Why present another volume on information technology and organizations? As the editors suggest in the introduction, the proliferation of writing about the designing, building, diffusion and use of information technologies consists largely of a simplistic juxtaposition between celebratory, dismissive and sceptical claims. What, then, does this volume achieve?
The book, edited by Bloomfield, Coombs, Knights and Littler, and with 12 contributors in total, is a substantial statement of research output from the UMIST‐based UK economic and social research council (ESRC) funded programme of information and communication technology (PICT). The book chapters are organized according to three main themes: strategies and markets, integrating technology and organization, and networks. Despite a disparate subject focus, diverse case‐study research sites and the editors’ acknowledgement that various ontological, epistemological and methodological debates surfaced in the production of the volume, the contributors are broadly linked in an attempt to understand how the discourse on organization and information technology operates: how the ontological categories of technology and organization are constructed and deployed, how technologies and organizations are brought together theoretically while simultaneously remaining discrete objects of study.
A common and recurrent theme throughout the book is that there is no linear or mechanistic logic to the unfolding of information technology strategy, innovation or use. Chapter 2, on aligning information technology and strategy, by Knights, Noble and Willmott is illustrative of this. The authors eschew the rationalism and the dualistic separation of thinking and doing of much change literature. The case study of IT strategy in Salesco ‐ company providing insurance and investment products ‐ describes the organization’s strategy as diffuse, covert and obscure, rather than orderly and visible, even after a consultant‐inspired introduction of formal strategic planning. The result is that despite three years of resource allocation, consultants, think‐tanks, mission statements and explicit IT planning documents, the implicit product‐based strategy was followed. According to the authors, the explicit strategy was undermined because of the failure to recognise how strategy is not unitary or separate from short‐term tactics, local conflicts, ad hoc decisions and accidents. Rather, strategy can be more usefully understood as a contradictory political process involving consensus building between competing and mutually resistant functional departments and product lines.
The contestability of strategy formulation and organizational power relations is also taken up in chapter 3, by Knights and Murray. The chapter describes the messages that markets send to companies and managers’ simultaneous and identity constituting role in the production of a social and institutional context. The case study of Pensco ‐ a financial services company ‐ illustrates how various groups and individuals respond to and act on particular views of a changing sectoral market in pursuit of material and symbolic resources, personal survival and career progress. Such activities are possible because there is no simple and clear‐cut means of knowing exactly what a market is conveying, but, more importantly, because actors ‐ such as managers ‐ do not exist independently of the conceptualisation and realisation of markets. At Pensco this took the form of a shift away from the implicit long‐term strategy of updating on‐line administrative systems, to the creation of new products and IT systems to support the new products. The changing strategy and focus of IT resources was not without persistent conflict and tension. Rather, it was achieved partly through the new CEO’s enthusiastic and aggressive determination to create products to take advantage of the newly deregulated financial services market, and the willingness of various opportunistic subordinates keen on sustaining their own remuneration, advancement and well‐being to enact the CEO’s wishes.
Chapter 4 by Wilson, Littler and Bruce explores the concepts of paradigms for strategy development. Like Knights and Murray, they assert the social construction, contestability and undecidability of fundamental concepts such as “market”, “competition” and “demand”. The case studies of Boss Systems and Tile Systems ‐ both suppliers of computer systems ‐ illustrate that strategy is both political and cultural and relies on sectoral paradigms for its formation. In response to increased market uncertainty and a fall in market share, Boss introduced a formalised strategic competitor analysis. This reflected its deeply embedded culture of respect for IT. Data, for example, could only be expressed quantitatively and had to fit the technical requirements of the database. Boss’s history and culture as a global supplier also affected its competitive analysis with smaller, emerging companies remaining unnoticed and unmonitored. Similarly, Tile’s response to their declining market share was to monitor market movements and accommodate changes as quickly as possible rather than focusing on customer needs and developing products in association with consumer constituencies. In both companies managers reacted conservatively and within the existing terms of reference of engineering expertise and of market power residing with market‐leading suppliers. Only after the continued failure of existing modes of activity was strategy problematized and rethought. For Wilson, Littler and Bruce the emergence of inter‐organizational collaboration and interaction, and product‐based market definitions could be beneficial trends because it constantly exposes companies to different paradigms.
The subtleties of inter‐organizational collaboration becoming co‐optation and interaction becoming intervention are examined in chapter 5 by Bloomfield and Vurdubakis. They concentrate on the materiality of power/knowledge of a consultant‐produced readiness review report for a UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital. The report, as an inscription device which acts as a non‐human intermediary between the technology and its users, assesses the preparedness of a particular hospital to implement a resource management system. For Bloomfield and Vurbubakis, the authority of the report is accomplished not so much through its subject matter, but the way the subject is written about and particular positions which reading the report creates and sustains. The configuration of people, objects and events, and the mobilisation of what can count as legitimate information is achieved through, for example, suppressing divergent opinions, providing insider interview evidence from hospital staff, asserting patient care as the most important single outcome, redefining the domain of clinical freedom, and identifying doctors and managers as having information needs which pre‐date the report. The report, therefore, maintains an insider‐outsider division between hospital staff and consultants while simultaneously allowing their view of the future to coincide. This labour of division between inside and outside reinforces the role of the consultants as merely conduits for the external changing reality of the NHS, rather than as an obligatory passage point which inscribes the world in a particular way and actively aids in performing into existence conditions that can be acted out.
The role of IT in organizational change and the problematisation of technology is the main focus of chapter 6 by Bloomfield, Coombs, Owen and Taylor. Their chapter on the construction of systems and users in the NHS is indicative of the volume’s recurrent emphasis on users of technology as important research constituencies, and highlights the convergence and on‐going boundary redrawing between disciplines such as organizational behaviour, marketing management and behaviour, and information systems. They document the introduction of a case‐mix management system into the NHS ‐ a system designed to facilitate doctors‐as‐managers by providing coded and standardised cost‐per‐case information for patient treatment. However, with the introduction of the NHS internal market ‐ the separation of health providers and purchasers, the emergence of clinical directorates and a shift from processes to markets ‐ the advent of doctors‐as‐managers has not occurred. The case‐mix system has been laterally transformed into a system to monitor the internal market’s contracts and reconfigured for usage by newly created business managers. The fate of technology and its target users is, they argue, neither determining or determined and cannot be factored into accounts of organizational change because organizations and users do not merely adjust to the imperatives of technology. Rather, technologies, organizations and users are better conceptualised as mutually constituting ontological and sense‐making effects.
Chapter 7 by Knights, Murray and Willmott, and chapter 8 by Murray and Willmott examine the notion of networks, but from distinct analytical points. In a similar analytical approach to that deployed in the Bloomfield and Vurdubakis chapter, Knights, Murray and Willmott document the work that is necessary to build an inter‐organizational electronic data interchange (EDI) at Switchco ‐ an organization created jointly by financial services companies. They describe the power/knowledge processes of problematising the financial services sector, interesting companies in a particular solution, enrolling them and mobilising material and symbolic support. Although the network is currently becoming more convergent and less reversible, collaboration proved particularly difficult and complicated because of the number of companies involved in the project, ill‐defined strategies, the ambiguity of working closely with competitors and contingent circumstances. Murray and Willmott’s chapter on the network age and information technology contrasts with the other chapters because it does not rely on case study material, but attempts to provide a framework for understanding the rise of networking. They explore the broad context of change ‐ multinational location, competition, product innovation ‐ from which organizational structures as networks have emerged. They argue that the employment relationship has been ignored in this trend and that the transformation of networking into an organizational reality of real trust, involvement and empowerment is a political endeavour which requires a fundamental change in the politico‐economic system.
Each chapter in the volume is independent, individually referenced, and presupposes a reader who would more than likely read some chapters, but not necessarily all and not necessarily in a particular order. The process of reading is not determined purely by the text, and reading the chapters sequentially provided illuminating insights into the active construction of readers with particular needs and desires which might be taken for granted. Each chapter unfolds along a standard and linear path with an introduction, an exposition of relevant theory, a presentation of case material, a discussion of theory and how it relates to the evidence, and a conclusion; the effect being that each chapter presents a somewhat linear and coherent whole. Given the contributors’ concern to problematise linearity and the separation of theory and practise, knowledge and knowers, some attempt at innovative format and order would have been valuable.
The shift from single or jointly authored texts to edited volumes with individual or collectively written chapters can have subtle effects on scholarly output. The volume illustrates one such effect through a degree of repetition of ideas, particularly when outlining theoretical issues. The presupposition is that readers need to have an explanation of key concepts within each individual chapter. This would probably not be visible to the reader of one or two chapters, and the overlaps are not entirely surprising given the contributors’ shared concerns.
At the time of writing the volume is only available in hardback. This is unfortunate as it will necessarily mean that the number of copies purchased by individuals, and particularly those doing research degrees or young researchers, will be reduced. This is a pity because it is a volume that would be a valuable addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in understanding and advancing debates in organizational behaviour, information systems, strategic and marketing management, and social theory.
