Abstract
Traditionally, research related to Sustainable Information and Communication Technology (Sustainable ICT) has focused on the technological aspects, but there is an emerging stream of research, which looks at Sustainable ICT from the viewpoint of the social sciences. In this paper, we build on and contribute to this research by emphasizing the role of history in the shaping of Sustainable ICT. Rather than seeing the importance of history as pure technological determinism or path dependency, we draw on the historical turn in organizational studies to highlight the idea that history is malleable. This implies that organizational actors can reshape their past from the present, thus creating new conditions for the future. To highlight the importance of this theoretical conceptualization of history, we present a case study of the Nordic ICT company Tieto, where the heat recovery system of the Älvsjö data center (finished in 1978) was reconceptualized as “green” following the Green Information Technology (Green IT) trend in 2007. This way of theorizing organizational history could be used more widely within research into Sustainable ICT in order to understand why Sustainable ICT has become what it is, which also implies that we can re-interpret this history to shape the future of Sustainable ICT.
Highlights
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a cornerstone of modern society and an integral part of everyday life
Scholars arguing for a historical turn claim that organization researchers have traditionally failed to properly understand the role and impact of historical processes for the unfolding of organizational events such as the development of organizational identity and the adoption of certain practices and technologies. Their main message is that history is “malleable” [13] (p. 622) and open to interpretation rather than given and immutable [14,15,16,17,18], and that organizational actors often use dispersed historical memory cues to create a sense of meaning and coherence in organizational narratives [19,20]. In starting this dialogue between Sustainable ICT and the historical turn within organization studies, we argue that Sustainable ICT practices and/or technologies are adopted because they are superior, i.e., more sustainable or profitable, to other practices and/or technologies
We argue that a change in the global discourse about sustainability in the ICT industry contributed to the possibility to re-imagine the material and very “real” heat recovery system as Green Information Technology (IT) and later Sustainable ICT
Summary
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a cornerstone of modern society and an integral part of everyday life. Scholars arguing for a historical turn claim that organization researchers have traditionally failed to properly understand the role and impact of historical processes for the unfolding of organizational events such as the development of organizational identity and the adoption of certain practices and technologies. Their main message is that history is “malleable” [13]
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