ABSTRACT
In this chapter we explore ways of facilitating and enabling organizational change by introducing new technology in the news organization Nationen. Digital technology is central for understanding journalistic practices today and our point of departure is a ‘digital-first’ project lasting for five years. We use an analytical lens introducing prescriptive and proscriptive socio-material approaches as opposite poles of a continuum in order to examine how the social and the material are fused in practice and evolve over time. Prescriptive practices are designed and consist of predefined rules and routines built into technology for sustained efficiency while proscriptive practices provide opportunities for flexibility and use technology as support and enabler for situated novel and creative action. Our findings suggest that in technology-driven organizational change processes prescriptive and proscriptive socio-materiality are entangled and that the composition can change over time as the project develops, giving prominence to one over the other. The managerial challenges for succeeding with such organizational change are thus twofold: involve and engage the users of the new technology to make functional precepts and scripts for the former, and enable organizational learning and knowledge sharing in order to develop collective proficiency for the latter.
