Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age

Citation

Kallinikos, J. (2006), "Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age", Information Technology & People, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 390-393. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593840610718054

Reading textbooks is frequently a tenuous, unrewarding experience that is quite revealing of the ways an average student readership is “constructed”. Dominant institutional beliefs concerning the usefulness and accessibility of the teaching material join hands with the increasing involvement of the publishing industry in shaping the contents of academic texts. The result is often the publication of limited value textbooks with a short life span. This is definitely not the case with Representing Organization, an insightful and stimulating text on the very conditions underlying organizational operations in the current age. The book clearly articulates a distinct theoretical argument supported and illustrated by the empirical work, which the authors (most extensively Simon Lilley) have conducted over the last decade or so. In this respect, Representing Organization is not a textbook in the standard, conventional use of the term but a rather an academic work that can be deployed to support teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels.

An introduction gives the flavour of the book whose major themes are subsequently explored in ten chapters. Overall, the book deals with the implications associated with the expanding involvement of information and communication technologies in organizations. However, many of the information age hypes (e.g. decentralization, empowerment and flexibility, virtual organizing, knowledge management) that have dominated popular and academic texts alike are approached critically, as the authors engage in the effort to understand and present the distinctive character of work and organizational developments that have been taking place over the last few decades. Information and the technologies by which it is processed, managed and exchanged matter in many and crucial ways that differ, however, from the straightforward, heavily rationalized and under‐socialized ways depicted by managerialism and informationalism.

Drawing, among others, on Cooper (1992, 1993), Bloomfield (1986) and my own work (Kallinikos, 1995, 1996), the authors elegantly construct an argument that situates the understanding of information and its practical implications within a wider social and instrumental context. The increasing organizational involvement of information processes and the technologies by which they are supported are seen as specific expressions of a wider cultural and social shift coinciding with Representation as the dominant way of conceiving, framing and acting upon the world. Representation, in this sense, does not refer to the posterior mapping of an already existing reality (as the Anglo‐Saxon term may suggest) but to the making of a pliable, symbol‐made reality by recourse to standardized symbol systems and schemes of which programming is an example par excellence. Such a symbol‐made reality is not though a disembodied structure, a version of reality existing at the level of images, symbols and codes. It impacts on what is perceived as real and is crucially involved in the construction of what a particular community or even age conceives as real and relevant to act upon. The internet epitomizes the technological version of such a worldview and the title of the book, Representing Organization, makes sense when it is placed within such a wider understanding of representation.

Two major and closely‐related social projects are realized this way. First, ascriptions of the world can always be detached from particular situations (a “here and now”) and thus deployed in the service of mastery, communication and control at a distance. Again, contemporary computer‐based technologies of information and communication and the patterns of work, action and communication they enable stand as the epitome of these developments. Second, those groups providing the premises of such a world construction/ascription may obtain or sustain their dominance over other social groups. Technological innovation, the authors argue, is often triggered by the desire and ability of social groups to sustain their advantage over weaker groups. These claims are given historical substance by reviewing the relatively speaking recent history of industrial automation, coinciding with the introduction of numerically‐controlled tools and machines since the 1930s (Noble, 1985), and the origins of systems thinking and modelling.

Thus placing the understanding of information within the wider context of Representation, the authors persuasively claim and empirically demonstrate that information processes and technologies do not map an existing reality of facts and events. They are rather crucial means for constructing such reality by offering objectified versions of the messy and recalcitrant character of things and events that can thus be rendered accountable, recombinable and masterable in the pliable world of technological information. Such a project is however ambiguous, marked by gaps, inconsistencies and social struggles that ultimately shape the forms through which technology is deployed in varying instrumental settings of the contemporary world. Technology is ultimately socially shaped (albeit such a shaping is subject to many constraints) and Actor‐Network Theory is deployed to describe and to certain degree explain some of the processes through which particular groups of actors become capable of imposing their own version of reality onto others.

Having placed the understanding of information processes and the technologies by which they are sustained in such wider context (the first five chapters of the book), the authors extend their analytical grip by critically re‐examining a number of central issues in contemporary organization and information science. Empowerment, accountability, control and self‐discipline are discussed in two chapters that show the ambiguous and double‐edged character of the relevant processes. Empowerment of employees, human discretion and autonomy develop alongside the growing surveillance enabled by information technologies and the introjected models of self‐discipline they enable. Chapter eight, nine and ten deal with the issues of virtual organization, risk and control, and knowledge management respectively. In all these chapters the authors offer penetrating insights into the conditions underlying contemporary organizational life that show the ambiguous character of the phenomena on which they focus.

An extensive part of arguments put forth are explored and illustrated by reference to the construction and implementation of production, scheduling and distribution information systems in the oil industry. Three such systems in three different units of a large multinational oil company with the pseudonym Mexaco are presented in considerable detail that gives the reader both an opportunity to assess the claims the authors make and better understand their theoretical arguments. Some other empirical illustrations are drawn from the study of groupware applications in two organizations (in connection with virtual organizing) and a consumer self‐scanning system deployed in one of Safeway's stores (in connection with the themes of empowerment, self‐discipline and accountability)..

No such short description can do justice to an argument that develops in nearly 180 pages. I have certainly overlooked the development of claims and a number of details that others may find worth mentioning. But overall, I have been able, I believe, to convey the major thrust of the authors' argument. I have found Representing Organization interesting and stimulating and, despite the complexity of the arguments deployed, written in a pedagogic and fairly accessible way that makes it highly recommendable as a teaching support text. The book is also a useful inventory of an array of very thought‐provoking ideas and references to other very important research publications. The empirical data presented in the book can themselves be deployed for further theoretical explorations.

There are a few things that I would have liked the authors to be more critical or slightly detached from. One of them is their tendency to treat accounts of reality supplied by the actors in the contexts, which they have studied as the ultimate yardstick against which any other statement should be evaluated. They may not have implied that but I have been left often with such an impression, which is strengthened by the ethnographic positivism that has come to dominate the organizational and information systems research. Accounts provided by the actors in the contexts studied are one version of reality (not the version) whose usefulness is to be ultimately judged within the wider context of objectives, concepts and preoccupations underlying a research project. Such actor‐produced accounts by no means have a primacy over truth (Kallinikos, 2004). Another issue that I would have liked to see debated is the institutional status of many of the processes, which the authors analyse. Indeed the adoption of information systems and the overall logic onto which they are predicated offer an excellent opportunity for studying how rationalized action schemes and packages mingle with powerful commercial software interests to shape the reality of particular organizations. Finally there is the issue of the disposability of information and the dynamics it propels. As the authors show in the last chapter of the book, standard managerialist accounts of information construe it as a precondition to knowledge. This may be true under particular conditions. Yet, most regularly, information bears an uneasy relationship to knowledge being understood as fallible yet enduring accounts of the world. Information owes its value (its informativeness) on the “news” it is capable of carrying about the world (Borgman 1999, p. 133) and “news” are well known to live an ephemeral life. Indeed, the ephemeral and disposable character of information often undermines or, at least, is not well attuned with the relative stability underlying knowledge claims.

But I perhaps ask too much. A book is just a book and cannot cover the whole world. Representing Organization is an insightful and highly recommendable text on organizations and organizational patterns in the information age that many will find relevant to use in their teaching.