Dissertation Research: Recovering the Organizational Significance of Technology

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This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Social Studies of Science, Engineering, and Technology will support data collection in a comparative case study of the adoption and implementation of new information systems by universities. The study is explored with guidance from two perspectives: neo-institutionalism from organization analysis in sociology, and actor network theory from science and technology studies. Data primarily come from interviews with officials at large Midwestern research universities. Two questions are asked. First, why do organizations of higher education adopt new information systems; and secondly, what consequences result from a university choosing to implement a new information system like PeopleSoft?? Neo-institutionalists suggest that organizations copy each other's moves in order to be perceived as legitimate players in a field. Organizations are especially likely to mimic each other in conditions of uncertainty, when concerns about rationality and legitimacy force administrators to account for their decisions. Actor network theory shifts explanatory attention away from the adopting organization, and toward the provider of new technologies. It asks: how do vendors of new information systems manage to convince university administrators that their organizational problems are best solved by adopting, for example, PeopleSoft? For neo-institutionalists, because the adoption of a technology is done primarily for legitimacy, its post-implementation effects are undertheorized and thought to be inconsequential. But for actor network theorists, the implementation of a new technology is expected to exert significant pressure for change in organizational practices and structures. The adoption of a new information system by universities (like PeopleSoft) allows for an opportunity to bring together these two theoretical orientations for empirical assessment. The study will reveal much about how technologies are related to work-practices, and make significant contributions both to science and technology studies and to the sociology of organizations. This comparative case study of PeopleSoft (and other information systems) will help universities to choose more wisely as they outsource an increasing number of bureaucratic tasks to private market vendors. Moreover, by soliciting experiences (through personal interviews) from university employees who have faced the difficulties of implementing a new information system, the dissertation will yield information and understandings that might help organizations better accommodate future technological intrusions.