Discipline and Change: How Technologies and Organizational Routines Interact in New Practice Creation

In this paper we study the development and implementation of a technology over a long period of time, with a particular focus on how its disciplinary effects interplay with and change organizational routines and actors’ capacities, thus producing new patterns of action. To identify these processes of change and emergence of practices, we propose a combinative theoretical analysis at the interface between institutional and practice-based approaches. Drawing on a rich ethnographic case study, we show how the fact of considering technologies as the combination of three dimensions (technical substrate, managerial philosophy and organizational model) furthers our understanding of institutional change and the creation of new practices. In particular, we examine the internal dynamics between the three dimensions of these technologies and the duality of organizational routines (their ostensive and performative aspects). This enables us to reintroduce practices and agency analysis into an institutional approach to technological change, and to put social history, designers’ assumptions and disciplinary effects of technologies back into the analysis of the micro-dynamics of routine changes. We identify several factors which partially explain divergent technological trajectories concerning institutionalization and emerging structures in two different settings.

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