@article{1404344,
      recid = {1404344},
      author = {Leonardi, Paul M.,},
      title = {Car crashes without cars : lessons about simulation  technology and organizational change from automotive design  /},
      publisher = {MIT Press,},
      address = {Cambridge, Mass. :},
      pages = {1 online resource (x, 334 pages) :},
      year = {2012},
      abstract = {Every workday we wrestle with cumbersome and unintuitive  technologies. Our response is usually "That's just the way  it is." Even technology designers and workplace managers  believe that certain technological changes are inevitable  and that they will bring specific, unavoidable  organizational changes. In this book, Paul Leonardi offers  a new conceptual framework for understanding why  technologies and organizations change as they do and why  people think those changes had to occur as they did. He  argues that technologies and the organizations in which  they are developed and used are not separate entities;  rather, they are made up of the same building blocks:  social agency and material agency. Over time, social agency  and material agency become imbricated--gradually  interlocked--in ways that produce some changes we call  "technological" and others we call "organizational."  Drawing on a detailed field study of engineers at a U.S.  auto company, Leonardi shows that as the engineers  developed and used a a new computer-based simulation  technology for automotive design, they chose to change how  their work was organized, which then brought new changes to  the technology. Each imbrication of the social and the  material obscured the actors' previous choices, making the  resulting technological and organizational structures  appear as if they were inevitable. Leonardi suggests that  treating organizing as a process of sociomaterial  imbrication allows us to recognize and act on the  flexibility of information technologies and to create more  effective work organizations.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1404344},
}