technology concept even if innovators never understand the nature of their own blindness. To achieve these goals, I draw on research on organizational cultural toolkits to construct a framework suggesting that technology concepts frame cultural resources, which are then used to construct the very problems the technological artifact will be built to solve. From this perspective, culture does not directly shape technological artifacts. Rather, a technology concept activates culture as it draws frames around resources that will guide peoples problem construction practices. By acting as a frame through which problems can be constructed, technology concepts play a key role in selecting the set of cultural resources that will be used to develop technological artifacts. I explore this framework through a qualitative study of computer simulation software in a major automotive engineering firm.

Student culture vs group work in computer science

Our industrial advisory boards tell us that our students are well prepared technically, but they lack important group work skills. Simply adding project courses and requiring that assignments be done in groups has not improved the situation. A careful study of student culture in Computer Science has uncovered barriers to collaboration, which can be overcome only by pervasive changes in the way we approach our curriculum.

Technological Determinism and Discursive Closure in Organizational Mergers

In times of organizational change leaders often tell stories that justify publicly the directions in which organizations move. Such stories are always political in nature and often reflect the motives of the storyteller. We observe how leaders in high‐tech organizations use the story of technological determinism in organizational settings as a discursive practice through which they invoke the “inevitability” of technology to justify managerial decisions to the public. Rather than taking ownership of certain actions, managers are able to use this story to claim that certain organizational changes are inevitable, and to eliminate alternative stories. We examine this strategy as it appears in the public discourse produced during two mergers in the high‐tech and telecommunications industries occurring from 1998 to 2002: US West and Qwest, and AOL and TimeWarner. Finally, we demonstrate that the story of technological determinism performs discursive closure around each merger.