ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a study of a District Health Authority project to computerise personnel and patient records. It discusses uncertainty, which is embedded in the course of technical innovation and which has developed against a backdrop of traditional organisational structure. The chapter describes uncertainties that are maintained and often intensified by innovators’ lack of technical knowledge. It also describes some of the features of technical innovation, and the uncertainty that surround these. The chapter presents a processual model of the development and maintenance of communication barriers between ‘experts’ and ‘non-experts’ who are involved in the innovation process. It argues that because of the general lack of technical knowledge and a concomitant inability to recognise ‘reliable’ technical knowledge if it should appear, managers are working very much in the dark. The chapter traces the micro-interactional processes of communication between innovating parties, and not to extend the analysis into the wider organisational structure of the National Health Service.
