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56 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

and knowledge workers and recognize the importance of taking a process
perspective (see Chapter 1) on managing the introduction of any kind of tech-
nology – seeing this as a complex, and typically highly political, organizational
change process. The chapter begins by looking at the general relationship
between technology and organization and then provides the example of tele-
working to illustrate the human, structural and institutional influences on this
relationship. The chapter then goes on to explore new organizational forms
that are potentially more conducive to knowledge work and how these have
been influenced by new forms of ICT. We illustrate the problems of introduc-
ing ICT to effect organizational change with a case study of a university that
was seeking to ‘professionalize’ practices through introducing an enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system. In this case, ignoring the needs and wishes
of powerful faculty was not effective but this was only recognized in the post-
implementation phase when changes had to be made to the system design to
accommodate this group and their administrators.

>> THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND
ORGANIZATION

In thinking about the role of technology (and in particular ICT) in facilitating
knowledge work within an organization, it is important to first look in more
general terms at the relationship between technology and organization. This
will help us to understand that introducing an ICT to support some aspect of
knowledge work will not, in-and-of-itself, lead to the desired effect.
Early researchers exploring the relation between technology and organization
developed accounts which were ‘deterministic’ – that is, they assumed either that
the organization somehow determines which technology can be adopted or that
the adoption of technology determines what kind of work can be carried out.
For example, in one of the earliest studies, Woodward (1965) argued that dif-
ferent types of technology were associated with different forms of organization.
Others followed suit, considering different attributes of technologies and their
relationship to organizing and organizational structures (for example, Perrow,
1967). These are referred to as ‘contingency theories’ – where an organization’s
structure and/or processes are seen as contingent on, or dependent on, the
type of technology that is used. In this sense, these authors also implied that the
technology determines or causes a particular form of organization. For example,
it was suggested that the more complex and unpredictable the production sys-
tem technology, the more likely were organizations to adopt organic rather than
mechanistic structures (Burns and Stalker, 1961).
In studies of ICT this was taken one step further, with authors assuming
that ICT could ‘drive’ or ‘force’ organizational change – so, if an organiza-
tion adopts a Knowledge Management System (KMS – a type of technology
discussed more fully in Chapter 7), this would lead to improvements in the
extent to which individuals would share knowledge. Such a deterministic view
of technology is very simplistic and is not supported by empirical evidence. As

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