involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs. Institutions ... ranging from financial and accounting techniques to structural designs and.
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WORK, CONTROL AND COMPUTATION: RETHINKING THE LEGACY OF NEO-INSTITUTIONALISM
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Jannis Kallinikos and Hans Hasselbladh
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ABSTRACT
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This chapter claims technology to be a principal mode of regulation in formal organizations alongside social structure and culture. Such a claim breaks with the conventional neo-institutional outlook that considers technology outside the object of institutional analysis of organizations. The distinctive regulative logic of computational technology is manifested in the increasing entanglement of domain-specific practices and their underlying cognitive and normative order with the decontextualized principles and methods that have traditionally been deployed in the management and control of work operations. Such entanglement and the effects it generates reflect the reshuffling of the regulative reach of technology, social structure and culture under the pressures exercised by the dynamics of current technological change and the impressive involvement of computational systems and artefacts in human affairs.
Institutions and Ideology Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 27, 257–282 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0733-558X/doi:10.1108/S0733-558X(2009)0000027010
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INTRODUCTION
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This chapter deals with the implications of the deepening involvement of computational information in work and the forms through which work is exercised and controlled. While significantly instrumentalized, work in modernity has always been embedded in strong normative and cognitive or cultural backgrounds that conferred it wider significance and meaning. Even though professions best exemplify the case (Freidson, 2001), these relationships apply to an impressive range of jobs and occupations in modern times. We refer to this complex assemblage of cognitive techniques, values, norms and orientations as regimes of work. The distinctive and domain-specific nature of the varying regimes of work has over the course of modernity been challenged by the development and organizational involvement of an armoury of managerial methods that we refer to as regimes of control, ranging from financial and accounting techniques to structural designs and management models (Fligstein, 1990, 2001). Regimes of control have been substantially more abstract and context-free than the work-specific practices underlying the regimes of work. The longstanding relationship and mutual implication of work and control regimes are currently reconfigured. Computational information reshapes both the nature of domain-specific tasks it regulates and the forms through which calculative techniques and modes of control and coordination are exercised. Technology has often been seen at a remove from social processes through which the institutional nature of work arrangements is negotiated and put into place. We would like to suspend this assumption and explore how the deepening involvement of computational information reframes the historical balance between work and control regimes. In doing so, we place technology alongside social structure and culture as the primary regulative modes in formal organizations. Social structure (e.g. formal role systems, routines, hierarchy) and culture (i.e. rationalized action schemes deriving from the prevailing cultural models of thinking and doing) have been the main objects of neo-institutional studies. Therefore, in considering technology a key modality for organizing social relations, we break with a longstanding tradition. We hope to be able to demonstrate the usefulness of such a venture in the rest of this chapter. In the next section we briefly position ourselves vis-a`-vis the varying neoinstitutional currents within organization studies. We raise several issues, a key one being the considerable neglect of an analytics of technology and the ways it is implicated in organizational and institutional processes. We then move on to show how technology represents alongside social structure and
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culture a principal mode of regulation in organizations. These ideas are further substantiated and specified by reference to work regimes and control regimes. Regimes of work pertain to the sphere of the workplace, even though they rely on shared and often formalized knowledge, practices and norms transcending the individual workplace. Regimes of control are systematic attempts to act upon regimes of work, to shape, classify and direct the criteria of relevance in work regimes. This is followed by a detailed description of the technological paradigm of computation and the ways it reshapes the nature of work tasks and the methods by which these are exercised. In the final section of the chapter, we bring together the conceptual threads we have developed, considering how computation impinges upon work and control regimes and delineating how our claims differ from neo-institutionalist ways of understanding work and organizations.
TECHNOLOGY AND THE NEO-INSTITUTIONAL LEGACY
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Early contributions to the neo-institutional research in organization studies considered technology as an autochthonous phenomenon not amenable to institutional analysis (Meyer & Rowan, 1977/1991; Meyer & Scott, 1983). Technology was seen as central component of the organizational ‘core’, which social and institutional factors impinged on, modified or disturbed. Thus understood, technology was construed as virtually outside the processes and structures that were affected by institutional forces. That position was most clearly stated in the model developed by Meyer and Scott (1983), in which technology was conceptualized as the second major force affecting organizations, apart from institutional forces. The institutional environment, ‘an evolving set of rationalized patterns, models and cultural schemes’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1977/1991), was pictured as the site of rationalization. Organizational structures and modes of conduct were conceptualized as under constant pressures to put up a legitimizing display of structural and normative conformance. In this respect, the rationalizing process was seen as being at odds with technology. Despite a number of seminal contributions in which work processes, structures and, crucially, control mechanisms were shown to be closely linked to technological processes (cf. Perrow, 1967), neo-institutional analysis remained alien to the idea that technological artefacts may embody values, normative orientations and promote distinctive modes of conduct.
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The early contributions were followed by DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983/ 1991) immensely influential formulation of a neo-institutional framework that has ever since inspired numerous empirical studies. Their contribution was to conceptualize institutional processes in ways that overcame many analytic problems underlying the somewhat sketchy description of the institutionalized environment portrayed by Meyer and Rowan. They defined a new level of analysis – organizational fields – and three mechanisms creating structural isomorphism (coercive, normative and mimetic). From then on, and still up to this day, a considerable amount of research within neo-institutionalism in organization studies has been occupied with the empirical investigation of one or another aspect of structural isomorphism. This approach had the undeniable premium to fit the dominant North American methodology in social science – large-scale studies of populations (organizations in this case) in which the emergence and diffusion of similar organizational forms or structural devices of formal organizing were analyzed by statistical methods. The central conclusions in these studies relate to the importance of interorganizational relationships of stratification, that is, relationships where some organizations are leaders and other followers, the role of certain actors, especially the state and professions, as agents of change and carriers of structural devices of organizing. The processes studied were understood as being predominantly of social or cultural character. They seldom touched upon technology or anything materialized beyond the written word (rules, formal positions). The black box of legitimacy, often deployed in a tautological way (broad diffusion was often equalled to ‘legitimacy at work’), played a central explanatory role, as the major prerequisite for organizational survival and success. As we have noted earlier (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000), there is a striking resemblance between the neo-institutional studies of structural isomorphism and diffusion research in general. A theoretically subtler and methodologically more variegated brand of neo-institutional studies, mostly inspired by Friedland and Alford (1991), has challenged the primacy of studies of structural isomorphism among sets of organizations. Contrary to the previous emphasis on institutionalization as a unidirectional and one-dimensional process, a broad range of studies have set out to define and study institutional logics (Thornton, 2004). Friedland and Alford mentioned the capitalist market, the bureaucratic state, the family (as institution), democracy and organized religion as the central institutions of modern societies and as sources of distinctive institutional logics. Thornton and Ocasio (1999, p. 804) define institutional logics as ‘the socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices,
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assumptions, values, beliefs and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality’. Common to this direction in neoinstitutionalism is the emphasis on analyzing institutions as partially independent from each other but also, and perhaps increasingly, crossing each other’s domains and layered upon one another to produce ambiguity, social conflict and new social practices. While this has been a crucial reinvigoration of neo-institutionalism, very similar ideas can be found across contemporary social sciences. The view of modern society as constituted by different, sometimes conflicting logics has become an increasingly common point of departure (cf. Castoriadis, 1987; Giddens, 1990; Fairclough, 1992; Luhmann, 1982, 1995). In this brand of neo-institutionalism, technology is seen as embedded in particular institutional logics, for instance, subsumed under a prevailing institutional logic of an industry (Thornton, 2004). In that sense, institutional logics do not break with the neo-institutional legacy. The wholesale concept of the institutional environment is broken down to empirically identifiable institutional logics, related to distinct material and symbolic practices, while institutional fields are rather seen as a particular level of analysis, suited to investigate the unfolding and intermingling of institutional logics (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). Conceptualized in this way, institutionalization processes become more open-ended phenomena and possible to analyze with considerably larger variation of research methodologies than in the previous semi-diffusionist studies of structural isomorphism. The turn towards institutional logics might be seen as neoinstitutionalism distancing itself from the yoke of contingency theory and functionalism underlying many studies of structural isomorphism, thus moving closer to contemporary social theories. The more nuanced and empirically variegated research programme on institutional logics has however backtracked with respect to some of the defining characteristics of neo-institutional research. In some studies inspired by the notion of institutional logics, agency seems to have assumed a self-evident natural quality being regarded as inherent in individual and collective actors, although susceptible to the influence of various situational factors (cf. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, & Caronna, 2000). It is worth in this respect reminding of Friedland and Alford’s (1991, p. 260) poignant warning: ‘Without understanding the historical and institutional specificity of the primary objects of analysis, social scientists run the risk of elaborating the rationality of the institutions they study, and as a result become actors in their reproduction’.1
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Neither the semi-diffusionist studies of structural isomorphism nor the more recent analysis of institutional logics recognize technology as a distinctive regulative mode. Until recently, neo-institutional studies regarded technology either as a ‘dependent variable’, affected by external institutional forces, or as a domain of practice not susceptible to analysis by means of neo-institutional concepts. The more recent shift to institutional logics affords a place for technology as an element of the particular ensemble of values, practices, norms and so on that make up an institutional logic. The approach of institutional logics has several strengths in guiding the analysis of organizational fields. It represents a multifaceted way to map broad similarities across organizations. But it is also capable of identifying and accounting for significant differences between them. For instance, the notion of institutional logics could serve to analyze the effects of technological change in an organizational field but seems less suited to disentangle why these effects occur in competencies, identities or norms or to penetrate into aspects of technological change, beyond everyday understandings as reported by the involved actors. The course taken in this chapter represents an attempt to address certain issues related to the institutional effects of modern information technology, rather than a voice from within earlier or later brands of neoinstitutionalism. The line of analysis we develop seeks to rediscover the route once opened by Lewis Mumford (1934) in his classic Technics and Civilization in which he traces the take off of industrialism and modernity to a variety of cultural predispositions and techniques, ranging from the discovery of central perspective and timekeeping to the diffusion of literacy and numeracy. Our contention to explore, or rather delineate the conditions for exploring institutional effects of computational technology, might be seen as a follow-up to the critique we have earlier voiced against the still dominant tendency within neo-institutionalism to prioritize the less tangible aspects of the social order (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000).
REGULATIVE MODES IN FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS The distinctive ways by which technology is involved in the making of organizational relations emerges against the juxtaposition of technological regulation with the ordering of social relations achieved through social structure and culture. These last have been the key objects of neo-
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institutional studies, that have focused in investigating formal role systems (i.e. bureaucracy/hierarchy) and rationalized action schemes predominantly deriving from the prevailing cultural models of thinking and doing. Little wonder, there is a close and historically substantiated relationship between technology, social structure and culture, whereby the one implicates or is driven by the others (Mumford, 1934, 1952; Winner, 1986). Also, the development and deployment of technologies necessitate access to rules and operational regimes and a host of other regulations. However, these should be distinguished from the very task and procedures embodied on (and thus regulated by) the technological system itself. Technological regulation works through a combination of strategies and principles deploying material objectification, functional simplification, closure and automation.2 Computation is a contemporary and crucial empirical manifestation of these principles, as we will show in more detail later in this chapter. Material objectification takes predominantly the form of elaborate technical codification (such as software code and relations between data tokens) that presupposes the extensive procedural simplification of the tasks and operations, which technology is called to bear upon. Software technology is fairly complex in technical terms but relies on the significant streamlining and simplification (occasionally referred to as reengineering) of the tasks and operations that constitute its target domain. In this respect, functional or procedural simplification must be understood as an instance of a selection, accomplished out of much a broader set of possibilities. Functional simplification constitutes indeed the core of technological mode of regulation (Luhmann, 1993, Ch. 5). It represents the key instrument and the rationale for decoupling the object of technological regulation from immediate human intervention (closure and black boxing) and the social relations that develop around work tasks, reduce the possible sequences of cause and effects (or ends and means) and automate their execution (Kallinikos, 2006). In what ways does technological regulation differ from regulation accomplished by means of social structure and culture? To begin with, all forms of social structure also presuppose ordering through a variety of strategies that bear strong resemblance to functional simplification and closure. Social structures represent a reduction of complexity through definition and specification of duties, standardization of their execution and stratification of their monitoring and evaluation. Routines and standard operating procedures are in many respects defining characteristics of organizations (March & Simon, 1958/1993; Nelson & Winter, 1982; Scott, 2001). However, these similarities notwithstanding, formal role systems and
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its accompanying job descriptions and rule stipulations can never be sealed off from their surrounding institutional and social complexity, at least not in the same way as technological systems. Nor can their execution be entrusted, other than in a trivial fashion, to material and technical means, as is the case with automation. Automation, it should be pointed out, is crucial to technological regulation. By black boxing and automating work processes, functional simplification is achieved. In this respect, bureaucracy and information technology could be seen as functional alternatives, as Beniger’s (1986) study of the economic origins of information technology suggests. Comprehensive material objectification and automation are thus essential to technology. The steps by which technological operations unfold in selffiring, chained sequences distinguish technological regulation from the management of complexity by means of formal role systems. But self-firing or automation is but a consequence of the distinctive forms through which technological objectification works. Formal roles systems are generally mapped onto the task segmentation and standardization upon which they bear (Mintzberg, 1979; Sinha & Van de Ven, 2005), but the two systems remain separate. By contrast, technological objectification is both exclusive and expansive. It tends to translate or replace altogether formal role systems with technological sequences. This may and often does imply the regulation of technology through higher order technologies, in a cascade or even hierarchy of technological systems (Luhmann, 1993). The distinction of technology from norms, rules, conventions and other culturally embedded action scripts may seem easier to make and more straightforward than that between social structure and technology. In a sense, technology and culture seem to be at a remove from one another. Cultural schemes, norms and rules may well rely on simplification, standardization and often substantial ritualization of behaviour, but these means of regulating social relations differ substantially from functional simplification, closure and automation. Perhaps, a key difference between the cultural and technological modes of regulation pivots around the emphasis put upon material objectification as a key strategy of control and coordination. No matter which values and predispositions particular technologies may express and which rules they make necessary, they cannot exist as technologies unless the functions they embody get externalized, materialized and carried out by elaborate and interrelated systems of devices and materially supported processes, including lines of code, as in software technology. Culture, on the contrary, makes extensive use of material artefacts but predominantly as means of expressing cultural predispositions rather than as means of instrumenting cause-effect or procedural sequences. By
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contrast, technology has an unmistakable outcome orientation (Castoriadis, 1987). It may be used in symbolic ways (gaining legitimacy, signalling modernity) but only by virtue of its pronounced instrumental orientation and the connotations tied to such an orientation. In this respect, the major difference between technology and culture as regulative modes lies in the varying and, to some degree, reverse emphasis given to the objectification versus subjectification processes (Table 1). Culture constructs subjects in an immediate way. Technology may accomplish such a task only indirectly by means of constructing an object universe that turns upon subjects, aspiring to direct and channel their behaviour by engraving the paths along which subjects enact their agency (Kallinikos, 2004b). These relationships are schematically summarized in Table 1. The differences between these three primary modes of regulation identified here are of course subtle and shifting. Most crucially, they often presuppose one another and each one may provide support for the others, as historical examples of regimes of work and control testify. For instance, skill profiles and patterns of use associated with particular technologies are to some degree modes of interiorizing (through learning) established patterns of action (culture). Technology is also strongly linked to a significant set of criteria (expertise) for designing formal role systems, which are key governance mechanisms for social structure. We conclude that an important aspect of what constitutes work and formal organizations in modernity has not explicitly been made to an object of inquiry and analysis in the neo-institutional research. The sparse interest in the institutional effects of technology becomes evidently a strong limitation against the background of the boundary-spanning nature of modern technology and its multivalent involvement in formal organizations. To study particular social settings, however, we need to find conceptual
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Table 1.
Strategies Modalities
Agency forms
Principal Modes of Regulation in Organizations. Technology
Social Structure
Functional simplification, closure Technological instrumentation, automation Skill profiles
Stratification, functional simplification Routines, standard operating procedures
World framing
Formal role systems
Models of action, modes of conduct
Objectification versus Subjectification
Culture
Norms, perceptions, expectations
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paths that allow us to dissect how these three primary modes of regulation are configured under the influence of historical forces and subjected to different forms of social authority. In the following section, we turn to the aforementioned distinction between regimes of work and regimes of control, which we see as representing different forms (institutions) of ordering social relations in organizations. We foresee that current technological developments bring considerable changes to the relative independence, which these two spheres have maintained from one another in the course of modernity. To be able to account for such a comprehensive change, it is necessary first to spell out the distinctive nature of work and control regimes and identify the forces that account for both their relative independence and current interpenetration.
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REGIMES OF WORK VERSUS REGIMES OF CONTROL
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Industrialism and modernity have been closely associated with the institutionalization of work to a distinct social domain, substantially separate from family, public and community life. In a long historical process, that acquired particular momentum in the first half of the 20th century, work has increasingly been made to an object of systematic and rationalized evaluation, redesign and effectivization (Tilly & Tilly, 1998). After nearly two centuries of profound transformation of work, one can safely conclude that there are no ‘natural’ forms of work to be found anymore nor any skills or competencies acquired by means of haphazard and contingent involvement with the exigencies of life. The overwhelming majority of occupations, positions and skill profiles in modern societies are the historical outcomes of a long process of occupational, industrial and administrative rationalization. Shaped by these developments, work in its various forms has come to be embedded in a more or less explicit instrumental and normative regime, that is, a constellation of knowledge, skill profiles, norms and expectations, professional roles, social relations and artefacts that together make work and its outcomes standardized and fairly recognizable across contexts (Dean, 1999, pp. 21, 211). What is thinkable, valued and recognized as legitimate professional practice is both circumscribed by and realized through a complex, heterogeneous assemblage of material conditions (sometimes manifested in pervasive organizationally embedded technologies
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like that of the steel mill or the assembly line) but also through a variety of social and institutional mechanisms. Professional identities (e.g. plumbers, military officers, medical or legal experts, computer engineers), forms of knowledge and competencies (educating small children, mending a car, constructing a building) are derivatives of intentionally designed structures and task processes in work life. In modern work life, people become what they are and do what they do as a result of being technically trained, socialized and continuously behaviourally adjusted to particular regimes of work. Goals, action schemes and particular orientations are solidified in work by a broad spectrum of means in a way that is simultaneously very pervasive and difficult to reduce to manifest expressions of intentionality (Perrow, 1986; Kallinikos, 2006). The assemblage of technologies, administrative routines and standard operating procedures, which defines each instrumental domain, is often entangled with a complex normative and behavioural background from which it is hardly separable. In that sense, regimes of work acquire the qualities that Foucault (1980, p. 95) attributed to power relations as ‘intentional and non-subjective’. While Foucault’s analysis primarily concerns political regimes, it is equally applicable to analyzing working life. A vast range of practices that might have been originally motivated by a calculative quest are crystallized and layered upon each other in ways that make it difficult to attribute to straightforward instrumental concerns (Rose, 1999). A regime of work does not simply express the ideas and goals of a collective at a certain point in time, less so of a particular individual (Gordon, 1991; Kallinikos, 2006, p. 80). It is intentional in the sense of manifesting a distinctive logic of persistent orientation towards certain modes of action associated with the pursuit of particular objectives. The horizontal (cross-site, cross-organizational, cross-national) extension of work regimes is a central feature of modern societies. Regimes of work are not tied to single organizations or sites; they rather pertain to a societal domain – such as education, justice, medical practice, banking, forest industry or professional football (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Luhmann, 1982; Thornton, 2004). Many of the technological solutions, forms of knowledge, skill profiles and administrative methods that make up what we refer to as regimes of work are used, mimicked and cross-fertilized across organizational boundaries. In fact, many of these features are part of a general, nowadays almost global repertoire of organizing (Meyer, Boli, & Thomas, 1987; Guille´n, 1994). Local workplaces are sometimes labelled as ‘organizations’ (schools, hospitals, etc.) but are, at least in a historical sense,
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local branches of a national system (often similar to other national systems) defined by a common work regime. Work regimes emerge and get enmeshed in daily work, becoming over time, trans-local schemes for constituting and organizing work in particular domains. At this point, we would like to introduce a distinction between regimes of work and regimes of control.3 The instrumentalization of work that results from the emergence and institutionalization of regimes of work is firmly rooted into the distinctive nature of work within which it occurs. Regimes of work are tied to the differentiation of modern societies into functional blocks and the further divisions that usually occur within these blocks, for example, primary, secondary or higher education, primary or specialized health care and production of industrial goods of various kinds (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Luhmann, 1982, 1995; Thornton, 2004). The processes that have given rise to the instrumentalization of work in different contexts of modern societies have certainly been trans-organizational and marked by shifts and turns. But they have always retained strong elements of specificity, derived from the particular character of tasks addressed within each one of them. Alongside the instrumentalization of work that results from the institutionalization of work regimes, we find one of the major topics in research on organizations that we associate with control regimes. Since the late 19th and early 20th century, work has increasingly become an object of distant framing, evaluation and control. Beginning as mundane efforts to record and monitor businesses or other commercial operations to make them calculable (Hopwood, 1987; Miller & O’Leary, 1987), these efforts soon developed into a new form of hierarchically mediated power relations. The historical development of the major structural patterns, methods and procedures of hierarchical control in formal organizations such as the ‘M-form’, decentralized budgeting, tayloristic work processes and particular office forms have been a major area of research in previous scholarship in business history (Chandler, 1977), industrial sociology (Bendix, 1956) and, in later days, the new institutionalism in organizations studies (cf. Baron, Dobbin, & Jennings, 1985; Fligstein, 1990; Mezias, 1995). These different structural solutions were not free-floating ‘tools’, evaluated according to their user value. Control techniques, for instance, management control by means of applying the return on investment (ROI) measure, are linked to ideals of organizing that carry a far higher degree of generality, abstraction and decontextualization. Thus emptied of its context or sector-associated particularities, work is constituted as an object amenable to intervention (Hasselbladh & Kallinikos, 2000). The most profound empirical analysis in
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that regard is to be found in Fligstein’s (1990) work on the historical evolution of ideals of control in American industry. Regimes of control could be seen as formal templates for structuring and monitoring the collective contributions of people in organizations, irrespectively of the nature and particular character of that contribution. Regimes of control are designed to bear on work regimes irrespectively of the specific nature of work within the various regimes of work. In this respect, regimes of control are closely tied to the diffusion of formal organizations in modern times. They are to a much higher degree than work regimes linked to goals and priorities of particular social groups, such as owners, principals and managers, though they are far from simple tools in the hands of these groups (Deetz, 1992). Recast in this terminology, research on organizations has been preoccupied with analyzing the extent to which regimes of control actually intervene upon and reshape regimes of work, often entertaining anachronistic and romantic views of work as something real, authentic and good. Industrial sociology has explored the impact of various structuring, formalizing and calculating measures on regimes of work that are traditionally associated with low-skill tayloristic or quasitayloristic work (cf. Braverman, 1974; Zuboff, 1988; Orlikowski, Walsham, Jones, & DeGross, 1996). Across a considerable number of industries and sectors, regimes of work and regimes of control have in many ways had a rather contingent relation. Regimes of control also transcend individual organizations, both in terms of the structural components they are made of and in terms of the organizing ideals they are predicated on. Not infrequently, regimes of control have failed to penetrate in any substantive fashion the prevailing regimes of work. Weick’s (1976) notion of ‘loosely coupled systems’ is indicative of this phenomenon, as is Meyer and Rowan’s (1977/1991) notion of the Janusfaced character of formal organizations. Even though regimes of work and regimes of control have co-evolved and often been interlinked in a variety of ways, they have also retained considerable independence from one another in many work settings and domains. Thus, regimes of work, we suggest, should be distinguished from regimes of control in the various forms the latter have assumed in formal organizations in modernity. In some respects, the contradistinction between regimes of work and regimes of control coincides with the historical tension between a logic of action associated with particular occupations or professions and the abstract and decontextualized logic of action brought about by the diffusion of formal organizations and their ascent to a key institution for organizing human effort in modernity (Luhmann, 1994). The neo-
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institutional school has so far paid little attention to work as a regime independent from control. Most of the times, work has been assumed to be ‘sealed off’ from the influence exercised by institutional forces that often take the form of control regimes, diffusing across industries, societal sectors and nations (Fligstein, 1990).
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THE TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGM OF COMPUTATION
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The relationship between work and control regimes described above is currently reconfigured by the deepening involvement of computational information across work domains and organizations. In this section, we describe some key features of computation as technological paradigm and its implications for the forms through which work is exercised and controlled. To begin with, software packages are elaborate systems of data tokens whose permutations (combinations) are governed by logical operations of the more general and context-free nature (Hayles, 2005; Kallinikos, 2004a; Zuboff, 1988). In this respect, software packages are key vehicles of rationalization that re-enhance the orientation and mode of regulation intrinsic to regimes of control. However, particular software-based applications embody specific functionalities, dictated by the nature of tasks whose execution or monitoring they are brought to assist. Electronic patient records, for instance, must combine the computational logic of automation with the specific character of patient records as these have been shaped by medical practice. Traditionally, computational technologies have been considered as means to further administrative rationalization, reengineering, streamlining or optimization of work processes (Castells, 1996; Yates & Van Maannen, 2001; Lilley, Lightfoot, & Amaral, 2004). The common understanding has been that the computational mediation of work tasks, modules and organizational operations by and large continues the tradition of industrial techniques, and the ways these have been implicated in the making of work and organizational practices. Structural changes in organizations like shorter spans of control and flatter hierarchies, disaggregating of operations and outsourcing have been understood as the outcome of the thorough remaking of the infrastructural base of organizations brought about by computational technologies (Castells, 1996, 2000, 2001).
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Computational technologies have also been associated with the intensification of computer-mediated interaction across settings and organizational boundaries. Distributed work and networking have thus been attributed to the linking modalities of the new technologies of information and communication (DeSanctis & Monge, 1999; Fulk & DeSanctis, 1995). Granted that interaction and communication patterns are the ‘raw material’ of organizing (Knorr-Cetina & Bruegger, 2002; Weick, 1979), it is not surprising that distributed work and networking have been portrayed as an important agent of a change, away from hierarchical control and as a comprehensive platform upon which new forms of exercising work develop (Barley & Kunda, 2004). Since the diffusion of open source models of organizing, computational technologies have also been understood as an essential tool for supporting collaborative methods of work and new forms of sociality often referred to as social networks (Benkler, 2006).4 Their importance notwithstanding, none of these ways of understanding the organizational implications of computation is well suited to deal with the novel ways by which computation parses and reassembles reality and, through this, reconstitutes work processes and the building blocks of organizing. Studies on the work and organizational implications of information technologies have been confined to the documentation of their effects but seldom have they analyzed how these effects are associated with the distinctive constitution of computational technology. Rather than being simply a tool in the service of the broad objectives of reengineering and effectivization, computation represents a technological paradigm that introduces a set of historically innovative modes of perceiving and acting upon reality (Borgmann, 1999; Kallinikos, 2006). Let us explain. The interaction of humans with computational artefacts often assumes the forms of acting upon recognizable perceptual and cultural unities that reach humans at the level of the machine interface, that is, the computer screen. These may be administrative tasks or pieces of such tasks, standard operating procedures, services, email addresses, photos and images, depictions or descriptions of objects, personal information, object information and the likes. However, these objects are not natural or given but rather constructed and assembled by computational technology. A procedure enacted through human rule following and interpretation is never identical to the same procedure transposed electronically and assembled by computational means (Dreyfus, 2001; Lanzara & Patriota, 2001). The culturally and perceptually recognized character of computational objects conceals the elaborate mechanics by which the computational technology reassembles reality from scratch. What reach the interface with
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humans are not simply versions of reality that are mediated en bloc, units of an already perceived world transferred to the virtual realm. The computational rendition of reality is accomplished by means of a relentless decomposition of perceptual and cultural unities and their reconstitution through elaborate panoply of automated procedures by means of which digital tokens or figures are assembled to meaningful (culturally and perceptually recognized) unities. What is on the screen engages constantly a series of underlying computer applications and systems through which it is sustained and manipulated. Computational objects are vertically stratified. The assembly of reality from scratch thus distinguishes computation from other modes and techniques for representing and constructing reality. This is the outcome of the fact that computation is (1) a cognitive technology of binary parsing that is marked by (2) a comprehensive degree of automation of cognitive operations unfathomable in the pre-computational age. Cognitive operations are often grounded on the decomposition of a particular phenomenon and the definition of the pieces or steps that are brought together to constitute that phenomenon. Abstract decomposition and procedural (stepwise) reasoning are therefore essential to many cognitive operations. Computation is, however, not simply a cognitive technology but a technology of elaborate binary parsing that, since Leibniz, is understood as a language for representing and constructing reality. This may seem mystic or long-stretched to non-initiates but makes up an essential quality of computation. Most culturally and perceptual recognized units can be traced back to a number (usually very large) of binary alternations. The comprehensive automation of computation provides the means for descending from the level of the interface down through higher level languages and machine language to elementary binary parsing. It is this way artificial (computational) objects are constructed and manipulated. In this respect, computation marks a distinctive step on the human forms of involvement with the world that has far-reaching implications for the established regimes of work and control with which we are concerned here. Computation carries the dream of reductionism intrinsic to managerial technologies and techniques straight into the daily procedures of work. The more profound implications of the analytic-reductionist constitution of computation emerge clearer against the background of the inherited forms of involvement with the world. Despite the broad range of technologies, methods and abstractions we earlier associated with the diffusion of work and control regimes, human involvement with the world has been accessed and mediated by perception and context-embedded forms of interaction (Cassirer, 1955). Indeed, the history of work could be
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understood as the longstanding effort to master the recalcitrant materiality or tangibility of the world. Its heavy cultural embeddedness notwithstanding, work has always been immersed into the materiality of life. Modern work regimes are undeniably instrumental in their orientation, even when they are concerned with accomplishing distinctive outcomes that are difficult to formalize, for example, curing illnesses, teaching children and designing a car. Such an instrumental orientation has nevertheless implied a tangible world involvement of one or another kind. Most work tasks and operations in the modern age have been exercised in environments in which face-to-face communication, immediate perception and bodily involvement have been central components (Arendt, 1958; Zuboff, 1988). The elaborate segmentation of the world brought about by the deepening division of labour in the recent history of industrial capitalism undoubtedly signified important changes that increasingly moved human involvement away from immediate confrontation with the world. An expanding array of operations has in this process been delegated to technology and automated machine systems, with humans increasingly assuming the role of distant and often mediated monitoring (Sotto, 1991). And yet, for all its abstractions and heavy technological reliance, industrial capitalism seldom moved as drastically away from the physical constitution of reality (Flusser, 1999, 2000, 2003) as computation is currently doing. One of the key forms through which computation impinges upon the reality of work is thus associated with the fact that computational procedures break with the primacy of perception (Kallinikos, 1995), as a key mechanism of relating to the world (things and social relations). The logical and deeply analytic/reductionist character of computational technologies drives perception away from natural or man-made objects and embedded interaction. The work objects computation constructs (computerized tasks, services, processes) are only superficially controlled by the user. A significant part of the job is accomplished by a whole range of automated (black boxed) operations activated by the user’s interaction with the interface. In this respect, computational objects or artefacts are constructed and sustained by recourse to automated cognitive operations (computations) that elude the human embeddedness in the world. To a certain degree, computation can be seen as simply a further step in the development of the methods of information processing cast in traditional media. A recollection, in particular, of the diffusion of numeracy in modernity suggests that numbers and numerical systems have been critically involved in the establishment of a reality different from that of immediate experience. Despite their apparent comprehensibility and semantic simplicity, numbers
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and numerical relationships are abstract cognitive entities that describe highly selective aspects of the world, standardizing and homogenizing it (Cline-Cohen, 1982; Rose, 1991). Therefore, the use of numerical systems in organizations has produced a reality brought forth by the constitutive power of numeracy and its particular applications, that is, a reality of frequencies, ratios, indexes and other abstract relationships far removed from the referential world. However, the connection between different information items or sources in traditional media and environments was the product of skilful human accomplishment (Dreyfus, 2001). The perception and culture-based recognition of the elements of reality were brought forth by routine or creative human intervention. The logic behind for instance calculating profit in terms of ROI has been accomplished by agents, enacting ideas about control, relevance and behaviour. Computational automation reframes the relationship between the expert and the object of expertise, as it seeks to reconstruct those aspects of human expertise that are automated. Such a reconstruction is by necessity accomplished by a long analytical journey through which expert skills and their object are dissolved and recaptured by computational artefacts. In this sense, computation and technological information continue a longstanding tradition of cognitive analyzability and calculability and endow it with a momentum that had been impossible without the comprehensive automation enabled by computation (Yates, 1989). The implications of these developments for the ways humans perceive and act upon the world are farreaching. If we are right, then a substantial part of the perceptual inputs and cognitive tools of human agents are and will increasingly come to be provided by the technology of computation and the variety of systems and artefacts it sustains. Whether as computer-constructed visual images and units or in the forms of discrete symbol tokens (alphabetic or numerical systems or other marks and digits), these perceptual inputs will to a large extent be derived from a microscopic reality about which humans do not and cannot have knowledge by experience and acquaintance.
TECHNOLOGICAL REGULATION AND INSTITUTIONS The constitutive qualities of computation suggest that its deepening involvement in work life is bound to change the content or object of work and the forms through which work is exercised and controlled. The degree to which domain- or site-specific characteristics of work are reconstituted
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through computation remains an empirical (contingent) question. But there are a few key features that we expect to encounter across a wide array of contexts. The compact, vertical constitution of computation and its growing organizational involvement suggest that a significant number of tasks, services and operations are and would increasingly be invoked, controlled and manipulated by elaborate systems of automated information-based procedures beyond the discretion of the user. This comprehensive black boxing and consequent automation of tasks and operations at an inclusive level (e.g. field, sector, nation) leads to a drastic reduction of the accessibility of the premises by which the object of work is constituted. Traditionally, the content and methods of work have to a certain degree been negotiated in situ or across occupational domains, within the social and material matrix of techniques, knowledge forms and meanings provided by work regimes. The developments we describe establish a new field of forces in which the processes that shape a work regime and the dynamics of technological change crisscross one another at several levels. The ongoing and comprehensive digitization of libraries offers a revealing example of how computation reframes the objectives of libraries, the work object of librarianship and the processes through which library services are assembled. Preservation and lending of books and documents give way to the imperatives of accessibility and findability, in an electronically connected world marked by the spectacular growth of electronic documents and the emergence of powerful search engines such as Google. The digital document (whether a book, photograph, article, etc.) is a different object than the traditional hard copy. It is much more malleable, and located, ordered and accessed by an elaborate repertory of automated procedures that pivot around what is referred to as metadata (concise descriptions of digital objects). The production of digital metadata is a highly delicate and complex sociotechnical task in which technical knowledge of computational objects and their behaviour is essential. A substantial number of other occupations or professions (journalists, accountants, physicians or lawyers, filmmakers and photographers to name but a few) have similarly been impacted by the trends we describe here. Work regimes have to some extent always been accessible to individual and collective reflection and negotiation. Despite a variety of constrains imposed by hierarchical control and other contingencies, reflection over the conditions underlying work regimes represented a key input in defining (through professional discourse, accumulation of experiential facts or other means) the object of work and the forms by which it should be acted upon,
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mastered and assessed. Computational shaping of the object of work by necessity reduces the local or domain-specific character of reflection and negotiation and transforms them to issues of engineering and technological development. Professional, locally embedded or domain-specific work features become objects of what is referred to as requirements engineering. Computation does not simply automate a particular object of work as trivializing accounts of it often assume. Most crucially, as the example of librarianship suggests, it impinges upon and reconfigures institutional arrangements previously negotiated within the bounds of particular work regimes. Accordingly, changes in work regimes increasingly derive from the dynamics of technological change that often transcend the jurisdictions of powerful groups (principal, managers, professional associations) operating within the instrumental culture and confines of particular work regimes. Against this backdrop, it is reasonable to conjecture that the rules of evaluation and the criteria of relevance in work will be increasingly formalized through technological means, as computation penetrates work and organizations. This leads to a rearrangement of existing forms of relations between work regimes and control regimes in formal organizations. If work regimes are shaped by the reductionist, analytic logic of computation, then the previously often uneasy and contingent attempts to accomplish coherence and intelligibility between the world of work and the priorities of a regime of control will increasingly be accommodated by computationally based control regimes. Linking a computerized work regime to a computerized control regime may lead to radically less transparent forms of control. This is the inevitable consequence of what we referred to above as the vertical constitution of computational technologies that makes it nearly impossible to retrace or reconstruct how a particular way of action is made mandatory or prohibited by stipulations in the software used in the work process (Grimmelmann, 2005; Lessig, 1999/2006). We suggest that empirical research should devote much more attention to the entanglement of work, control and computation that most neoinstitutional accounts of work and organizational processes have so far left aside. As already indicated, neo-institutionalism has failed to observe that technology is a key institutional carrier, to use the terminology of Scott (2001), through which work procedures, skill profiles and rationalized action schemes are implanted in organizations and across organizational fields. By contrast, we attribute technology a salient role in the making of work and organizational life. Reflecting over the course of modernity and the key role technology has played in the constitution of modern organizations, we would like to claim that technology in general and the paradigm of
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computation in particular represent a distinctive regulative mode. As such technology contrasts with social structure and culture along the lines presented earlier in this chapter and schematically summarized in Table 1. The developments associated with the computerization of work raise serious questions regarding the future of work and control regimes. Since early industrialism, norms and practices in work have been challenged by an increasingly complex assemblage of stratified structures, systems of control and methods of designing the work process. Despite its complexity, such an assemblage has to some extent been within the reach of individual and collective cognition, possible to reflect upon and engage. Computerization transforms work in subtler ways, far more difficult to grasp, let alone negotiate. Work procedures, criteria of performance and functionality embedded in software literally constitute the object of work, making very difficult to question the processes and outcome of work. The normative content of work is not any longer supported or mediated by technology, but it increasingly appears integrated, or even hidden, in technology. How are, for instance, the technicalities of metadata, to refer to our previous example of libraries, related to the preservation and diffusion of knowledge as a key normative orientation of librarianship? Functionality and outcome orientation have always been mixed up with norms in work settings, especially in professional work. But recent developments suggest we may come to witness an unforeseen interpenetration of technological processes with normative content, substantially weakening the assessment and normative evaluation of work. These are some of the reasons as to why institutional analysis cannot continue bypassing the involvement of technology in social life and how technology, social structure and culture as generic modes of regulation interact to shape the regimes of work and control. The interpenetration of technological, structural and cultural modes of regulation provides no excuse for failing to differentiate between them and expose the distinctive logic they exhibit.
POSTSCRIPT Technology represents one of three major modes of regulating formal organizations in late modern society. In this respect, it constitutes a key carrier through which established patterns of action and control are implanted in organizations and other instrumental settings of contemporary society. Our emphasis on technology in general and computation in particular
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intends to fill a historical gap in the genre of studies of organizations that draw on what we broadly conceive as institutional analysis. Work and control regimes are currently subject to significant transformations as computational technology expands its regulative aspirations, entering every walk of life. Technological dynamics that develop beyond the confines of particular regimes of work are shaping the object (what) and the processes (how) by means of which work regimes have developed as mainly horizontally negotiated forms of social relations. They also influence the constitution of control packages and raise their transferability across contexts and fields, thus further facilitating the penetration of work regimes by an abstract and decontextualized logic of control. The distinctive mode of technological regulation suggests that the structuring of work regimes and the organizational contexts they populate is to a much larger extent than before accomplished through the elaborate material objectification and encased instrumentation of work tasks and operations brought about by computation. Against this background, we find it no longer viable to solely focus on social structures and cultural norms as the primary modes of regulating formal organizations. To neglect the variety of forms through which technology becomes a vital mode of regulation in society at large and in organizations amounts to bypassing a key vehicle through which formal organizations are constituted as institutional entities. Technology, and more specifically computation, represents a twofold challenge to the students of institutional relations in organizations. Firstly, computation makes up a mode of regulation, which is partly not analyzable by the conceptual means provided by neo-institutionalism. Secondly, computation substantially rearranges the historically relatively independent relationship between regimes of work and regimes of control in working life and produces new and interesting imbrications. The claims we put forth in this chapter by no means deny the negotiability of technological systems and their local interpretation and reshaping. None of the three modes of regulation we mention (technology, social structure and culture) imposes unproblematically, linearly and unambiguously the patterns they carry on particular agents or local contexts. But according to our analysis, the present development of technology will have far-reaching implications, as it implies considerable changes of the forms through which agency is constituted and operates as well as of work as a societal domain semi-independent from vertical control. It may well be that a new realm of choice and freedom may open as a result of these trends (Benkler, 2006). But it is crucial to understand the historical trade-offs between what is lost
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and gained. Our analysis hopefully contributes in sketching a picture of the issues involved in both their ambiguity and complexity. Technology cannot be wished away.
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1. See Jepperson (2002) for a more comprehensive explication of another brand of neo-institutionalism, no longer residing in organization studies. The research program in sociology created mainly by John W. Meyer regards individualism and its social, cultural and political manifestations as institutional effects to be analyzed. 2. See Kallinikos (2004a, 2004b, 2006) for a more detailed explanation. 3. Studies of the work process, the social life of the shop floor, deskilling and so on used to have a prominent standing in academic research on formal organizations. It has become increasingly common to equalize organization research with often narrow and de-contextualized studies of singular control practices and to gloss over the work process as an object of study (see Barley & Kunda, 2001, for a more detailed critique). 4. Wikipedia, Facebook and Myspace are typical examples.
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