The Co-evolution of Socio-technical Systems: Organizing as the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies

• In Event: Expanding The Relationship of Technology and Organizing

Abstract

In this paper, I develop a framework which suggest that organizational actors are always working to imbricate their own agency with the agency of material artifacts, and that different patterns of imbrication produce complementary changes in people’s social interactions and in technology’s material features. I draw on data collected through an ethnographic study of a computer simulation technology in a major U.S. automotive engineering firm to illustrate this framework empirically.

Author

• Paul Leonardi, Northwestern University