Welcome to the InfoSci Platform
Reference Hub3
Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century: New Mechanisms at Work

Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century: New Mechanisms at Work

Louise Harder Fischer, Richard Baskerville
Copyright: © 2020 |Volume: 31 |Issue: 4 |Pages: 19
ISSN: 1063-8016|EISSN: 1533-8010|EISBN13: 9781799804727|DOI: 10.4018/JDM.2020100104
Cite Article Cite Article

MLA

Fischer, Louise Harder, and Richard Baskerville. "Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century: New Mechanisms at Work." JDM vol.31, no.4 2020: pp.69-87. http://doi.org/10.4018/JDM.2020100104

APA

Fischer, L. H. & Baskerville, R. (2020). Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century: New Mechanisms at Work. Journal of Database Management (JDM), 31(4), 69-87. http://doi.org/10.4018/JDM.2020100104

Chicago

Fischer, Louise Harder, and Richard Baskerville. "Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century: New Mechanisms at Work," Journal of Database Management (JDM) 31, no.4: 69-87. http://doi.org/10.4018/JDM.2020100104

Export Reference

Mendeley
Favorite Full-Issue Download

Abstract

A predominant understanding in information systems research (ISR) is that technology has institutionalizing, routinizing, and socializing effects in its interaction with users in the human enterprise. Subscribing to these effects from an organizational point of view no longer provides a full understanding of the more complex dynamics in the 21st century workplace inhabited by a vast amount of different technologies with different purposes. Through a critical realist analysis, focusing on patterns in socio-technical structures and more specific actions and outcomes afforded by the recent and forceful adoption of unified communication and collaboration platforms (UCC), the authors see a new, powerful socio-technical mechanism of individualization that is profoundly changing these socio-technical dynamics. Through 18 interviews with knowledge professionals, the study finds that the mechanisms of individualization reduce the influence of the organization as an institutionalizing and socializing socio-technical system. As an example, the power of individualization creates new parallel structures of small networks of close colleagues. Thus, this research sees new structural patterns and dynamics emerging, forming a much more complex, yet self-organizing socio-technical system. The authors suggest expanding the socio-technical understanding of the present techno-organizational reality by taking into account the socio-technical mechanisms that produce certain outcomes. By understanding the fundamental mechanisms at work, they provide those with a fuller understanding of how these mechanisms can enable, while simultaneously crippling, each other. This fuller understanding also aids the pursuit of providing workplaces that achieve both humanistic and economic objectives.

Request Access

You do not own this content. Please login to recommend this title to your institution's librarian or purchase it from the IGI Global bookstore.