Car crashes without cars : lessons about simulation technology and organizational change from automotive design / Paul M. Leonardi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leonardi, Paul M., 1979- author.

Series:

Acting with technology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Automobiles--Design and construction--Data processing.

Automobiles.

Automobiles--Computer simulation.

Technology--Social aspects.

Technology.

Computer simulation.

Automobiles--Design and construction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 334 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2012]

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Every workday we wrestle with cumbersome and unintuitive technologies. Our response is usually "That's just the way it is." Even technology designers and workplace managers believe that certain technological changes are inevitable and that they will bring specific, unavoidable organizational changes. In this book, Paul Leonardi offers a new conceptual framework for understanding why technologies and organizations change as they do and why people think those changes had to occur as they did. He argues that technologies and the organizations in which they are developed and used are not separate entities; rather, they are made up of the same building blocks: social agency and material agency. Over time, social agency and material agency become imbricated--gradually interlocked--in ways that produce some changes we call "technological" and others we call "organizational." Drawing on a detailed field study of engineers at a U.S. auto company, Leonardi shows that as the engineers developed and used a a new computer-based simulation technology for automotive design, they chose to change how their work was organized, which then brought new changes to the technology. Each imbrication of the social and the material obscured the actors' previous choices, making the resulting technological and organizational structures appear as if they were inevitable. Leonardi suggests that treating organizing as a process of sociomaterial imbrication allows us to recognize and act on the flexibility of information technologies and to create more effective work organizations.

Contents:

1 Perceptions of Inevitability 1

2 Between Technological and Organizational Change 21

3 Crashworthiness Analysis at Autoworks 55

4 Developing Problems and Solving Technologies 85

5 Articulating Visions of Technology and Organization 131

6 Interpreting Relationships between the Social and the Material 177

7 Appropriating Material Features to Change Work 235

8 Organizing as a Process of Sociomaterial Imbrication 265.

Notes:

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

9780262305778

0262305771

OCLC:

810933271

Publisher Number:

9786613899675

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.