Standards Embedded in Technology - Different Perspectives and Approaches

Standards embedded in technology/different perspectives and approaches

1. Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations. https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-505-fall2008/files/2008/09/usingtechnologyand-constituting-structures.pdf

In this paper, they illustrate, that people adopt different technologies-in-practice even if the technology was the same according to their various technological visions, skills, fears and abilities, because of specific understanding and different past experience or practices. The technology in practice are structures enacted through the recurrent use of technology, it means that they are focused on ongoing and situated interactions that users have with the technology. Therefore researchers suppose, that companies should be looking for return on the use of technology, rather than just returns on the technology.

[pic 1]

THE EMBEDDEDNESS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS HABITS IN ORGANIZATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL LEVEL ROUTINES: DEVELOPMENT AND DISRUPTION?????

2) In this paper, researchers demonstrated the importance of having the right user attitude and knowledge in order to be able to use the system effectively and efficiently. Arguably, choosing the right people to fill the user role is more important than possessing the required skills, as skills can be acquired later. They found factors that had influenced the adoption negatively include: system usefulness, response time, technical support, empathy of service quality, user perception and user skills. Factors contributing to the positive adoption include: information relevancy, user attitude, leadership, medical sponsorship, organizational readiness, clinical process and external communication with the inter-organizational system.

[pic 2]

Material aspect of technology or materiality

1)The Materiality of Technology: An Affordance Perspective Samer Faraj and Bijan Azad

In this paper, they proposed the technology affordance lens as a way to bring materiality back in and as a theoretical lens for studying the sociomaterial connections. Therefore they summarize deep problems in the dominant organizational conceptualizations of technology as commensurate bundles of features and products. Analysis suggests that in the push to develop/theorize the construct of technology, extant research has cast aside crucial issues about material aspects of technology in use. The researchers explored affordance perspective as a promising avenue to bring materiality back into organizational studies of technology and evaluate how it has been used in the organizational literature.

2)Materiality and change: Challenges to building better theory about technology and organizing Paul M. Leonardi a,*, Stephen R. Barley

In this paper, they suggest, that nowadays individuals work routinely not only with people, but also with information technology. Thesecond one has material properties. Although those material properties result from choices made by particular groups of designers, they confront users with real constraints on and opportunities for conducting their work. Understanding how people deal with an information technology’s materiality seems essential for developing a broader and fuller understanding of organizing. By bringing materiality more centrally into theories of change we should be able to speak more precisely about why people do the things they do with technology and why organizations and practices acquire the forms they acquire. Actually, they outline four challenges that researchers must address before they can reconcile the reality of materiality with the notion that outcomes of technological change are socially constructed.

Factors affecting adoption.

1)WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY: TEMPORAL PATTERNS OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADAPTATION IN ORGANIZATIONS http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49404/windowsofopportux92tyre.pdf?seq

This research finds that adaptation drops off dramatically after an initial burst of intensive activity. Organizational forces such as production pressure and team erosion appear to contribute to this rapid decline. They also find that this decline of adaptation is not irreversible, in that later, unexpected events can trigger new spurts of adaptive activity. This research has confronted an apparent conflict in the literature over the timing of technological adaptation in organizations. While innovation research describes a gradual, continuous process of modification, behavioral theory indicates that the process may be much more discontinuous. While full integration of a new technology may take several years, adaptation attention and effort are not applied consistently over that period, nor do they taper off gradually. Rather, they are concentrated in short periods of time. This finding suggests that what appears, at an aggregate level, to be "continuous improvement" may more accurately be described as the sum of discrete episodes of adaptive activity carried out at different times and applied to different technologies. In this paper they found out that the initial episode of adaptation is especially important. The decisions and directions taken during a short period following initial installation a period that may be as brief as two to three months-are major determinants of how the technology will be used by the organization over the longer term.