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60 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

organizations, they may overstate how deterministic these pressures actually
are. In contrast, other theories, notably structuration theory (Giddens, 1984),
in addition to recognizing the constraining influences of the existing envi-
ronment (i.e. existing social, political, cultural, economic structures), also
recognize the ability of actors to shape these structures over time. Indeed,
proponents of structuration theory argue that structures exist as constraints
only to the extent that actors enact these structures in their ongoing everyday
activity, thereby privileging human agency over structural constraint. There
are ongoing debates about the relative influence of institutional and structural
constraints versus human agency – debates that we are not going to be able to
resolve here. However, outlining these debates does highlight the importance
of recognizing the ways in which the design, diffusion and use of all kinds of
technologies that can potentially support knowledge work are influenced by
both the institutional environment and also the actions and interactions of
human actors.
More recently, it has also been pointed out that accounts of how technology
is designed, adopted and used have tended to ignore its material and physical
properties. What is becoming increasingly clear is that technologies are simulta-
neously social and physical (Orlikowski and Barley, 2001) artefacts – the physi-
cal properties of technologies influence the ways they can be used. In other
words, the material properties of a technology both constrain and afford its use.
For example, the traditional design of the telephone system constrained use
to particular physical locations because of the need for land-line connections.
Today, mobile phone technology frees up the use of the phone so that people’s
communication becomes much less geographically restricted. Such a differ-
ence reflects the material properties of the technology, which therefore con-
strain (and enable) the options available to designers and users (Barley, 1990;
Orlikowski, 2006, 2007). So, returning to the Blackberry example, Orlikowski
(2007, p. 1444) writes,
The performativity of the BlackBerrys is sociomaterial, shaped by the particular con-
tingent way in which the BlackBerry service is designed, configured, and engaged in
practice. For example, the ‘push email’ capability inscribed into the software running
on the servers has become entangled with people’s choices and activities to keep devices
turned on, to carry them at all times, to glance at them repeatedly, and to respond to
email regularly. Such activities are only relevant in the circumstance of messages being
continually pushed to handheld devices, and of shifting interpretations and interests
that become bound up with the constantly available electronic messages. It is not a
matter of the technology interacting with the social, but of constitutive entanglement.

This suggests that in order to understand the impact of technology on knowl-
edge work we need to integrate the influences of human agency and the purpose
to which technology is being put, the processes entailed in its construction, its
material properties, and the institutional context that enables (or disables) its
design and use. Addressing these characteristics – purpose, process and context,
in this case in relation to technology as a particular form of knowledge – is

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