Vladislav Fomin

Regulation of Information Technology-Based Practices: The Case of a Trading Floor Incident in an Investment Bank

Despite the pervasive presence and richness of contemporary IT-inscribed rules, we see a paucity of studies on IT use as a form of technology-based organizational regulation and associated forms of control. We define IT-based regulation as regulatory processes that create, combine and embed rules within IT artefacts; by doing so they maintain and enforce rules that, by constraining or enabling social behaviours, govern both the organizational use of IT artefacts and their expected organizational effects. On the one hand, organizational studies on regulation have remained faithful to the idea of pure social regulation and have largely ignored its material and technological elements — in particular, the growing presence of IT (Latour, 1994, 2005; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). The bulk of recent management and organization studies, indeed, view regulation primarily through a social lens (Latour, 1994, 2005; Denis, 2007) including Jackson and Adam’s (1979) investigation of rule lifecycles, Jabs’s (2005) study of communicative rules coordinating the launch of Challenger and Oberfield’s (2010) analysis of rule-following in a government organization. On the other hand, a handful of recent studies has focused on the technological dimension of regulation but engaged mainly with ‘pure’ material elements of control, including walls or asylums (Hook, 2001; Latour, 2005). Recent interest in the material foundations of the social (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007; Leonardi, 2011) — often labelled sociomateriality — has recognized the presence of rules with the idea of scripting — entangling rules in IT artefacts (Orlikowski, 2005).

Sociomaterial regulation in organizations: The case of information technology

Information technology (IT) is used to regulate organizational processes both to allow and to prevent specific behavior. Recent scandals in the financial industry exposed overconfidence in IT based regulation and, as scholars of regulation have long known, the games people play increase with the number of rules in place. To explore the practices in organizations with a broad perspective we define sociomaterial regulation as the relationships between the rules, the IT artifacts, and the practices. A new theoretical terminology around the three relationships (materialization of rules in IT artifacts, interdependency between IT artifacts and practices, and coupling in time between rules and practices) helps to explore a large case study of the implementation of an e-learning system in a French university over a five years period. The study reveals five modalities of sociomaterial regulation which can be understood using the three relationships: functionality-, tool-, role-, procedure-, and social process-orientation play out very differently for the organization in terms of the change in practices, the sources of control (hierarchical versus emergent), and innovation activity. We discuss implications for management and policy.