ABSTRACT
One of the most commonly repeated findings from research on the organisational consequences of technological change is that new technical systems fail to achieve their goals because of an inadequate consideration of the ‘human’, ‘social’ and ‘organisational’ dimensions of change (Benders et al. 1995). It is already apparent that promoters of virtual forms of work, such as teleworking have, also underestimated or inadequately understood the social basis of such innovations (Jackson this volume). It is also increasingly common for such observations to be linked to failures in, or barriers to, learning that prevent in some way the questioning of prevailing socio-technical design assumptions. For many, it is increasingly necessary to challenge such assumptions in order to enable, in Zuboff’s phrase, a ‘new division of learning’ to replace the classical bureaucratic ‘division of labour’ (Zuboff 1988). The significance of this point is more than adequately brought home by the apparent revelation that until recently only two of the 30,000 personal computers within Microsoft were formally authorised to be connected to the Internet (Wallace 1997).
