ABSTRACT
In ordinary language, the term technology chiefly denotes the material component of organizations, the part that objectivist theories refer to as the technical system: plant, machinery, equipment, tooling, as well as the procedures and tasks needed to use this component to transform objects or symbols. In the system-centered conception, technical progress is an exogenous component imposed on the organization and to which the organization must adapt if it is to avoid inefficiency. It is thus a cultural artefact whose meaning is constructed socially and is specified in relation to the preferences, interests, values, identities, motivations and cognitive frames of the groups of actors who are important in collective action. The process-centered conception starts from an explicit critique of technological reductionism, of the perspectives that regard technology as a concrete object, separate from the organization, and see it as only having to do with equipment and tools.
