Stephen R. Barley

Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments.

New medical imaging devices, such as the CT scanner, have begun to challenge traditional role relations among radiologists and radiological technologists. Under some conditions, these technologies may actually alter the organizational and occupational structure of radiological work. However, current theories of technology and organizational form are insensitive to the potential number of structural variations implicit in role-based change. This paper expands recent sociological thought on the link between institution and action to outline a theory of how technology might occasion different organizational structures by altering institutionalized roles and patterns of interaction. In so doing, technology is treated as a social rather than a physical object, and structure is conceptualized as a process rather than an entity. The implications of the theory are illustrated by showing how identical CT scanners occasioned similar structuring processes in two radiology departments and yet led to divergent forms of organization. The data suggest that to understand how technologies alter organizational structures researchers may need to integrate the study of social action and the study of social form.

Institutionalization and Structuration: Studying the Links between Action and Institution

Institutional theory and structuration theory both contend that institutions and actions are inextricably linked and that institutionalization is best understood as a dynamic, ongoing process. Institutionalists, however, have pursued an empirical agenda that has largely ignored how institutions are created, altered, and reproduced, in part, because their models of institutionalization as a pro cess are underdeveloped. Structuration theory, on the other hand, largely remains a process theory of such abstraction that it has generated few empirical studies. This paper discusses the similarities between the two theories, develops an argument for why a fusion of the two would enable institutional theory to significantly advance, develops a model of institutionalization as a structuration process, and proposes methodological guidelines for investigating the process empirically.

Technology and institutions: what can research on information technology and research on organizations learn from each other?

We argue that because of important epistemological differences between the fields of information technology and organization studies, much can be gained from greater interaction between them. In particular, we argue that information technology research can benefit from incorporating institutional analysis from organization studies, while organization studies can benefit even more by following the lead of information technology research in taking the material properties of technologies into account. We further suggest that the transformations currently occurring in the nature of work and organizing cannot be understood without considering both the technological changes and the institutional contexts that are reshaping economic and organizational activity. Thus, greater interaction between the fields of information technology and organization studies should be viewed as more than a matter of enrichment. In the intellectual engagement of these two fields lies the potential for an important fusion of perspectives, a fusion more carefully attuned to explaining the nature and consequences of the techno-social phenomena that increasingly pervade our lives.

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.

Cultures of Culture: Academics, Practitioners and the Pragmatics of Normative Control.

Culture of cultures: Academics, practioners and the prgmatics of normative control - This paper presents a method for assessing whether members of two subcultures, in this case academics and practitioners, have influenced each other’s interpretations. Conceptual and symbolic influence are seen as special instances of acculturation, and their occurrence can be studied by specifying changes in the language that members of different subcultures use to frame a topic or issue. Models of academic- and practitioner-oriented discourse on organizational culture were derived from early papers on the topic. The texts of 192 articles on organizational culture written between June 1975 and December 1984 were then examined for evidence of acculturation. The data strongly suggest that those who wrote for practitionere and academics initially conceptualized organizational culture differently. Over time, however, academics appear to have moved toward the practitioners’ point of view, while the latter appear to have been little influenced by the former. Besides showing that it is possible to study acculturation by investigating language use, the analysis raises important questions about the links between theory and practice m organizational behavior.

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 ,

Corporations, Democracy, and the Public Good

Organizational theorists have had much to say about how environments affect organizations but have said relatively little about how organizations shape their environment. This silence is particularly troubling, given that organizations, in general, and corporations, in particular, now wield inordinate political power. This article illustrates three ways in which corporations can undermine representative democracy and the public good: promoting legislation that benefits corporations at the expense of individual citizens, the capturing of regulatory agencies by those whom the agencies were designed to regulate, and the privatization of functions that have historically been the mandate of local, state, and federal governments.

Building an Institutional Field to Corral a Government: A Case to Set an Agenda for Organization Studies

Although organizational theorists have given much attention to how environments shape organizations, they have given much less attention to how organizations mold their environments. This paper demonstrates what organizational scholars could contribute if they were to study how organizations shape environments. Specifically, the paper synthesizes work by historians, political scientists and students of corporate political action to document how corporations systematically built an institutional field during the 1970s and 1980s to exert greater influence on the US Federal government. The resulting network, composed of nine distinct populations of organizations and the relationships that bind them into a system, channels and amplifies corporate political influence, while simultaneously shielding corporations from appearing to directly influence Congress and the administration.

In the Backrooms of Science The Work of Technicians in Science Labs

This article presents data from an ethnographic study of science technicians. The article proposes a model of the science technicians role as broker in a serially interdependent occupational division of labor and then contextualizes the model by examining how technicians conceptualize and manage troubles that arise in the course of scientific procedures. The data suggest that technicians possess most of a labs contextual knowledge and skill and that technicians, therefore, play a critical role in the production of scientific knowledge. Because contextual knowledge carries less status than formal knowledge, however, technicians experience status inconsistencies. The implications of such status inconsistencies for the transition to an increasingly technical workforce are discussed.

The Social Construction of a Machine: Ritual, Superstition, Magical Thinking and other Pragmatic Responses to Running a CT Scanner

That technology can disrupt the tissue of experience and overturn taken for granted assumptions is a fundamental premise in all science fiction involving time travel. Thrust suddenly into a future whose principles are unknown, time travelers are forced to unravel a new world’s logic so as to act knowingly amidst strange socio-technical surroundings. The drama of the protagonists’ sense making is heightened when they are unable to consult with knowledgeable informants, and yet must pass as competent insiders to avoid perils of detection. Such plots are fraught with dangers narrowly averted as heroes and heroines piece together the logic of the future by trial and error and serendipitous discovery. Whether time travelers ever fully comprehend the future’s technical logic is irrelevant; they need only learn to act as if they might.