What You See Is What You Get? A Comparison of Theoretical Lenses to Study Technology in Organizations. - Mueller, Reath (2012) - Article

What You See Is What You Get? – a Comparison of Theoretical Lenses to Study Technology in Organizations

Introduction

To be able to identify, explain and predict how organizations, individuals and technology interact in the context of the intersection of social and technological systems, researchers have drawn on a variety of theories. A theoretical lens, as an input to research, acts as an important sensitizing device for researchers and enables them to make meaningful observations in the empirical world. What we as scholars see and abstract from our observations of technology in organizations today shapes how we look at the very same phenomenon in the future. To illustrate how the conclusions we draw from empirical observations are influenced by the choice of theoretical lens, we use our own experiences in working with different lenses to make sense of technology and the social, based on a field study in a corporation implementing an internal Wiki. Three different lenses are used: the Enterprise Systems Experience Cycle of Markus and Tanis (2000), the structurational practice lens of Orlikowski (2000) and the mangle of practice of Pickering (1995). In this paper the interpretational process is described, not the fieldwork. Overall, the question that is addressed in this paper is epistemological in nature: How do different theoretical lenses change our understanding of technology, organization and their relation?

Foundations

Meta-theory

In this research, we are interested in how our understanding of the relation between social and technological systems has changed with the evolution of the theoretical paradigms we draw on to make sense of the world. These three perspectives should be understood as a way of thinking about the world, so as meta-theories rather than theories in a more narrow sense. Figure 1 (p. 3) depicts how the lenses help researchers to derive abstract conceptual interpretations from their empirical observations. Meta-theories can be used as guidelines for creating more context- or system-specific models of observable behaviour and help researchers to identify relevant constructs and meaningful relations. The three perspectives that are investigated are seen as sensitizing devices – a kind of scaffolding that helps us to build conceptual models of phenomena in the empirical realm.

Process theory

Researchers following the stream of process theory (PT) aim to identify interconnected events that lead to a certain outcome. Their aim is to discover why a certain outcome occurred by connecting the events that led to the outcome. PT does not refer to consequences as variables, but as phenomena representing changes in states. PT seeks to understand and explain necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for events to occur. That is, from the final outcome one works backwards to the initial state to identify necessary conditions for the final outcome to occur. They key element to PT then is the event and not the variable. Technologies take on two specific forms in PTs: the role of a dependent variable which serves an organization’s information processing needs or the role of an occasion for an emerging organizational structure.

PT’s levels of analysis are “made up of a continuum”. Field data is often complex and researches are urged to engage in specific strategies to make sense of data in order to attain the appropriate mix of levels and units of analysis. Further, PTs can take different forms (Van de Ven, 1992):

1. Life cycle: a unitary sequence of events moving toward an altered state;

2. Teleology model: multiple ways to reach an end state by planning, implementation and adaptation;

3. Dialectic model: a recurrent convergence of multiple divergent progressions, while struggling with contradictory events;

4. Evolution theories: follow a recurrent iteration of variation, selection and retention.

Depending on the form, researchers may choose the approach that fits best.

The Enterprise System Experience Cycle (ESEC) is a specific instance of a life cycle PT. it states that the adoption of an Enterprise System is accomplished in four phases:

1. Chartering phase: leads to the funding of the IS to be implemented; the major outcome of this phase is a decision whether or not to proceed with system implementation;

2. Project phase: focuses on having the selected IS implemented in the targeted organizational units;

3. Shakedown phase: follows and involves the organization “coming to grips” with the software and this phase ends when normal operations have been achieved;

4. Onward and upward phase: the organization can assess whether its investment has been a success.

Structuration theory

The structuration theory (ST) focuses on social practices ordered across time and space as the object of study. Giddens (1984) describes a duality: structure shapes and is shaped by the actions of human agents and human action shapes and is shaped by structure. This duality of structure shows that structure is the medium and the outcome of an agent’s actions, and hence enable and constrain their behaviour. Giddens introduces modalities of structuration as a connecting element between structure and agent. Human agents interact through communication. To make sense of these interactions, actors draw back on interpretative schemes. This bears two important consequences: (1) actors produce and reproduce existing interpretative schemes through their act of communication and (2) the production and reproduction of interpretative schemes also sustains or alters existing structures of signification and meaning. Power is exerted through facility, which Giddens separates into allocative resources (e.g., land or raw materials) and authoritative resources (e.g., persons or actors). Hence, actors exert power through their command over authoritative or allocative resources, therewith producing and reproducing structures of domination.

Markus and Robey (1988) see ST as a variant of PT, which focuses on the ongoing interactions between agency, context and technology. There is no cause for change, such as technology, but only an occasion for structuring which may result in unpredictable outcomes. Structurational theories still embody a process perspective.

Orlikowski’s (2000) practice lens is the second lens used in this study. This practice view of technology proposes that technologies-in-practice (TiPs) represent structures. Human agents recursively draw on existing structures (both TiP and other structures) and therewith reconstitute these.

Sociomateriality

Sociomateriality assumes that material and human agency are interwoven and thus represent a duality; one cannot exist without the other because their relation to other constitutes their existence. Two ontologically separate schools of thought addressing this topic have emerged: (1) ontological inseparability of the social and the material and (2) engagement between the two, but no inseparability. Both have different implications for studying technology in organizations. Sociomateriality represents a type of process theory too. However, it employs different foci in that it stresses the importance of the role of the social and the material in shaping and being shaped by practice.

In this case, the focus is on Pickering’s (1993, 1995) mangle of practice. Pickering argues that not only do humans have agency, but materials do as well. The crucial difference is that only human agents pursue goals, visions and dreams (i.e. have intentions). Both are, however, not separate, but temporally, mutually and emergently productive of one another. Human agents encounter resistance by the material, and they may accommodate the material (e.g., a machine or device) by tuning it to achieve their goals or adjust their goals. Over time, experiencing resistances, tuning and establishing accommodations iteratively lead to an interactive stabilization, a practice in which all resistances have temporarily been overcome.

Summary and comparison

In table 1 (p. 6), the three lenses are compared. The table provides some indication as to how and why a lens might influence the interpretation of a phenomenon in a specific setting.

The Case

Data collection and analysis

Data collection took place at Herms, a corporation in the airport industry managing several airports worldwide. The data collected reaches from 2004 to 2012, while the actual data collection period took place from 2009 to 2012. Originally, the firm was approached to answer the question of how to successfully implement an organizational Wiki, but evolved as we got to know the case better. During the time at Hermes, 24 employees were interviewed. Furthermore, usage data, internal surveys, presentations, actual Wiki entries, secondary interview data, press releases and various other documents were collected.

Following the three different lenses, different analysis strategies were employed. The PT approach followed a narrative design, which represented a story containing an actor, an action, a goal accomplished by certain means, a specific setting and a particular outcome. For the ST approach, the data was analysed based on the elements provided by ST (structures, interpretations, norms) as well as resulting events from differing sense making strategies. For the mangle practice perspective a narrative approach similar to the ST approach was used. In addition, material agency was considered.

Case description

Founded in the 20^th century, Hermes started out as a state-owned corporation that was established to manage a local airport in Germany. Historically, the organization exhibited a rather bureaucratic organizational structure. In 2001, the company went public. This triggered its transformation to a global player in the airport industry and resulted in a major transformational initiative to realize synergies and eliminating redundant work practices in the company. To scale its operations internationally, the company had to overcome functional silos. With knowledge recognized as one of the most important resources in this context, people asked for a Wiki as a possible solution to the fact that knowledge often was unidirectional and isolated. Strongly inspired by Wikipedia, the resulting “knowledge market” was thought of as emphasizing collaborative production of knowledge and providing a central platform for organizing and exchanging corporate knowledge.

After approval, the Wiki project started with eight key members who were chosen based on their expressed interest in the topic. To increase the Wiki’s attractiveness and make it a meaningful source for the employees, the project team wrote 500 articles. This led to a first need to adapt the concept, because the Wiki collided with the existing intranet. Beyond the content, also the purpose of the Wiki had to be determined. To supports joint production of knowledge, the Hermes Wiki was equipped with an editorial team to oversee postings and the system was designed to allow for anonymous posts.

Once the Wiki went live in 2007, there was a heavy internal marketing campaign. While generally received very well, users faced a couple of difficulties when trying to appropriate the new tool. For example, the technology was hard to use, and therefore a graphical user interface was developed that enabled “what you see is what you get”-editing (WYSIWYG). The introduction of the Wiki also led to the surfacing of some conflict between different departments or through the question of who should be allowed to put what into the Wiki. Nevertheless, the introduction was seen as a success. At the end of the fieldwork, Wiki had about 350 active contributors and totalled at about 3000 articles. On an average workday, the Wiki receives about 2000 – 3000 page visits. The Wiki has been integrated as a normal tool into the working routines of Hermes’ employees. More recently, because it is such an accepted tool, many organizational sub-units are thinking about how to further adapt the tool to suit their group’s particular needs. Establishing a Wiki farm introduces more specialized, localized Wikis for special purpose groups.

Emergent key issues

When applying a PT lens to study the adoption, the attention was drawn towards structurational approaches and their goal to explain the emergence and functioning of complex societal structures such as organizations. However, the technology vanished into the background and seemed to be little more than an opportunity for employees at Hermes to consider new working practices. Consequently, a turn to the ideas of sociomateriality resulted into the description of dialectic processes of resistance and accommodation and how they contributed to better understand how the social and material are tuned to each other until they reached interactive stabilization. Comparing the three different perspectives shows five issues that emerged:

1. The role and the nature of technology: how does changing theoretical perspectives yield a different interpretation of what this artifact is and how it impacts the case as it unfolds?

2. Technological change: how can changes be understood and explained through the various lenses we investigate and what do changes mean?

3. Changing practice: why did the practice of the intranet change and how did the various lenses we employed help us to make sense of what we see?

4. Organizational change: shifting through lenses, how did the perception of organizational change and the explanations we found for it evolve?

5. Understanding stability: what does stability mean? What are the implications of this meaning for the emergence of stability?

Comparison and discussion of lenses

The nature and role of technology

Applying a process theoretical lens, the main focus of the analysis was to investigate the process that leads to a successful introduction of the new technology into the organization, with more focus on events and their sequence. Technology rather seemed to be attributed the role of an instrument or tool used in actions or decisions made by human actors, so it had a rather passive role. This lens framed the research accordingly. When looking at the data, the primary focus was to understand how the Hermes project team acted in order to achieve their goal, a successful introduction of the Wiki. The analysis focused on what was done to facilitate its introduction, so it focused on different events like training sessions/marketing.

Switching to a structurational point of view produced severe impacts on the nature and role of the technological artifact in the analysis. Technology almost seemed to vanish in the background, as the main focus is on structures and their mutually constituent relationship with agency. Looking at the case, using a structurational approach makes it difficult to really capture and conceptualize the role of technology. The Wiki seemed to be little more than a trigger for changes in Hermes’ organizational structures and the attention shifted towards consequences that emerged from the Wiki project on other parts of the organizations, like the conflict that arose between the ideas of Wikipedia as an organization and the established organizational structures.

When using the mangle of practice perspective, technology conceptually re-emerges as it becomes an important part of the story. Humans are no longer just interacting with each other in the social realm, nor are conceptualizations restricted to abstract process chains or equally abstract structures. Through their actions, users equally engage with the social (i.e., structures) and the material (i.e., technology) and become part of an ontologically inseparable sociomaterial assemblage. Much closer attention had to be paid to the relations between the various entities (social structure, process and technology) involved.

Technological change

From a process perspective, changing the technology is only one among many events that depict the decisions of he project team to ensure that the project goals are achieved. The focus is on the decisions made, and problems encountered by users interacting with the technology. Technological change rather seems to become the overall outcome.

Using a structurational lens changes the focus of analysis. As technology itself cannot carry structure in this lens, the question is why does the change occur in the first place? As the technology vanishes in the background in this analysis, the focus shifted and technological change merely becomes a proxy for structural change; or a conflict between individual agency and organizational structure. Technological change thus always results as a deterministic response to human agency that, in turn, shapes and is shaped by organizational structure.

Applying a mangle of practice perspective suggests that technological change can and should not be separated from the change occurring in the overall assemblage. The main goal of this lens is to understand how the various entities mangled into such a sociomaterial assemblage relate to one another. Technological change is thus only one observation that reflects the ongoing transformation of the performative assemblage (e.g., the WYSIWYG-editing). Applying the mangle of practice lens also leads to the emergence of facets of technological change that complement the analysis of the role of the technological artifact (e.g., the creation of initial Wiki content).

Changing practices

When first using a narrative lens to study the introduction of the Wiki, the intranet was not a major part of the analysis, more a piece of the existing IS landscape at Hermes. Despite the fact that problems with the intranet emerged as the case unfolded, the process view on the Wiki’s introduction did not allow the researchers to study those two issues as one. In fact, the Wiki was the only practice being studied.

In contrast to that, the structurational perspective shifted the attention towards the practices overarching the Wiki team, the intranet team and the users. The interpretation revolved around structures like signification and legitimation, and these allowed the researchers to understand why the problems faced by the intranet team are actually an important part of the story. Attention is drawn towards the interaction of work and non-work structures. The democratization of content production and the streamlined editorial process illustrate the changes in the intranet-based technologies-in-practice. The structural lens helped to understand how the intranet story is embedded into the overall case and how and why the intranet changes from a dominant to a reactive part.

These latter issues of why and how were refined further when the mangle of practice lens was applied to the case. The mangle illustrates that the way that users relate to the intranet changes as the Wiki changes the material surrounding they are embedded in. This way, individuals’ interpretations attribute meaning to the material and determine the way they relate to that material.

Organizational change

The narrative lens of process theory can equally be applied to many different units of analysis and phenomena of interest. With the discretionary choice of overall outcome we are interested in, we determine which of the many events preceding the emergence of this overall outcome will be relevant to the analysis. It seems that organizational change is only shining though as an indication of a positive organizational response to the new technology; the underlying organizational change is neglected.

A structurational perspective reverses this picture; when trying to describe and explain organizational change, technology steps to the back once again. It only is an opportunity for structuring. The fact that more and more individuals were collaborating after the introduction of the Wiki is not because of the Wiki as technology per se, but more because this new organizational structure provided Hermes employees with a new realm of action they can choose from.

The turn towards the mangle of practice has lead to a more comprehensive framing of the overall phenomenon as a sociomaterial assemblage. Technology again re-emerges as an important facet of the story, because of the technology’s ability to influence the relationship among other, non-technological aspects. This perspective allows us to see the assemblage as a whole and to understand changes in any of its aspects as reflective of a larger transformation. Technology as a part of that assemblage, as well as the organization, is shaping and is shaped by this transformational process.

Understanding stability

Through the process theoretical lens, stability can be seen as the culmination of the event chain into the desired overall outcome one is interested in. In this case, the overall outcome is the successful introduction of the Wiki into the organization. Consequently, the goal of the process is to a certain degree conceptualized ex ante and stability occurs by definition once the overall outcome has emerged.

Using the structuraional lens, stability can be described as a situation in which chosen actions (agency) and structural properties are congruent and no conflict arises between them. Thus, enactment leads to a relatively stable selection of actions chosen, and actions, in turn, lead to a reinforcement of structures already in place. Using this lens, the current stability in the case represents a situation in which the TiP in relation to the Wiki seems to be in accordance with the organizational structure; the organization has found a consistent pattern of using the Wiki to support its practices.

Drawing on the mangle of practice, the concept of interactive stabilization describes a situation in which resistances and accommodations are in balance. Through repeated iteration of resistance and accommodation, the overall assemblage is gradually transformed into a network of stable relationships. However, interactive stability only seems to be an analytical possibility; the relations are subject to a countless amount of influences that change their relationships.

Towards a comparative framework

Looking at the nature and role of technology, all three perspectives start off with the same description of the technological artifact. However, when entering the analysis and interpretation of the case, the different lenses provide entirely differing stories concerning the role and nature of the technological artifact.

A similar observation is made in respect of technological change. It depends on the type of technology whether one lens or the other provides an advantage.

Changing practices brings the attention to an issue raised in table 1. Through the making and breaking of interconnections at different levels of analysis (from micro to macro), the whole organization can – intentionally or unintentionally – develop new performances.

This, too, is what made the description of organizational change possible through the mangle of practice lens, and less so through the structurational perspective. PT leads to an interpretation that offers an easy recipe to follow, a sort of best practice, but misses out on the phenomenon’s complexities. The structurational perspective offers insights into the roles of power, reflexivity and knowledge inherent to human agency and the tasks and routines, but misses out on the delicate role taken by technology. Finally, the mangle sometimes succeeds to uncover all the fine-grained connections between seemingly distant, even temporary practices that at one moment strongly influence the fate of certain associations within the assemblage that constitutes the organization.

The issue of stability highlights some important aspects as well. First, organizational change and the emergence of stability only seem to be accessible to the process theoretical studies if explicitly conceptualized as the phenomenon of interest (the dependent variable). Even then, stability will be a rather static concept. In the structurational perspective, change and stability become endogenous and stability is not a predefined state conceptualized anymore. The turn towards the practice lens helped us understand how the professional work-life of individuals is implicated by their non-work life, so it led to conceptual enrichment.

Table 2 (p. 16) attempts a synthesis of the observations and provides a comparative framework. In summary, the less our focus lies on the interplay between the whole and the parts, the more we might miss out on the emergence of organizational change. However, it is the researcher’s goal that should define the researcher’s strategy. So, the importance lies on the one hand in understanding how to employ a theoretical lens and being aware of its implications, while on the other hand, it also lies in the researcher’s context.

Conclusions

Limitations of this study:

1. The nature of the paper: none of the accounts presented and discussed above are able to elaborate on the emerging theories describing the empirical plane in sufficient depth;

2. The lenses that are chosen each represent but one example for interpreting the tenets of the respectively underlying ontological paradigms, and the separation among the different lenses might not be as clear-cut as we make it appear;

3. All of the observations and their comparisons are bound to the Hermes case.

Beyond these limitations however, the authors suggest that their study contributes to researching the technological, the organizational and their interactions. The comparison should point researchers to the different conditions under which the respective paradigms will be a meaningful foundation for theorizing. The study has also implications for the organizations we study and inform; it has practical relevance. The authors strongly believe in theory’s power to inform meaningful action in practice and that “nothing is quite so practical as a good theory” (Lewin, 1945).