The Scope Capture of Technology and Its Consequences for the Autonomy of High-Status Professionals

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 24: High-status Occupations and Technological Change

Abstract

Prior research suggests that high-status professionals should be able to appropriate workplace technologies in service of their autonomy. When might they be unable to do so, and with what consequences? Drawing on historical and ethnographic data on the development and use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, we describe how the “scope capture” of technology by law and finance constrains appropriation and impinges on the autonomy of high-status physicians. Scope capture unfolds over three phases: (a) financial-legal creep, where new financial-legal use cases become entrenched in the technology, (b) banalization, where financial-legal compliance professionals transform institutional pressures surrounding the technology into everyday annoyances, and (c) defensive backworking, where high-status professionals inadvertently enroll themselves in upholding the technology’s financial-legal use case over its original use case. These findings unpack how scope-captured technologies serve as vehicles for deepening the hold of financial-legal pressures on professional autonomy, producing adverse professional and organizational consequences.

Authors

• Devesh Narayanan, Stanford University

• Arvind Karunakaran, Stanford University

• Alex Lee