Information Technology and Organizations: Strategies, Networks, and Integration
194
Information Technology and Organizations: Strategies, Networks, and Integration
194Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780198296119 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2000 |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.40(d) |
| Lexile: | 1570L (what's this?) |
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Chapter 1:Introduction: The Problematic of Information Technology and Organization
It is said that we are living through an era in which organizations within industrialized societies are experiencing a prolific growth in the development and deployment of information and communications technologies. Across all sectors of the economy, both public and private, within and between organizational boundaries, computer-based information systems appear to be pervasive. Concomitantly, many observers and commentators have proclaimed the dawning of a new age-known variously as the information society, the information economy, or post-industrial society, and so on-in which society itself is on the verge of transformation through the use of information technology (IT).' However the claims surrounding the IT revolution-ranging from visions of technological utopia to dystopia-are evaluated, it is clear that this area merits critical attention.' The aim of this short introduction is to set out the starting-point for our PICT research on IT and organizations, and thus provide some of the background to the lines of argument developed in the later chapters.In contrast to the surfeit of prophesies in the area, comparatively little effort has been expended in trying to understand how the discourse on organizations and IT operates. Yet all the attempts at analysis and prediction deploy tacit models and concepts of 'technology' and `organization'. Thus, an important assumption underpinning this book is that the critical study of the development and use of IT in organizations has to start with an examination of these background assumptions and theories which govern how the relationship between technology and organizations is construed. It has to consider, for example, how technology and organization are brought together theoretically while remaining distinct objects of analysis. While we do indeed set out to study the role of 1T in changes within complex organizations, we also try to understand the very terms within which debates about organizations and technology take place. Seeking a critical stance on management, organizations, and IT, and united by a broad emphasis on the constitutive role of social relations in the development of technology, we aim to explore the concepts and issues which underpin the projected benefits and problems associated with IT; to define the various overlapping problematics which govern the questions we pose about it. As with many scientific and technological advances, developments in the area of IT and organization serve to provide a focus for debate in which a familiar stock of issues tend to be rehearsed (Bloomfield and Vurdubakis 1995). Thus questions regarding the proper place of technology in relation to society and social relationships, social order, control versus freedom, responsibility, and autonomy, and so on, are to be found in programmatic statements for, as well as reactions to, IT. Moreover it is interesting to note that despite the opposing stances of technological optimists and pessimists, they both tend to reproduce a technologically determinist problematic in which a limited set of alternatives are on offer: empowerment or managerial control; liberation through technology (e.g. the personal computer, the Internet), or domination by technology; competitiveness secured through technology or economic oblivion brought about by the failure to exploit technology. Either way then, whether for good or ill, IT is seen to be powerful, to have a transformative capacity, changing organizations and their members, societies, and communities. As a complement to this, organizations (as social entities) bear the burden of plasticity. In other words, organizations must adjust to the imperatives of technology.
The existence of this common ground beneath otherwise divergent views of IT underscores the need to examine closely the specific discursive resources through which its role in relation to organization, or society more generally, is articulated. For instance, claims about IT tend to emphasize either discontinuityit will revolutionize everything (Kranzberg 1989)-or continuity-things will continue as before (Winner 1989). Thus, in contrast to the putative transformative character of IT, it may be pointed out that from an information perspective, one could regard a simple card index file as a form of information system; indeed one could go back through history and stress the importance of the development of writing, lists, and other inscription devices,' and in particular their role in the exercise of power. Appeals to history-whether they stress continuity or discontinuity-reinforce particular representations and understandings of technology and its place in the world. They thereby constitute appropriate objects of enquiry: in the effort to understand how questions in the area are posed and answered (see Tribe 1981); and how, for instance, the claims within the discourse on IT and organization are indexed and sustained.
The glare associated with advanced computing and communications technologies lures us like moths to a light. The ubiquitous microchip and its ever-diminishing dimensions, coupled with increasing processing power and concomitant computational speeds, rapidly expanding storage devices, and all the other attendant gadgetry, are all too frequently the predominant foci of attention. Images of utopia or dystopia thereby loom large as we seek to make sense of this apparently awesome potential, and we lose sight of the crucial task of trying to ask the right research questions (Roszak 1988).
While much effort has been expended by geographers, policy analysts, economists, and others, in efforts to map and measure the emerging information economy, in our own research we have been interested in how it is that such approaches can be deemed as the way to study IT. Though useful for other purposes, mapping and measuring cannot assist us in a critical approach to information technology because in a sense they are simply further expressions of it. Indeed, mapping and measuring are not neutral or passive instruments which merely reflect the objects they are deployed to reveal: they are constitutive of them; they inscribe the world in a particular way. Thus it is at least as important to consider other aspects of IT, such as the question of what counts as information-and how this intersubjective agreement is achieved in practice in specific organizational settings-rather than just how much of it is in circulation.
Given the points raised above it is clear that the study of the development and role of information systems in organizations leads the researcher into encounters with some very difficult problems. Questions of epistemology, expertise, knowledge and power, of language and meaning, information and representation, objectivity/subjectivity and the philosophy of science and technology, the putative division between the technical and the social, to name but some, are deeply implicated in any serious study of how information systems are developed, marketed, and used in organizations. However this would not necessarily be apparent from a reading of the mainstream journals and texts which deal with the area of organizations and IV In part this may be explained by the fact that as an academic field of investigation, information systems is a comparatively new area of endeavour reflecting a variety of influences and ideas. Amongst these one finds systems theory and cybernetics which share common roots in the very onset of the computer era; ideas on organizational design which are much influenced by socio-technical and contingency approaches to organizations; theories of decisionmaking; the study of accounting systems for enforcing responsibility and managerial control; and the plethora of systems development methodologies.
Though there is valuable critical work in the area (e.g. Kling 1996), in the main critical ideas have not entered the foreground of debate and remain effectively relegated to the margins of the subject there is, for instance, no first rank critical journal in the area (unlike, for example, Accounting, Organizations and Society in the discipline of accounting).' Often critical perspectives tend to be treated as sources of interesting ideas and insights but almost by definition are not seen as directly relevant to the practicalities of getting on with the building of better information systems in the here and now. In fact this state of affairs represents something of a paradox. The pragmatic approach to `getting on with using IT' can be seen to be at odds with the revolutionary claims made on its behalf. For if the technology is really revolutionary then surely there is a need to step back from the fray a little and attempt to take a broader view of the field, to be more circumspect towards the question of how the technology should be developed and used...