TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY -
By Hafidh Saif al Rawahy -
PEOPLE generally conceptualise technology as a human arrangement of “tools, machines, materials, and methods” to serve attainment of human purposes. When it comes to information and communication technologies (ICTs), people may not fully recognise the complex interplay between technologies and humans especially in organisational settings. They usually hold a naïve view of technology-human relationship, drawing a clear line of demarcation between what they consider as technical and social. It is argued here that the relationship is much more complex, like a juggernaut, where technology and humans continuously struggle to shape each other. Improved understanding of this relationship is a critical factor for putting technical systems in complex social organisations.
A common view, each generation in history produces new technological innovations believed to determine human development. Some innovations take off and others crash and burn. Unsuccessful innovations disappear and the successful ones seem to have proved their values and are rapidly adopted as the force to transform organisations and society. This simplistic view of technological progress causing social progress has long endured and is quite popular among policy makers. For most people and most of the time, the technologies they use every day are of mysterious origin and design, neither are they concerned to know from where they come or how they were designed and produced. They simply are interested in their use and to some extent are willing to adapt themselves to technology’s requirements hoping that they will continue to function the same way. Technologies appear to have emerged as if from nowhere and proceed to transform organisations and societies into which they are diffused. The drawback with this thinking, it leaves no space for human choice or intervention in the process of design, produce or use. It also excuses people from responsibility of their decisions about technologies and for the technologies they make or use.
At the very least, people exercise choice to use technologies, and how they do so. This leads us to another way of thinking about this relationship with the notion of technologies as neutral tools. Alongside this thinking, the origins of technologies in terms of how they were designed and produced are not considered problematic, but the ways in which they are used in organisations most certainly are. This view at least gives importance to individuals and groups in organisations who are making choices to use technologies and how they use them. It creates a space for considering complex and sometimes conflict-ridden socio-technical interactions inherently common in most organisational environments. This view is at the core of management thinking in corporate environments. Closer look at the origins of technologies deployed in their organisations reveal that the processes by which these technologies are designed and produced are just as riven by human choices as and when they are used, indicating that technologies are not neutral tools after all; they are carriers of particular values and interests.
Alternatively, we can think of technologies as being socially constructed; they are designed, produced and used by people and therefore they are not separate from, but rather part of the social, economic and political forces of the organisations and society. Many technologies reveal footprints of the conditions of their design, production and use, raising an interesting point, technologies are not just things that perform useful functions; they are ideas that have been made real and therefore they carry meanings, values, goals, assumptions, interests and prejudices of their designers, producers, users and promoters. For instance, a car is not just an engine in steel-casing with electronics or a means of transportation. Its meanings are given through the process of design, production and use. Whether or not people own cars, and if they do, the car’s make, age, price, size, etc all provide meanings for them and others about who they are, and what their values and aspirations. In the same way, the designs of cars carry prejudices of their manufacturers. Big and powerful American cars reflect outgoing and social mobility; smaller and economic Asian cars reflect nuclear-family and frugal society; and sturdy and luxury European cars reflect prosperity and technical maturity. It is recognised here that the workings of technologies in organisations as the outcome of aligning meanings, interests, negotiations and compromises between individuals, groups and institutions involved. Its only drawback is its supposition that technologies themselves play no role in that process of social construction mainly because it over-stress social choices and surrounding environment at the expense of technical considerations.
A better way to conceptualise the technology-human relationship in organisations is to give prominence to both social and technical actors — humans (individuals and groups), materials (computers, networks and tools) and non-materials (software, standards, methodologies, policies, strategies and identities). For instance in the act of driving a car one may be influenced by the car’s manoeuvrability, but also by traffic regulation, previous driving experience, road conditions, traffic, behaviours of other drivers or use of mobile phone. All these influencing and heterogeneous factors are linked to how you act. While technologies seem to represent material and non-material artefacts, this does not imply we should exclusively think of them as physical objects, rather we need to abstract technologies as material outcome of co-ordinated human actions and hence essentially social. Technologies are products of human actions because they come into existence, and sustained by human actions. They are also used or modified by humans to accomplish their goals. Through their use they are being reconstituted, and through their appropriation by humans, they exert their enabling or constraining influence. Also as a medium of human actions, technologies do not “determine” the performance of social practices of organisations, they only “condition”. For instance, only when users conform to technology’s embedded rules, processes and resources they unwittingly sustain the institutional structures in which the technologies are deployed.
In the interest of improving our way of thinking about technology-human relationship, I would disagree with statements such as “technology everywhere is the same and cannot be blamed” when it fail to take off or the “fault is in mindset of people”. It is naïve to imagine we can parachute technical systems and they will just land safely on complex social environments. Technology may well be the same when sitting on-the-shelves; but when it is enacted in organisations it becomes different — a result of local design, negotiations, politics, understanding, entrepreneurship and leadership. From this perspective, technology seems to possess an “interpretative flexibility” and not just a “black-box” to be purchased, plugged and play. Even when a ready-made package is purchased by an organisation, it is always subject to extensive design of its use within an organisation and must be integrated with work processes, communication channels, means of co-ordination and collaboration, organisational culture, authority structures and every other element of an organisation. Local knowledge and local innovation are important in getting technologies interwoven with business processes, communication modes, routines and organisational power play. This underscores the need for local organisations to balance between looking outward for foreign expertise and looking inward for local know-how that is usually either undervalued or simply snubbed off.
