Lecture 1

Question 1

Technology deterministic

Answer 1

Technology is an external, largely independent phenomenon that determines or forces change in the social system.
E.g. rhetoric about the transformative power of digital technology

Question 2

Strategic choice

Answer 2

• Managers make choices about which technologies they will adopt through strategic alignment of the technology with the organization. This choice will determine the outcome, not the technology itself.
• Assumption is that managers rather than users are the key actors in shaping technology to a particular organizational or economic end.

Question 3

Gartner’s five-step hype cycle

Answer 3

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of inflated expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of productivity

Question 4

Enacted view

Answer 4

Users shape the technology to their own needs — for example by developing “workarounds” or by improvising with the technology to generate new uses.

Question 5

What are the implications of the enacted view?

Answer 5

1. Technology is social, dynamic and multiple
2. Technology must be used to have effect
3. Use of technology has unintended consequences

Question 6

Agency perspective

Answer 6

• Enactment view explains the relationship between technology and organizations through the study of agency (Giddens: “capacity for action”)

Question 7

Human agency

Answer 7

• Human agency: “People have the option, at any moment and within existing conditions and materials, ‘to choose to do otherwise’ with the technology at hand” (Orlikowski, 2000, p. 412)

Question 8

Material agency:

Answer 8

“the capacity for nonhuman entities to act on their own, apart from human intervention” (Leonardi, 2011, p. 148).

Question 9

Affordances

Answer 9

• Action possibilities and opportunities that emerge from actors engaging with a technology (Faraj & Azad, 2012)
• The properties and qualities of technologies are common but you cannot predict how technologies will be used due to its affordances
• Affordances come to surface when asking: “what does the technology enable you to do what could NOT have done before the technology was in place?”
• Often ‘inscripted’ in design
• Negative affordances: ‘constraints’

Question 10

Impliation 1: 1. Technology is social, dynamic and multiple

Answer 10

a. Technologies are not neutral, objective, or independent; they are social because they are constructed by people.
b. Technologies are dynamic.
Even after a technological artifact appears to have solidified, with the discourse around its functions and features apparently having reached “closure” (Bijker 1997; Pinch and Bijker 1984), the stability of the actual artifact is still only provisional (e.g. phones)
c. Multiple: We have a tendency to talk of technology as if they were wholes— monolithic, uniform, and unified (e.g. “the Digital Economy”).
It is only when you ’break open the technology’ that you see that it is not a single artifact. Eg. DaVinci Robot

Question 11

Espoused technologies

Answer 11

the broad discourses associated with their functions and features.

Question 12

Technologies-in-use

Answer 12

the situated ways in which we actually use specific technological features in particular ways