Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations

As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations. (Information Technology; Organization; Structuration Theory; Work Practices) Technology—and its relationship to organizational structures, processes, and outcomes—has long been of interest to organizational researchers. Over the years, different research perspectives on technology have developed in parallel with research perspectives on organizations—for example, contingency theory (Woodward 1965, Galbraith 1977, Carter 1984, Daft and Lengel 1986), strategic choice models (Child 1972, Buchanan and Boddy 1983, Davis and Taylor 1986, Zuboff 1988), Marxist studies (Braverman 1974, Edwards 1979, Shaiken 1985, Perrolle 1986), symbolic interactionist approaches (Kling 1991, Prasad 1993), transaction-cost economics (Malone et al. 1987, Ciborra 1993); network analyses (Barley 1990, Burkhardt and Brass 1990, Rice and Aydin 1991), practice theories (Suchman 1987, Button 1993, Hutchins 1995, Orr 1996), and structurational models (Barley 1986, Orlikowski 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994). Today, both technologies and organizations are undergoing dramatic changes in form and function, and new and unprecedented forms and functions are becoming evident. In response, organizational researchers have applied notions of innovation, learning, and improvisation to account for such dynamic and emerging patterns of organizing (Brown and Duguid 1991, Weick 1993, Hutchins 1991, Brown and Eisenhardt 1997, Hedberg et al. 1997, Barrett 1998, Hatch 1998, Lant 1999). Similarly, researchers of technology have also begun to use the notions of innovation, learning, and improvisation to understand the organizational implications of new technologies (Ciborra 1996, Cook and Brown 1999, Orlikowski 1996, Tushman et al. 1997). This paper continues the development of concepts that address the role of emergence and improvisation in technology and technology use, and in particular, seeks to extend the structurational perspective in this direction. The past decade has seen the development of a number of structurational models of technology which have generated numerous insights into the role and influence of technologies in organizations (Barley 1986, Poole and ORLIKOWSKI Using Technology and Constituting Structures ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/Vol. 11, No. 4, July–August 2000 405 DeSanctis 1990, 1992, Orlikowski and Robey 1991, Walsham and Han 1991, Orlikowski 1992, Walsham 1993, DeSanctis and Poole 1994). These models posit technology as embodying structures (built in by designers during technology development), which are then appropriated by users during their use of the technology. Human action is a central aspect of these models, in particular, the actions associated with embedding structures within a technology during its development, and the actions associated with appropriating those structures during use of technology. A number of commentators have urged further theoretical development of a structurational perspective on technology, suggesting that it may have considerable analytic advantages in explaining the consequences associated with the use of new and reconfigurable information technologies (Sproull and Goodman 1990, Weick 1990, Roberts and Grabowski 1995). Because a structurational perspective is inherently dynamic and grounded in ongoing human action, it indeed has the potential to explain emergence and change in technologies and use. However, realizing this potential will require augmenting the current structurational perspective on technology—specifically the notions of embodied structure and user appropriation. While these notions have been extremely valuable in explaining the various outcomes associated with the use of given technologies in different contexts, they are less able to account effectively for ongoing changes in both technologies and their use. This insufficiency is particularly acute in the context of internetworked and reconfigurable technology (such as groupware and the Web), the use of which is becoming increasingly prevalent in organizations today. In this paper, I extend the structurational perspective on technology by proposing a practice-oriented understanding of the recursive interaction between people, technologies, and social action. I believe such a practice orientation can better explain emergence and change in both technologies and their use. It does so by complementing the notion of embodied structure with that of emergent structure, and the notion of appropriation with that of enactment. Embodied and Emergent Structures In their understanding of technologies, structurational models of technology have been strongly influenced by the intellectual tradition of social constructivism (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, Bijker et al. 1987, Woolgar 1991, Bijker and Law 1992). Using rich case studies of technological invention and development, social constructivist research examines how interpretations, social interests, and disciplinary conflicts shape the production of a technology through shaping its cultural meanings and the social interactions among relevant social groups. This research also examines how the produced technology achieves ‘‘stabilization’’ through processes of negotiation, persuasion, and debate aimed at achieving rhetorical closure and community consensus. Further work in this tradition focuses more specifically on how dominant interests are reflected in the form and functioning of the technology, a process referred to as ‘‘inscription’’ (Latour 1992). Akrich (1992, p. 208), for example, writes: Designers thus define actors with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices, and the rest, and they assume that morality, technology, science, and economy will evolve in particular ways, A large part of the work of innovators is that of ‘‘inscribing’’ this vision of (or prediction about) the world in the technical content of the new object. Drawing on the ideas of social shaping and inscription, structurational models have posited that technology is developed through a social-political process which results in structures (rules and resources) being embedded within the technology. For example, Orlikowski (1992, p. 410) writes: [H]uman agents build into technology certain interpretive schemes (rules reflecting knowledge of the work being automated), certain facilities (resources to accomplish that work), and certain norms (rules that define the organizationally sanctioned way of executing that work). Similarly, ‘‘adaptive structuration theory’’ (DeSanctis and Poole 1994, Poole et al. 1998) focuses on the structures built into such technologies as group decision support systems. For example, DeSanctis and Poole (1994, p.125) note: [S]tructures are found in institutions such as reporting hierarchies, organizational knowledge, and standard operating procedures. Designers incorporate some of these structures into the technology . . . Once complete, the technology presents an array of social structures for possible use in interpersonal interaction, including rules (e.g., voting procedures) and resources (e.g., stored data, public display screens). The development of a structurational perspective on technology has benefited considerably from social constructivist ideas, particularly in the absence of any explicit treatment of technology in Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration. However, the adoption of social constructivist conceptions has also created some difficulties, primarily with respect to two propositions: that technologies become ‘‘stabilized’’ after development; and that they ‘‘embody’’ structures which (re)present various social rules and political interests. The first proposition—that technologies become ‘‘stabilized’’—neglects the empirical evidence that people ORLIKOWSKI Using Technology and Constituting Structures 406 ORGANIZATION SCIENCE/Vol. 11, No. 4, July–August 2000 can (and do) redefine and modify the meaning, properties, and applications of technology after development. As Woolgar and Grint (1991, p.370) argue, the proposition of stabilization admits social construction only during development, and ‘‘[t]hereafter, technological determinism is allowed, on the basis that beyond the point of stabilization there is little disagreement about what the technology can do.’’ Existing structurational models of technology, because they posit flexibility in how structures are appropriated, avoid such strong technological determinism. However, their presumption that technologies embody specific stable structures is nevertheless problematic because it depicts technologies as static and settled artifacts with built-in arrays of fixed and determinate structures that are (always and readily) available to users. Such assumptions of technological stability, completeness, and predictability break down in the face of empirical research that shows people modifying technologies and their conceptions of technology long after design and development (Rice and Rogers 1980, von Hippel 1988, Ciborra and Lanzara 1991). Such assumptions are also inappropriate in the context of the dynamically reconfigurable, user-programmable, and highly internetworked technologies being developed and used today. The second proposition—that technologies ‘‘embody’’ social structures—is problematic from a structurational perspective, because it situates structures within technological artifacts. This is a departure from Giddens’ (1984) view of structures as having only a virtual existence, that is, as having ‘‘no reality except as they are instantiated in activity’’ (Whittington 1992, p.696). Seeing structures as embodied in artifacts thus ascribes a material existence to structures which Giddens explicitly denies (1989, p.256): . . . a position I want to avoid, in terms of which structure appears as something ‘outside’ or ‘external’ to human action. In my usage, structure is what gives form and shape to social life, but is not itself that form and shape—nor should ‘give’ be understood in an active sense here, because structure only exists in and through the activities of human agents. Structure is here understood as the set of rules and resources instantiated in recurrent social practice. Elements of technology (such as voting procedures, stored data, and public display screens), once they have been built into a technology, are external to human action. As inscribed properties of a technology, they constitute neither rules nor resources, and thus cannot be seen to be structures. It is only when such technological elements as voting procedures, stored data, and public display screens are routinely mobilized in use that we can say that they ‘‘structure’’ human action, and in this way they become implicated as rules and resources in the constitution of a particular recurrent social practice. For example, consider the myriad software packages, network tools, and data files installed on countless desktop computers and corporate mainframes worldwide. Until such time as these are actually used in some ongoing human action—and thus become part of a process of structuring—they are, at best, potential structuring elements, and at worst, unexplored, forgotten, or rejected bits of program code and data cluttering up hard drives everywhere. We are unaccustomed to conceiving of rules and resources as only existing ‘‘in and through the activities of human agents,’’ largely because of our conventional views of them as either external entities (e.g., corporate policy, traffic regulations, land, factories, money) or internal schemas (e.g., rules of thumb, expertise, judgment). From a structurational perspective, however, external entities and internal schemas are only constituted as rules and resources when they are implicated in recurrent social action (pace Sewell 1992). Our conventional view of rules and resources as external entities suffers from what Taylor (1993) refers to as an ‘‘objectivist reification,’’ while the view of rules and resources as internal schemas suffers from a ‘‘subjectivist reduction.’’ Commenting on rules, Taylor (1993, pp.57–58, emphasis added) writes: In its operation, the rule exists in the practice it ‘‘guides.’’ . . . the practice not only fulfills the rules, but also gives it concrete shape in particular situations. . . . In fact, what this reciprocity shows is that the ‘‘rule’’ lies essentially in the practice. The rule is what is animating the practice at any given time, not some formulation behind it, inscribed in our thoughts or our brains or our genes or whatever. That is why the rule is, at any given time, what the practice has made it. Similarly, Giddens (1979, p. 65) writes that ‘‘rules and practices only exist in conjunction with one another.’’ In the same way, resources too, are inextricably linked to practice. Giddens observes (1984, p. 33, emphasis added): Some forms of allocative resources (e.g. land, raw materials etc.) might seem to have a real existence. In the sense of having a ‘‘time-space’’ presence this is obviously the case. But their ‘‘materiality’’ does not affect the fact that such phenomena become resources . . . only when incorporated within processes of