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58 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

(1995) refers to this as the ‘interpretative flexibility’ of technologies, arguing that
technologies are fundamentally equivocal because they can be interpreted, and
made sense of, in different ways by different people. This explains why individu-
als and groups can ‘enact’ (or act out) the same technology in different ways.
Technologies, according to this view, are a bit like the props on a stage – they
can be picked up and used by different actors for different purposes (an umbrella
might be used as a weapon, for example!). Orlikowski (2000) argues, then, that
the use of any kind of ICT is best seen as a process of enactment. Implementing
a new ICT system in an organization will not deterministically change knowl-
edge workers’ practices. Rather, enactment emphasizes how knowledge workers
appropriate a given technology in different ways as part of their ongoing every-
day practices, as described next.
In some cases, people may enact the technology so that they do not have
to change their work practices, even where the technology was introduced
precisely in order to facilitate practice change. Thus, people may simply ignore
the technology or use it only very minimally, so that it does not interfere with
their established practices. For example, when Powerpoint was first introduced
as a technology into an academic environment, many professors continued
to use the old overhead transparency technology – handwriting on a sheet of
clear plastic and using a projector to project this on to a screen. It took many
years for some to ‘convert’ to the Powerpoint technology; and indeed many
never have.
In other cases, a new technology may be used, but not in the way intended.
For example, users may create ‘add-ons’ to a new ICT system that enable
them to continue to do work in the way that they always have done it. Thus,
there are many examples of people who download data from a new corporate
IT system and reformat this into an Excel spreadsheet that allows them to
work in the way they always had prior to the implementation of the corporate
system.
In other cases, users may draw upon the new technology to substantially
change their work practices, even in ways that were not anticipated by the
designers. For example, using a customer relationship management (CRM)
system, those in a sales department, may change their former habit of cold-
calling potential customers randomly and instead use the CRM system to
identify those most likely to be receptive to their calls and then target pro-
motional offers at this group without any cold-calling. This may, or may not,
be a more productive use of their time, but the point of the example is that it
is not the CRM system per se that changes the work practice, but rather the
users, as knowledgeable and inventive practitioners, find ways to use the sys-
tem to support them in doing their job (or conversely find ways to avoid using
the system or find ways to adapt the system to suit their needs). Knowledge
workers, in particular, often have ability, and the power, to enact technolo-
gies in ways that suit their interests, as we see in the case at the end of this
chapter, where university professors were able to resist a technology that was
designed to try to get them to change practice against their will. This impor-

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