Laura J. Black1
Paul R. Carlile2
Nelson P. Repenning3
Sloan School of
Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA USA 02142
Version 3.0
Work reported here was supported by the MIT Center for Innovation in Product Development under NSF Cooperative Agreement Number EEC-9529140. Our thanks to Deborah Ancona, Steve Barley, Lotte Bailyn, Bob Gibbons, Lee Fleming, Brad Morrison, JoAnne Yates, Wanda Orlikowski, Jenny Rudolph, John Sterman and seminar participants at MIT for helpful comments and constructive suggestions.
For more information on the research program that
generated this paper, visit http://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/.
1. MIT Sloan School of
Management, E53-364, Cambridge, MA
USA 02142. Phone 617-253-6638 Fax: 617-258-7579;
<lblack@mit.edu>.
2. MIT Sloan School of Management, E52-567, Cambridge, MA USA 02142. Phone 617-253-7782; Fax: 617-253-2660 <carlile@mit.edu>.
3. MIT Sloan School of Management, E53-339, Cambridge, MA USA 02142. Phone 617-258-6889; Fax: 617-258-7579; <nelson@mit.edu>.
Few ideas offer more potential for improving our understanding of organizations and how they react to the introduction of new technology than the notion that human action and social structure recursively interact. Like all major advances, however, notions of structure and structuring pose numerous challenges for refining current conceptions of organizations and the processes of organizing. In this paper we offer an approach for theorizing about the recursive interactions between action and social structure occasioned by the introduction of new technology. Our method integrates three elements from social and organization theory: a focus on activities, attention to accumulations of knowledge by individuals in those activities, and the recursive relationship among activities and accumulations. We apply this lens to Barley’s study of two hospitals implementing a CT scanning technology. Through the development and analysis of a simulation model we show how the relative distribution of expertise between doctors and technologists in using the technology recursively interacts with the conduct of the scanning activity to determine the patterns Barley observed.
You can download the paper in .pdf format by clicking below:
Formalizing Ethnographic Evidence
You can download the technical appendix that accompanies the paper by clicking below.
You can download the model (written in Vensim, see http://vensim.com) and the associated command files by clicking below: