Information technology as organization/disorganization

Information technology is seen, perhaps paradoxically, as having unleashed both more organization and more disorganization upon the world. This organizing and disorganizing potential has in the last two decades inspired a vast literature of enthusiasm and suspicion, anxiety and expectation. Technophiles often conjure utopian visions of information technology as the agent of individual freedom, consumer convenience, shared knowledge (virtual), community, and frictionless markets. At the same time, these dreams easily mutate into nightmares. Thus, technophobes detect in those same technological developments the birth pangs of Orwellian dystopias, where privacy is extinguished through computer enabled surveillance (an excess of order and organization). Or, alternatively, of Hobbesian virtual worlds populated by pornographers, malevolent hackers, unscrupulous fraudsters, depraved paedophiles and resurgent neo-Nazis (an excess of disorder and disorganization). No matter, hyperbolic such visions of technologically facilitated salvation and damnation may be, we must nevertheless not forget that events such as the dotcom bubble and the millennium bug panic of recent years clearly fed on these kinds of imagery. It is evident that the contradictory ways in which the role of ICTs in promoting (dis)organization are publicly appraised reflects a deeply held social ambivalence (from the Latin ambi-, in two ways, valentia strength, and valere value (Chambers, 2004)). Important changes are afoot in the realm of organization and what they amount to is still a matter of considerable dispute. At minimum, this represents a challenge to IS researchers to conceptualize more adequately and articulate more clearly the nature of the transformation(s) being undergone by contemporary organizations. In particular, it invites us to specify whatever role specific technologies may actually play in stimulating ordering or disordering, disorganization or re-organization. For instance, accounts of the organizing/disorganizing powers of various information and communication technologies often emphasize their intended or direct effects. But are these effects as straightforward as is commonly assumed? What is the role played by the various indirect or unanticipated effects of those same applications? How are particular technologies cast in the role of both hero and villain, the cause of, as well as the fix for, problems of (dis)organization.