Transcript Technology and - Homework Market

Organisational
Theory
Technology
Technology
Objectives:
 Introduce the concept of technology
 Discuss common assumptions about technology
 To understand the relationship between technology,
organisations, management and employees.
 To explore how the different perspectives view technology.
RMIT University
Slide 2
Thinking about Technology
A critical exploration of the claims and counterclaims of the
relationship between technology and progress.
‘Why do we take so little for granted in the social sciences and so
much for granted in the natural sciences?…what happens when you
apply the scepticism normally reserved for social relations to
technology?’ (Grint and Woolgar, 1997, 37).
Thinking Point:
Technology does not emerge from an objective exercise in
problem solving.
 Technology should not be thought of as an “end point”
 If we focus on capturing technology as the end of a process,
then we miss out on the human interactions and expertise!!
Please remember this when you become a consultant
RMIT University
Slide 3
Defining Technology
‘Technology’ is a fairly new word—coined by Jacob Bigelow, Harvard
professor, in the 1820s.
 Roots of the word are much older:
– Techne (Greek): art, craft or skill
– Teks (Indo-Euro): weave or fabricate
RMIT University
Slide 4
Defining Technology
Ontology
Technology is an objective reality. Technology exists
independent of our knowledge of it.
Epistemology
Positivism – truths about technology are ‘discovered’
through ‘testing’ our understanding against the reality found
in the objective world.
Knowledge that is produced or articulated:
‘A system based on the application of knowledge,
manifested in physical objects and organisational forms for
the attainment of specific goals’
Assumption that technology comes about in order to
meet an organisational or social need.
RMIT University
Slide 5
Defining Technology
Knowledge that is produced or articulated:
‘A system based on the application of knowledge,
manifested in physical objects and organisational
forms for the attainment of specific goals which maybe
for practical reasons, symbolic reasons or for reasons
of generating profit’.
Do we take these definitions for granted?
Or are these definitions underpinned by a analytical
tradition?
RMIT University
Slide 6
Modernist Approaches:
Structural typologies
• Types of technology: (Perrow)
– core technology, e.g. unit/organisation level (Woodward,
Thompson)
– supporting technology, e.g. task level, task variability (TV), task
analysability (TA)
– two-by-two matrix TV (high, low) against TA (high, low)
• Thompson’s Typology:
Distinguish between long linked (mass production continuous
processing), mediating (bring people together for exchange) and
intensive (coordinating two or more specialised abilities)
RMIT University
Slide 7
Modernist: Woodward’s Industrial
Organization (1965):
Organisational forms reflect production technologies
RMIT University
Slide 8
Technology as a Strategy
Child’s Strategic Choice:
• Technology is a consequence of organisational structure and
management’s ‘strategic choice’
• An organisation can shape technological change through their ability
to affect the supply and demand for a particular technology.
• An organisation responsible for a sizable portion of an industry can
greatly influence the technological development of the industry as a
whole when it creates (or refrains from creating) new products. For
example, Microsoft.
RMIT University
Slide 9
Symbolic Interpretive Approaches
Technology as socially determined
•
Technological changes are themselves socially
engineered and all human relationships (including
organisational relationships) are derived from and
ultimately determined by cultural and/or social
relationships rather than technological aspects.
RMIT University
Slide 10
Symbolic Interpretive Approach
Expanding the Definition
Theoretical “Ontological” Position
• Understanding of technology is socially constructed
• Symbolic interpretive approaches focus on how understanding of
technology as a concept is ‘constructed’ through interaction.
Analytical Approach:
• Symbolic Interpretivists expand definition beyond physical objects to
include symbols – words, images, metaphors and beyond task to
include interactions between people and technologies
RMIT University
Slide 11
Social Construction of Technology
Knowledge or ideas generated :
• Reject modernist notion that technology:
– determines organisational design
– is developed according to a particular ‘logic’, process or
universal law.
• Broadening the study of the socio-technical interface
• Special interest in New (computer) technologies
• Stochastic – more open to producing the unexpected –reliability
an issue
• Continuous – in ways never imagined by modernists
• Abstract – operator removed from technical operation
• Tight coupling –human agency/technology
RMIT University
Slide 12
Social Construction of Technology
Discourse focuses on influences of technological design
and use:
 Institutionalisation of technology
 Market control (mimetic pressure)
– Beta versus VHS, Microsoft versus Apple
 Social acceptance (normative pressure)
– 1890s cars interpreted as ‘green’ alternative to horsedrawn carts
– Today cars associated with environmental destruction.
 Government policy (coercive pressure)
– Criminalisation of hemp in 1937 allowed for DuPont’s
synthetic fibres.
 Gender (normative pressure)
– Bicycle
RMIT University
Slide 13
Social Construction of Technology
Application/focus of SCOT as an analytical tool:
 Identify the different interpretations of technology.
 Analyse the problems and conflicts these interpretations give rise to
 Correct the design features of the technological artifacts.
RMIT University
Slide 14
Social Construction of Technology
Technologies have different meanings to different groups
“..technology is not a pure application of science; it is codetermined by social, cultural, economic and technical
factors in the environment that contextualizes it”
(Hatch and Cunliffe, 2006: 155).
RMIT University
Slide 15
Critical Theory
Theoretical “Ontological” Position
 Technology exists
Analytical approach
Questions assumptions about technology and innovation
 Do technologies comes about in order to meet an existing need?
 Do we (creators) find ‘needs’ for a new technology?
– Transistors replace valves – miniaturisation?
 Are technologies invented for the ‘challenge’ or for symbolic
purposes?
– Hydrogen Bomb?
– Logos?
RMIT University
Slide 16
Critical Theory: Technology and “Progress”
Common (modernist) assumptions:
• Technological change is usually one of continuous
improvements of existing technologies.
• ‘We’ can always make things better and faster.
• The progressive element of technology makes it a unique
human endeavour.
• Advances in technology bring positive advances to an
organisation.
• An organisation’s level of progress can be measured in its
advances in technology.
Does evidence support these claims? Totally? Partially? Not at
all?
RMIT University
Slide 17
Critical Theory
Braverman and Labour Process Theory: power over
Harry Braverman’s key arguments
 Links Taylorist redesign processes to Marxist class analysis.
 Through the process of deskilling and work degradation, all employees are
finding themselves in a similar disempowered and alienated position.
– All work is becoming the same and workers are becoming extensions of
machines.
– Under the ‘logic’ of capitalism ‘deskilling’ is a universal process and the
skilled craft worker is becoming extinct.
– Through ‘deskilling’ workers have lost control over the production process
and are largely powerless to stop any workplace changes (e.g. technological
change, the hiring and firing of workers, managerial decision-making, shift
rosters, speedup, etc.)
RMIT University
Slide 18
Myth 1: Technology is ‘progressive’
Critical theorists (and postmodernists) argue:
 Technology is a subversive force:
– Technological change can be a subversive process that results in
the modification or destruction of established organisational roles,
relationships and values.
– Technology might be selected not because of its innate superiority,
but because it meets the needs of the power holder within that
organisation.
Examples:
 Early 1800s, British manufacturers in the textile industry wanted to
introduce new ‘more productive’ machines.
– Workers objected for fear of its impact on their jobs and skills.
– Formation of the ‘Luddites’ to destroy the ‘subversive’ technology.
 China Today: the concept of toxic progress –polluted air and water.
RMIT University
Slide 19
Myth 2: Technology can ‘fix’ all problems
Solving one problem generates new problems?
• Car accidents  seat belts, air-bags
• Hyper active kids  Retalin (prescription drugs)
• Heroine addiction  methadone
• Graffiti  resistant paints
• Dangerous jobs  robotics
• Global warming  carbon capture and storage/geosequestration
• ‘Ugly people’  cosmetics/cosmetic surgery
RMIT University
Slide 20
The Appeal of Technocracy
The myth of rational and objective leadership?
 That organisations can be governed by engineers and technical
experts (scientific managers) who attempt to solve workplace
problems’ based on technical/scientific principles.
RMIT University
Slide 21
The Deficiencies of the Technocratic Delusion
Technology is often a source of organisational problems.
• Goals for organisations are not always clear and often contested by
various stakeholders (workers versus managers).
Technology is value-laden: not objective
– It serves to benefit someone.
– It is informed by those who control the institutional means for its
creation
– The techniques produced embody (objectify) the values and
perspectives of individuals engaged in their production.
– Humans are not as quick to change behaviour as a new machine
or computer chip.
RMIT University
Slide 22
Critical Theory: Technology Driven
Organisations?
Technological Determinism
• ‘The assumption that technology determines—that is leads directly to—a
particular form of society or organisation’
Grint and Case (1998)
• We are the ‘servants’ of technology rather than its ‘master’ (‘Frankenstein
Monster’)
The technological imperative: technology as a cause of organisational
structure – we select then accommodate it.
– Robert Blauner concludes in his research on work in American industries
that:
‘technology more than any other factor determines the nature of the job
tasks performed by blue collar employees and has an important effect
upon a number of aspects of alienation’ ?
Blauner (1964)
RMIT University
Slide 23
Postmodern Conceptions of Technology
• Focus of Postmodern Conceptions:
– the relationship between technology and ‘self’ in organisations and
the emergence of the techno-human interface.
• Technologies of control (e.g. self-surveillance, discipline, focus on
performance rather than values).
• Technologies of representation: technologies used to represent
individuals and work processes:(e.g. electronic systems to identify
performance and make managerial decisions about merit and promotion
among employees).
RMIT University
Slide 24
Postmodern Conceptions of Technology:
Techno-human partnerships
• Cyborganisation
–A hybridised organisation: a techno-human construct
• An organisation that has been taken over in whole or in part by
computer or electromechancial devices (computers, software
programmes, phone systems, copier machines, etc.).
• An organisation determined by both machine and human
intervention.
• A techno-organic organisation
• There are dangers:
–Human misuse and abuse of technology
–Organisational members serve the technology instead of the
technology serving the organisation.
• Organisational members often expect more from a technology
than it can deliver.
–Human and social elements become subordinated to technological
capacities and/or imperatives.
RMIT University
Slide 25
Actor Network Theory: Techno – Human equality?
• Knowledge product of interactions – machines, people,
buildings, concepts, written documents
• Network not the actor that performs the act – humans just
another element (Networks of relationship between human and
non-human actors)
• Networks are fluid and largely invisible
• Two key assumptions:
• Social world is materially heterogeneous – socio-technical
ordering
• Elements of network do not have an independent existence principle of rationality
RMIT University
Slide 26
Technology as Knowledge
We have revealed four analyatical views about technology
 So what knowledge about technology does your
organisation want to capture?
Modernist
Predominantly captured?
Symbolic
Interpretivist
Critical Theorist
Which organisations view
these as “valid” accounts of
technology?
Post-modernist
RMIT University
Slide 27
Conclusion
Thinking Point:
Technology does not emerge from an objective exercise in
problem solving.
 Technology should not be thought of as an “end point”
 If we focus on capturing technology as the end of a process,
then we miss out on the human interpretations and expertise!!
Please remember this when you become a
consultant, because we often miss out three
viewpoints when it comes to technology.
RMIT University
Slide 28
References
• Blauner, R. (1964). Alienation and freedom: The factory worker and
his industry.
• Grint, K., & Woolgar, S. (2013). The machine at work: Technology,
work and organization. John Wiley & Sons.
• Grint, K., & Case, P. (1998). The violent rhetoric of re‐engineering:
management consultancy on the offensive. Journal of Management
Studies, 35(5), 557-577.
• Hatch, M. J., & Cunliffe, A. L. (2012). Organization theory: modern,
symbolic and postmodern perspectives. Oxford university press.
RMIT University
Slide 29