Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization

  • Authors:

  • Raymond F. Zammuto;Terri L. Griffith;Ann Majchrzak;Deborah J. Dougherty;Samer Faraj

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Management and Marketing, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010 Australia;Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, California 95053;Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Bridge Hall 401, Los Angeles, California 90089;Department of Management and Global Business, Rutgers University, 111 Washington New Street, Newark, New Jersey 07102;Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Organization Science
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Technology has been an important theme in the study of organizational form and function since the 1950s. However, organization science's interest in this relationship has declined significantly over the past 30 years, a period during which information technologies have become pervasive in organizations and brought about significant changes in them. Organizing no longer needs to take place around hierarchy and the collection, storage, and distribution of information as was the case with “command and control” bureaucracies in the past. The adoption of innovations in information technology (IT) and organizational practices since the 1990s now make it possible to organize around what can be done with information. These changes are not the result of information technologies per se, but of the combination of their features with organizational arrangements and practices that support their use. Yet concepts and theories of organizational form and function remain remarkably silent about these changes. Our analysis offers five affordances---visualizing entire work processes, real-time/flexible product and service innovation, virtual collaboration, mass collaboration, and simulation/synthetic reality---that can result from the intersection of technology and organizational features. We explore how these affordances can result in new forms of organizing. Examples from the articles in this special issue “Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function” are used to show the kinds of opportunities that are created in our understanding of organizations when the “black boxes” of technology and organization are simultaneously unpacked.