The article discusses the paper "A Representational Scheme for Analyzing Information Technology and Organizational Dependency," by John Tillquist, John Leslie King, and Carson Woo.
Organizations are continually influenced by notions of management promoted through broadly held visions of managerial practice. These notions often incorporate models that generally prescribe information technologies as enabling agents for directed organizational change. Such concepts reflect highly cohesive, self-referential systems of beliefs, goals, and rules that structure perspectives about computerization and work in organizations. To achieve "breakthrough" changes in efficiency, performance, or competitive advantage, organizations must translate these high concepts into a specific model of change appropriate for their organizational context. This study shows how abstract and institutional-level conceptions about change are translated into actionable and individual-level realities, and how within this translation the organization's ability to reform can be locked into a constraining process. As consultants bridge institutionalized conceptions of management to discrete organizational activities, participants of change adopt not only the vision of change but also new ways to talk, act, and plan. This adoption may inhibit change by blocking effective discussion and forcing compliance to ill-fitting prescriptions.
In an empirical study, perceptions of work and the workplace are compared with information systems (IS) support for those values. It is proposed that the congruence between the work values held by an individual and the perception of support for those values by an information system will affect the decision to use the system. Using a modified version of Elizur's Work Value Questionnaire, the work values and perceptions of IS support for those values are examined. Three factors that relate to the subjects' orientation to the world--societal, organizational, and individual--are isolated. The organizational orientation is found to be the most influential of the three in determining voluntary user participation, explaining 47 percent of the variation among subjects' usage patterns of a bulletin board system. These findings support the contention that when users became convinced of the efficacy of using an IS in mediating organizationally bestowed values, and when they perceive value in these organizational relationships, the system is used.