Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book provides one of the first clear-headed assessments of information technology and organizational transformation. Its virtue is not so much in its recognition of the importance of the subject; speculations on this topic have been rampant for more than a decade. Rather, it is unusual and unusually useful, because it avoids speculation in favor of conceptually coherent accounts grounded in empirical study of actual organizations. The chapters contained in this volume move beyond the superficial glorification of information technology as an extraordinary instrument of social change, and straight to the heart of the mechanisms of change as they play out in everyday organizational life. In the process, they reaffirm that the real story of information technology in organizations is more about people than about technology. Taken together, they provide an important contribution to the intellectual foundations of one of the most interesting developments in decades.
The History of Information Technology and Organizational Transformation
Part I provides valuable historical perspective on information technology (IT) and organizational transformation. In today's world of rapid and recurrent upgrades of hardware and software as well as seemingly constant organizational change, we often are too immersed in the details and in apparent relationships between IT and organizational change to see the broad outlines of longer term change. Technologies (including bureaucratic technologies and equipment) that aid us in handling information have been around for millennia, from alphabetic systems to computers. Moreover, organizational forms that seem new today turn out to have been around for centuries at least. The ability to look back at change over longer periods of time provides ...
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