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Paul Leonardi Northwestern University

Organizing as a Process of Sociomaterial Imbrication: a Or, an attempt to cope with the fact that Dan Robey already published on all your good ideas before you were born. Paul Leonardi Northwestern University. 1979: A Blockbuster Year.

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Paul Leonardi Northwestern University

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  1. Organizing as a Process of Sociomaterial Imbrication:aOr, an attempt to cope with the fact that Dan Robey already published on all your good ideas before you were born Paul Leonardi Northwestern University

  2. 1979: A Blockbuster Year

  3. 2002: I meet Robey (at the University of Colorado Library) • “User Attitudes and Management Information System Use" (1979) Academy of Management Journal • "Information Technology and Organizational Change: Causal Structure in Theory and Research" • (1988) Management Science • “The Organizational and Cultural Context of Systems Implementation: Case Experience from Latin America” • (1989) Information and Management

  4. 2002: I meet Robey (at the University of Colorado Library) • “Information Technology and the Structuring of Organizations" • (1991) Information Systems Research • "Accounting for the Contradictory Organizational Consequences of Information Technology: Theoretical Directions and Methodological Implications” • (1999) Information Systems Research • “Cultural Analysis of the Organizational Consequences of Information Technology" • (1994) Accounting, Management and Information Technologies • "Learning to Implement Enterprise Systems: An Exploratory Study of the Dialectics of Change," • (2002) Journal of Management Information Systems • "Transforming Work Through Information Technology: A Comparative Case Study of Geographic Information Systems in County Government" • (1996) Information Systems Research

  5. 2005: I meet Robey for real (at Case Western) • “If people can quickly and easily adapt the technologies they use in their work, that has real consequences for how we think about organizational change.” • Dan Robey • (excerpt taken from shoddy mental fieldnotes)

  6. Imbrication: MISQ 2011

  7. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 1950s

  8. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 1950s • X or ?

  9. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 1950s 1980s

  10. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 1980s • X or ?

  11. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 1950s 1980s 2000s

  12. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 • ? 2000s or ?

  13. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Routines: Patterns of Action. Action involves people interacting with other people and with technologies. Technologies (in-practice): How people enroll technology into their routines. People follow routines when designing technologies and they use technologies to carry out routines

  14. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Material Agency Human Agency

  15. Imbrication: MISQ 2011

  16. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Human Agency: Practice of forming and attempting to realize one’s goals Material Agency: Capacity of nonhuman entities to act on their own, apart from human intervention

  17. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Material Agency Material Agency Material Agency Material Agency Process of Organizing: Human Agency Human Agency Human Agency Human Agency

  18. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Material Agency Material Agency = Human Agency = Human Agency

  19. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Imbrication: Arrangement of distinct elements in overlapping patterns so they function interdependently

  20. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Material Agency Material Agency Material Agency Material Agency Human Agency Human Agency Human Agency Human Agency ? Time

  21. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Perceptual Construction as Mechanism for Imbrication Within the framework established by previous imbrications, constructing perceptions of whether they need to change their goals or change the the materials with which they work

  22. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Affordance and Constraint: “If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal… nearly flat… sufficiently extended… and if its substance is rigid… then the surface affords support…. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds… Note that the four properties listed – horizontal, flat, extended, and rigid – would be physical properties of a surface if they were measured with scales and standard units used in physics. As an affordance of support for a species of animal, however, they have to be measured relative to the animal. They are unique for that animal. They are not just abstract physical properties.” (Gibson, 1986: 127)

  23. Imbrication: MISQ 2011

  24. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Perception of Affordance Material Agency Human Agency Human Agency = Change in Routine

  25. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Perception of Affordance Material Agency Material Agency Human Agency Human Agency = Change in Routine = Change in Tech Perception of Constraint

  26. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Perception of Affordance Material Agency Material Agency Material Agency Human Agency Human Agency Human Agency Perception of Constraint

  27. Imbrication: MISQ 2011

  28. Imbrication: MISQ 2011 Take-Aways Imbrications of human and material agencies create “infrastructure” that can be used to change organizations Explanation of how the social and the material become “constitutively entangled” Unanswered Questions When is this infrastructure created? Is imbrication an individual or group level process? The result of group level construction of perceptual affordances and constraints?

  29. Work in Progress

  30. Work in Progress Implicit Proposition: People need to use technology in the same way for informal organizational change to occur • Existing Comparative Studies (Zack & McKenney, 1995; Robey and Sahay, 1996; Edmondson et al., 2001) • Single-Site Studies (Orlikowski, 1996; Vaast and Walsham, 2005; Boudrieu & Robey, 2005; Leonardi, 2007)

  31. Work in Progress Technological Artifact Technology-in-Use Technology-in-Practice (Materiality) (Individual use of Materiality) (Shared use of Materiality)

  32. Work in Progress

  33. Work in Progress

  34. Work in Progress Weeks 1-13: Divergence in both Piston and Strut Groups E1: Did you figure out if you get a better pulse if you up-gauge the rails? E2: Yeah, I ran a frontal ODB and it was better at 3 mils. E1: Oh. E2: I up-gauged it in CrashLab. E1: Huh. I’ve never used it (CrashLab) to do that I just tried it to route the belt for the dummy. E2: I never used it for that (seat belt routing). I just go into the text editor to do it. E1: Oh, that might be slower but it might be more accurate, I guess. It never thought about using it for that.

  35. Work in Progress

  36. Work in Progress Weeks 13-50: Convergence in Strut Group Only Piston Group “Some people still use it; but they kind of use it haphazardly like for this or that, and that includes me. So no one is using it consistently even for themselves and not that many people are using it all together. Like, for example, I just use it from time to time to set-up barriers. But some other people were using it to define contacts and some other people even were using it to do nodeouts.” Strut Group “Now it seems like everyone’s using CrashLab to set-up models. We don’t really use a lot of the features for post-processing or even model submission I guess. We mostly use it to set them up. At least that’s what I see everyone doing.”

  37. Work in Progress Piston Group Strut Group

  38. Work in Progress

  39. Work in Progress Desired Organizational Change “So if they’re using the tool, consultation will hopefully happen in different areas. I hope the discussion among crashworthiness engineers will be in areas related to the analysis of their models not how to set them up. You know, real engineering questions” Model Setup Consultations Model Analysis Consultations

  40. Work in Progress • Model Setup • how to position a barrier • where to place accelerometers • how to define sections • Model Analysis • (1) how to change the materials used to build parts • (2) how to change the geometry of parts • (3) how to change the location of parts

  41. Work in Progress Consultations in two periods of use (data from observations)

  42. Piston Group Consultation Networks Before Implementation Period 1 Period 2 A. Set-Up Consultation Networks B. Analysis Consultation Networks

  43. Strut Group Consultation Networks Before Implementation Period 1 Period 2 A. Set-Up Consultation Networks B. Analysis Consultation Networks

  44. Work in Progress Implications • Individual technologies-in-use must become shared technology-in-practice • Critical Mass at level of feature use, not technology writ-large • Change enabled by construction of “collective affordance” (vs. “functional affordance”) through convergence in features use • How we manage introduction of new technology

  45. Final Thoughts • Dan has created an area of study on the relationship between IT and organizational change • Dan is tireless in his pursuit of better theoretical explanations • Dan’s work exemplifies the idea of methodological fit and has legitimized qualitative work in the IS field • Dan finds ways to subtly inspire people to ask big questions, to come up with good answers, and to stay the course to develop better theory

  46. Final Thoughts

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