Political process perspectives on organization and technological change

Abstract

In 1949 in Mann Gulch and in 1994 in South Canyon, US firefighters died trying to outrun forest fires. They died ‘with their packs on’, weighed down by their satchels and other heavy firefighting equipment which they continued to carry despite instructions to remove them. Karl Weick (1996), in exploring why they did not ‘down tools’ when so ordered and it seemed rational to do so, raised central issues about the role of tools in people’s work identity, and the complex social and technical arrangements that make us hold on to ‘heavy tools’ when, in hindsight at least, a more flexible and responsive approach to changing conditions appear to warrant their release. This merging of people and the tools that they employ, the intertwined identities of our ‘material’ and ‘non-material’ cultures (Ogburn, 1964), is the subject of a growing number of studies extending far beyond the confines of technological change at work or within organizations. The questioning of the modernist assumption of a clear and unequivocal divide between ‘people’ and ‘things’ raises fundamental questions about how we are to understand technology, ourselves and progress in a late modern era. In an age of postmodern reflexivity characterized by the declining authority of metanarratives, questions are inevitably raised about the validity and meaning of any view of technology as an autonomous, independent and progressive ‘great growling engine of change’ (Toffler, 1970: 25). In what Latour (1994) characterizes as our ‘amodern’ world, the fundamental mythical divide upon which the self-understanding of our modernist culture was based – the separation of the ‘technical’ and the ‘human’ – is recognized by many for what it is (and was): a cultural equivalent of Canute ordering back the waves. The