Woodward (1958;1965)
Management & Technology (a contingency theory again/structure is contingent on technological complexity)
- Case studies of firms in England between 1953-1957
- there is NOT one best way for all production systems
Key Findings:
- no sig relationship between size and system of production
- no sig relationship between adhering to rules of management and success
- As complexity increases, so does # of employees, layers of management, admins, CEO span of control
- As complexity increases, 1st line supervisor span of control decreases
Galbraith (1974)
Main idea: Slack Resources & Org Design (responding to uncertainty/complexity)
Effective use of hierarchy/rules/etc. depends on frequency and # of exceptions
Can either:
- reduce need for info processing
- create slack resources (i.e., lead times, buffers, budget)
- create self-contained tasks (duplicate resources)
- increase capacity to process info
- vertical info systems (data, computers)
- lateral relations (use liaisons, teams, project managers)
Barley (1986)
Barley suggests that structure is both a product of and a constraint on human behavior.
Studied implementation of new radiology equip at 2 different hospitals and observed “scripts” of interactions between technicians and MDs
Same technology can led to different org environments
Technology are occasions where managers can re-evaluate or re-imagine the structures in which they work
Orlikowski & Scott (2008)
Sociomateriality
- The social and material are inextricably linked but management research often treats them as separate (e.g., contingency theorists- humans and technology are discrete; structuration – humans and technology are interdependent and they shape one another through ongoing interaction; sociomaterial-humans and technology exist through their temporally emergent constitutive entanglement)
- Applies an “agential realism” approach (people attribute agency to equipment, machines, formulate, and other apparatuses to explain the universe)
- New research – open sources software, online communities—google searches where the underlying technology was built and coded by people but is informed by millions of people’s searches and updated by their input
Leonardi (2011)
- Prior research using the human agency perspective has suggested that when humans are faced with a perceived constraint from the material agency of a technology, they typically change their routines to achieve their goals while leaving intact the technology
- Yet this ignores the reality that people are often able to manipulate the machines to better suit their routines (e.g., add a new model, write a new computer script, etc.)
- Imbrication: people have agency and technology have agency but people decide how they will respond to a technology
- Constraints: change technology
- Affordance: change routines
