Creative Technological Change

The Shaping of Technology and Organisations

Ian Mcloughlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415179997
• eBook ISBN: 9781134680153
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Creative Technological Change draws upon a wide range of thinking from organisational theory, innovation studies and the sociology of technology. It explores the different ways in which these questions have been framed and answered, especially in relation to new 'virtual' technologies. The idea of metaphor is used to capture the differences between, and strengths and weaknesses of various ways of conceptualising the technology/organisation relationship. This approach offers the possibility of developing new ways of thinking about, viewing and ultimately responding creatively to the organisational challenges posed by technological change.

1 Machines, organisms and virtual realities

Introduction

Technology has consistently played a dominant role in our images of modern, and now ‘post-modern’, organisations. But exactly what role technology plays and how in analytical terms it should be defined have been a matter of continuing controversy. In particular, from around the start of the 1970s it has been almost obligatory for academic studies of the relationship between technology and organisations to begin with a refutation of ‘technological determinism’. This refutation has focused on a variety of issues which we will explore in detail in this and following chapters but it relates at its core to the problems that arise in much organisational analysis through the use of metaphors of the organisation as a ‘machine’, ‘living organism’ and, most recently, as an ‘information processing brain’. This chapter is primarily concerned, therefore, with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of metaphors of organisation which give a primacy to technology as a key factor explaining organisational structure, behaviour and change.

The machine and its organisational dysfunctions

Gareth Morgan in his highly influential book Images of Organisation (1986, 1997) draws our attention to the fact that much of the theory and prescription of management and organisation, and indeed practitioners’ own perceptions of their managerial role and its organisational context, have been dominated in the twentieth century by a metaphor which views organisations ‘as if’ they were machines.

Consider…the mechanical precision with which many of our institutions are expected to operate. Organisational life is often routinised with the precision demanded of clockwork. People are frequently expected to arrive at work at a given time, perform a predetermined set of activities, rest at appointed hours, then resume their tasks until work is over. In many organisations one shift of workers replaces another in methodical fashion so that work can continue uninterrupted twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Often the work is very mechanical and repetitive. Anyone who has observed work in the mass-production factory, or in any of the large ‘office factories’ processing paper forms such as insurance claims, tax returns or bank cheques will have noticed the machinelike way in which such organisations operate. They are designed like machines, and their employees are in essence expected to behave as if they were parts of machines.

(Morgan 1986:29)

The appeal of the machine metaphor clearly relates to the historical context in which initial ideas concerning the nature of management and organisation were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Industrialisation and technological change were proceeding apace in both Europe and the USA. At the same time the evolution of the nation state and centralised government were also leading to the development of complex administrative processes.

Thus, Frederick Winslow Taylor and a succession of followers made the short step from acknowledging the productive potential of the science of machines to insisting that a ‘science of management’ was required to turn this potential into actual improvements in employee and organisational performance. Similarly, Max Weber’s concept of bureaucratic organisation was taken up by early management theorists such as Henri Fayol as the basis of a science of rational administration (for discussion of these developments see Rose 1988). Classical administrative theory and scientific management provided ‘one best way’ approaches to management and organisation. In effect they argued that the most effective/efficient performance followed from adopting a structure close to the ‘rational’, bureaucratic ideal-type of hierarchically arranged command and control structures or work design based on the principles of a detailed division of labour. In both cases the basis of these prescriptions was deemed to be the imperatives of industrial and administrative technology.

In order for these systems to work efficiently, their human counterparts had to be made to function in a machine-like manner as well. In fact, the less human-like the work of the humans and as a result, the less humanlike the humans themselves, the better. Thus jobs were designed so that they were deskilled, fragmented, machine-paced and routinised, whilst human motivation was sought through relatively high material rewards in the form of pay and job security. At the same time, employees were required to bring little of their humanity to the workplace:

The lightest jobs were again classified to discover how many of them required the full use of faculties, and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men, and ten by blind men. Therefore, out of 7,882 kinds of job…4,034 did not require full physical capacity.

(Henry Ford 1922 quoted by Salaman and Littler 1984:75)

The problem with such mechanistic images is that this model of organisation results, from a human and social viewpoint, in serious dysfunctions. Workers experience their jobs as boring and alienating which gives rise to grievances and conflictive relations with management. These relationships were, and still are, manifested in such ‘dysfunctional’ phenomena as poor labour relations, high levels of industrial disputation, absenteeism, accident rates, labour turnover and even industrial sabotage. The spread of scientific management and the mass assembly-line, whilst undoubtedly the basis for huge leaps in productive efficiency and overall improvements in economic well-being, has repeatedly been seen by critics as extracting too high a price in human terms (see e.g. Blauner 1964; Braverman 1974; Ritzer 1996).

One origin of this critique was ‘human relations theory’. This stemmed from the work, conducted over 15 years during the 1920s and early 1930s, of Elton Mayo and his collaborators in the Hawthorne plant of the General Electric Company in Chicago (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1964). The Hawthorne studies reached the telling conclusion that workers were not primarily motivated by material rewards alone. Rather, work was seen as a means of satisfying social needs. Thus in engaging in apparently dysfunctional behaviour workers were not, as assumed by Taylor and his followers, motivated by monetary gain but by the need to exercise some social control over their work environment. In fact, the presence of Mayo’s experimenters in the Hawthorne plant over long periods of time was to tap this need by creating an environment in which the workers’ cooperation was required in order to conduct the experiment—the famous ‘Hawthorne Effect’. The prescriptions drawn from this were that in order to raise worker output management had to change their approach to the motivation and reward of employees. Attention had to be given to satisfying the workers’ social needs at work and to developing less authoritarian and more human orientated modes of supervision. Humans had to be regarded as ‘living systems’ with ‘needs’ rather than as inanimate ‘machine-like’ objects.

Technology and organisations

The insight of human relations theory was to challenge ways of thinking about technology and the organisation as if the latter, and its human inhabitants, were themselves machines. Instead it encouraged thinking about organisations and technology in terms of biological metaphors. Organisations can be thought of in these terms, as natural living organisms or systems. In order to survive organisations have to find ways of satisfying the needs of their members. To do this they must adapt to the environmental context in which they operate where technology can be seen as one such key contingency. The organism metaphor thus permits a more subtle understanding of the relationship between technology and organisation. This insight was developed by what has become known as ‘contingency theory’. This had as ‘an assumption’, usually demonstrated, ‘that technology and work behaviour are intimately related’ (Rose 1988: 176).

Views over the way in which the relationship between technology and behaviour takes effect differ within contingency theory. In particular, drawing on the distinctions made in our Introduction, there are differences in how contingency theorists view the ‘role’ that is played by technology in shaping organisation and in their view of the ‘scope’ or definition of technology itself. Thus, in some views technology is seen as having a direct influence on organisational behaviour but in others this is seen as mediated by factors such as the way work is organised. Similarly, in some views behaviour is seen as a direct response or ‘reflex’ to a particular technology-organisation relationship and in others a product to some degree of individual interpretations of that situation. Further, the definition of ‘technology’ itself is variable, sometimes embracing only physical artefacts and systems and in others extending so far as to cover the organisation of work and more. These differences can be illustrated by briefly reviewing some of the key landmarks in attempts by contingency theorists to analyse the technology-organisation relationship.

Technology was first identified as a key variable shaping organisations in research published in the USA in the 1950s. This suggested, contrary to the inferences of human relations theory, that it was the nature of technology, if not directly, then mediated to varying degrees by forms of work organisation, which determined human behaviour. Thus managers keen to improve organisational efficiency were encouraged, not only to pay attention to matters of management style and communications, but also to take account of the way in which technology generated certain requirements in terms of organisational structure, or enabled and constrained choices over work organisation (Rose 1988:175–6).

For example, in their study of the attitudes of car workers in Detroit, Walker and Guest (1952) observed that assembly-line technology acted to constrain the formation of work groups and, to use Rose’s words, ‘frustrated’ what was assumed to be a ‘natural urge for social attachments’ (Rose 1988:185). In other words, technology could play a crucial role in ‘determining the character of the social relationships for any individual or for a group of individuals’ (Walker and Guest 1952:145). Sayles (1958) took this line of argument further by suggesting that actual patterns of behaviour—specifically grievance behaviour—could be seen as strongly related to the technology in a particular work setting rather than to variables such as management policy, labour turnover or style of supervision.

In these studies ‘technology’ was largely taken to be physical artefacts or systems which had an apparently direct and readily observable effect on behaviour. Thus Sayles makes the observation that, ‘we recognize that many persistent industrial relations problems have their roots in the technology of the plant’ and ‘…the social system erected by the technological process is also a basic and continuing determinant of work group attitudes and actions’ (Sayles 1958:119) although elsewhere the argument is made more subtle by the suggestion that technology has an enabling and constraining, rather than determining, effect on behaviour. Nevertheless, the identification of technology as one factor in shaping grievance behaviour, and by inference the nature and pattern of industrial relations in a workplace more generally, questions the human relations assumption that grievance and other conflict orientated behaviours are best dealt with by attending to the individuals seen as its cause or by seeking to improve management-labour communications. Rather, if technology is part of the cause of such ‘problems’ then organisational practitioners need also to bear this in mind in seeking to manage ‘dysfunctional’ grievance and other troublesome behaviours, perhaps by using Sayles’ analysis to anticipate trouble and target managerial efforts to potential problem areas in anticipation of rather than in response to worker actions.

Other contingency theorists have been less concerned with the relationship between technology and employee behaviour and have focused on the relationship with organisational structure and performance (see Hatch 1997). In so doing they have proposed a number of taxonomies which allow the characteristics of different types of production technology to be identified and the implications for ‘fit’ with different types of organisation structure to be assessed. Typically, these approaches adopt a more ‘expansive’ definition but the role of technology is still viewed as having relatively deterministic effects on organisation structure and behaviour.

The work of Joan Woodward (1970, 1980) provides a widely known illustration of such an expansive definition of ‘technology’. At the same time her conception appears to be highly determinist insofar as the room for interpretative action, albeit recognised, is limited and the effects of technology, albeit mediated by organisational variables, are seen as ultimately decisive in determining organisational efficiency. In fact, Woodward’s celebrated research in Southern England in the late 1950s and 1960s provides a classic illustration of the working through of the organism metaphor. Her analysis led to the conclusion—frequently cited as an example of technological determinism—that given technologies require management to adopt particular forms of organisation if their enterprises are to be commercially successful. At the same time, the starting point for her analysis was the problematic nature of the ‘one best way’ models of management and organisational design that are necessarily produced when the organisation is construed as a machine.

Woodward defined the scope of ‘technology’ as being more than just physical artefacts. Rather she focused on the broader ‘production system’ employed by an organisation, that is, ‘the collection of plant, machines, tools and recipes available at a given time for the execution of the production task and the rationale underlying their utilisation’ (Woodward 1970:4). From her empirical studies Woodward identified eleven different types of production system, so defined, which she subsequently grouped into three main categories of unit and small batch, large batch and mass, and automated continuous-process production systems. Further, the effects of different types of production system on managerial and employee behaviour were seen as mediated by the organisation’s structure, or more precisely, the management control system which varied according to whether they were: ‘integrated/ fragmented’, i.e. control was centralised or spread out across several divisions or departments; ‘personal/mechanical’, i.e. control over employees was exercised directly by supervisors and managers; or built into the production system itself, e.g. the pace of work was controlled by direct supervision or was machine-dependent.

The degree of fit between the type of production system and management control system was seen as the key factor in determining the commercial success of an organisation. Woodward found a strong statistical correlation between type of production system, type of management control system and commercial success. Thus her analysis suggested that unit or small batch production systems were best served by ‘integrated personal control systems’ (e.g. a small business producing single or small runs of products where all aspects, functions and employees are controlled by the owner manager). Large batch or mass production systems were best served by fragmented control systems of a personal or mechanical type (e.g. larger organisations where management functions are distributed across departments and where employees are controlled either by direct supervision or through machines). Finally, process production systems were seen as best served by integrated mechanical control systems (e.g. as in organisations such as oil refineries or chemical plants where management functions are highly centralised and where the consequences of employee task performance can be monitored and regulated through machinery designed to monitor the production process itself).

Woodward’s overall conclusion was that: ‘there is a particular form of organisation most appropriate to each technical situation’ (Woodward 1980:72). However, other contingency theorists have come to a more limited conclusion than Woodward about the determining influence of technology on organisations. For example, the Aston School (a team of researchers headed by Derek Pugh and based at Aston University, Birmingham, UK) began work in the 1960s and identified seven types of organisation structure. The researchers argued through a complex statistical analysis that variations in organisation structure were principally explained by the contextual factors of size and national context/culture rather than just technology (see e.g. Pugh and Hickson 1976). Other taxonomic approaches to the relationship between technology and organisation also give less emphasis to technology as the principal determinant of organisational behaviour but continue to employ and refine an expansive definition of ‘technology’ where the nature of the work task is the principal defining element. For example, Perrow (1967) recognised that organisations rarely have one type of ‘technical situation’ to respond to and that a range of technologies, rather than just one type of ‘production system’, are likely to be involved in production or service provision. It follows that the technological shaping of organisations is much more multifaceted than envisaged by Woodward (see also Thompson 1967; Galbraith 1973).

In summary, since the 1950s technology has been seen as a key variable in the analysis of organisations and, if not the key determinant, then one of the major contingencies shaping both structure and behaviour. However, there is no consensus over the analytical definition of technology, although the tendency has been to adopt ever more expansive definitions, in particular as attempts have been made to analyse non-manufacturing organisations. It is also unclear how much the actual effects of ‘technology’, whatever the definition, are mediated by human interpretation. At worst human behaviour appears to be a reflex response to given technological conditions. What is clear, however, is that technology is seen as an important driving force in organisational design and development. This core idea has led to much broader theoretical and analytical constructs concerning the relationship between technology, organisational change and the structure of society as a whole.

From industrial to post-industrial organisations

So far we have examined the interaction between technology and organisation as represented through the machine and organism metaphors in static terms. However, it is clearly also necessary to focus on the dynamic relationship between technology and organisation. If we take the view that technology is a key, if not the key, variable shaping organisations, then changes in technology—in particular those which lead to its greater sophistication and complexity—can be expected to have a profound effect on organisations and beyond.

Of course this is a familiar, almost common sense view. Technology is a pervasive feature of advanced industrial societies and to raise the significance of technological change by suggesting it as a causal or determining variable of organisational and broader socio-economic change seems almost natural. Clark Kerr et al. in their highly influential Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960) referred to the ‘logic of industrialism’ and the ‘technological imperative’ which they claimed was driving industrial and industrialising societies to adopt similar economic, political and social structures apparently regardless of their history and own cultural identities. As we will see in a moment, new information and computing technologies have frequently been identified as the source of a new ‘technological revolution’ to rival those of the past and as ushering in a major transition from a manufacturing-based industrial society to a postindustrial ‘information society’ with wide economic, political and social ramifications (see e.g. Forester 1985).

Such arguments are usually inextricably linked to positive, optimistic and progressive views of the long term consequences of the technological shaping of organisations. Indeed, they were clearly reflected in the work of many organisational analysts who focused on the consequences of automation in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, Woodward took the view that technological advance involving computer-based systems enabled increasing automation of the control of work operations as distinct from the transformation of, and transfer of, raw materials and part-finished products enabled by previous electro-mechanical technologies. This new technology would mean production systems in an increasingly diverse range of industrial sectors could, in the future, take on the characteristics of continuous process production systems. That is, key managerial goals and objectives could be designed into the technology itself and the plans to execute these—and related monitoring and corrective mechanisms—embodied in the layout and configuration of the physical hardware and systems.

Given such developments the predicted effects on organisa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shaping technology and organisation
• 1 Machines, organisms and virtual realities
• 2 The evolution of the innovative organisation
• 3 Fordism, post-Fordism and the electronic panopticon
• 4 Organisational choice, politics and technological change
• 5 Inside the black box: Social constructivism and technology
• 6 Transforming the organisation? Technology as ‘text’
• 7 Outside the black box: The socio-economic shaping of technology
• 8 Conclusion: Creative technological change
• References