1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910461970903321

Autore

Leonardi Paul M. <1979->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, Massachusetts : , : MIT Press, , c2012

[Piscataqay, New Jersey] : , : IEEE Xplore, , [2012]

ISBN

1-283-58722-X

9786613899675

0-262-30577-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (345 p.)

Collana

Acting with technology

Disciplina

629.28/26

Soggetti

Automobiles - Design and construction - Data processing

Automobiles - Computer simulation

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Perceptions of inevitability -- Toward a theory of sociomaterial imbrication -- Crashworthiness analysis at autoworks -- Developing problems and solving technologies -- Articulating visions of technology and organization -- Interpreting relationships between the social and the material -- Appropriating material features to change work -- Organizing as a process of sociomaterial imbrication.

Sommario/riassunto

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.