IS-Related Organizational Change and the Necessity of Techno-Organizational Co-Design(-In-Use)

Abstract

This chapter considers some aspects of an ethnomethodologically oriented ethnography that has been carried out in a medical Emergency Response Centre (ERC) before, during, and after an IS-related organizational change. After a description of the everyday work in the ERC and its larger social arena, the authors discuss the main changes and the users group’s resistance that mediated the new technologies’ transformative potential: the rejection of abandoning ‘old’ cooperative work practices, and the emergence of an innovative one, with its own condition of appropriateness, applicability, and accountability. Finally, starting from the evidence that solutions to problems emerging in a field must be coherent with the endogenous organization of activities of that field, with the configuration of inter-actions that actually sets up that context, the authors discuss the necessity of co-design(-in-use), and the possibilities provided by ethnomethodological ethnography as a tool for action research in IT design and techno-organizational change management.