Discussion and conclusions

This book seeks to contribute to what we may describe, in parallel with Collins and Evans (2002), as the ‘third wave’ in understanding about the social dimensions and implications of technology. The domain of Science and Technology Studies (STS) emerged through a critical assessment of the initial portrayals of technologies, which dominated economic, managerial and engineering discourse, as subject to instrumental control. Under these accounts, workplace technologies were presumed, on the one hand, to have properties that could readily be assessed and subjected to rational assessment (e.g. in technical or economic terms) and, on the other, they were seen as a reliably delivering organisational improvement (i.e. as drivers of organisational change). In a competitive context, globally available technologies were expected to deliver best practice solutions around the world. Early STS writings engaged critically with this pole of research, which was

seen to be influenced by what we have described as ‘the rhetorics of technology supply’, legitimating the choices favoured by managers and engineers and promoting particular technology pathways as necessary and incontestable. In reaction against these claims of technology to be transformatory,

imperative and universalistic, scholars from STS as well as other critical social science disciplines drew attention to the ways in which the outcomes of technological change often fell short of supplier promises. They highlighted the gap between the formalised representations of organisational processes embedded in supplier offerings and the diverse circumstances of the user organisation and its complex, heterogeneous and difficult to formalise practices. They also pointed to difficulties in assessing the properties of artefacts and in subjecting technology to rational assessment and control; and highlighted the negotiation and contestation of outcomes between different groups in the organisation. These accounts have principally emphasised the importance of local action

and contingency, rather than the ‘universal logics’ represented by computer systems. In so doing they have drawn attention to the need for local

discretion by user-organisation members to repair the deficiencies of computer-based systems which remain generic in comparison to the intricacy of organisational practice. As a result, many writers in what might be broadly described as the Social Study of Information Systems (McLaughlin et al. 1999; Ciborra 2000; Walsham 2001; Carmel and Agarwal 2001; Avgerou 2002) and elsewhere have problematised the claimed effectiveness of standardised (e.g. packaged) supplier offerings, stressing instead the need for extensive customisation of computer-based systems to get them to match specific organisational practices. Some have even carried this argument further, to insist that information systems must be built around the unique exigencies of particular organisations (Hartswood et al. 2002). Others have disputed the possibility of assessing the properties of organi-

sational computer applications in a context of necessarily imperfect information about these complex non-material products and their fit to particular organisations’ requirements. They have pointed to the contestation of assessments between different specialist groups within the user organisation, groups which deploy diverging and often incompatible criteria – and the associated salience of organisational politics in technology decision-making (Grint and Woolgar 1997). This analytical development coincided with the semiotic turn in the social sciences. In consequence, the social analyses of technology generally and the Social Study of Information Systems more specifically have, in recent years, been dominated by accounts from constructivist or interactionist perspectives (and particularly by Actor Network Theory and Ethnomethodology). These approaches have brought a widespread interest in ethnographic studies as well as the application of microsociological understandings. This work has been influential as a way to produce rich pictures of local settings and the resultant technological and organisational reshaping occurring during the implementation of generic solutions. However, as we have argued throughout the book, this body of research

tends to produce somewhat ‘unbalanced’ and ‘reductive’ accounts. In much of this writing, undue emphasis is given to local actors in technology implementation and use. Reading this work, we note how attention is focused almost always on immediate action, as if various actors were creating and recreating the world from scratch. This perspective is particularly problematic when one considers that we are addressing the importance of technologies which are, inevitably, largely constructed at a considerable remove in time and geographical and social space from their use (Kallinikos 2004a, 2004b). Thus the existing critical social science work on information systems both downplays the influence of technology supply and often overlooks the influence of the broader historical setting on the unfolding of the technology. The emphasis on local, short-term studies of technology adoption is particularly inadequate for exploring the development and influence of complex organisational technologies like ERP, which, typically offered as standardised, packaged solutions and increasingly supplied internationally and across

different sectors, would appear to exhibit very different dynamics to traditional software systems supplied on a bespoke basis. In this book, we have argued that the time has come to move beyond this

intial generation of STS and Information Systems research. While the shift from the first to the second wave of analyses of the technology and society relationship, which led to the formation of Technology Studies, was characterised by a sharp ‘epistemological rupture’ (Bachelard 1934), the second shift, which we are noting here, involves a more gentle weaning of Technology Studies and allied disciplines from what we may characterise as their ‘adolescent’ preoccupations. The critical project that motivated early Technology Studies (i.e. the second wave of analysis) inspired the rejection of much existing social and economic theory. In rejecting earlier frameworks and their imputed views of the character of technologies and the operation of social structures, analysts eschewed existing theory in favour of extremely simple but flexible analytic schema (concepts such as Actor Networks and Relevant Social Groups). These schema, however, provided rather weak analytical templates that run the risk of generating reduced forms of analysis. In particular, they encourage ‘atomistic studies’ which, in emphasising immediate interaction, tend both to divorce local action from its broader context and to underplay the need for a longer-term historical view both of the factors shaping local action and of their outcomes (Williams and Edge 1996; Russell and Williams 2002a). The second wave has as a result been characterised by a somewhat dua-

listic analysis, reflected in a series of debates about the respective roles of:

1 local: global 2 unique: generic 3 action: structure 4 technology decision-making processes as rational versus political.