ABSTRACT
Steven Barley is a management scholar who intensively studied how new technologies are implemented and used in organizations. Steven Barley gained worldwide acclaim with his studies on how hospitals in the US adopted new technologies, in particular CT scanners. In a more study, Barley and colleagues studied the emergence of virtual work in the workplace and how people deal with these new information-related aspects of work and organization. Following in the footsteps of Steven Barley’s ethnographic work on new technologies, other scholars have demonstrated interesting aspects of how new technologies are used. Together with the Israeli scholar Gideon Kunda, Steven Barley published a book on a relatively new phenomenon in organizations: contractors, the itinerant experts in knowledge economy. Barley, together with colleagues, has contributed to a better understanding of the impact of the human factor on how new technologies are introduced and used, and how technologies are an element in the shaping of organizations.
