Organizing with technology

Emerging technologies – like Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, wind and solar power, ubiquitous surveillance, digital platforms, autonomous vehicles, the hospital of the future, and more – are changing work, reshaping organizations, driving innovation, and transforming society. Introducing complex technologies in large organizations often takes place over years and can be associated with unpredictable upheaval and unexpected transformation. 

Waves of technological change are often associated with regimes of organizing such as Taylorism, Fordism, Globalization, and now Uberization. Today, as we face a variety of digital and other emergent technologies, there is a crying need for both practitioners and scholars to better theorize and explain the increasingly constitutive meshing of technology and organizing. 

Beyond theorizing the broader technological changes, there is an increased need for in-depth investigations of the processes where organizations embrace, adapt, and learn to function with novel technologies. We often start by embracing theoretical lenses such as sociomateriality, affordances, coordination, embodiment, framing, sensemaking, scripting,  performativity, conflict, and emergence. These studies typically require embedded ethnographic studies of the emerging change over long durations. 

Some of our active research projects:

Some representative papers: