ABSTRACT
Technology has long been seen as central to organizational, social and economic change. Beyond some of the more simplistic accounts that see technology as directly and unconditionally determining the nature of change at work and in society, there persists a rich tradition of the social study of technology at work. This tradition has attempted to interpret the complex relations between technology, social processes and work organization as a means of understanding a range of phenomena: the impact of technology on work, the impact of social processes and social agency on technology and, most recently, the nature of organizational change as sociotechnical change (Badham 2005). In the course of this work, virtually all the dimensions of technological change have been questioned: the ontological status of technology itself (material or constructed), the possibility that technologies actually have ‘effects’, the relationship between technology and work, the capacity of managers, workers, users, consumers and other actors (human and non-human!) to shape, construct and enact technology, and the very experience of technological change itself.
