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Purpose – Addresses labor control in fields where familiar organizational and occupational controls are weak, notably postindustrial arenas characterized by networks, heterogeneity, and change.Methodology/approach – Proposes that labor control operates via socio-technical networks composed of diverse ties to social actors, technologies, and typifications. Data from an interview-based study of early website production work is used to examine the impact of such a network.Findings – Socio-technical networks constrained web workers#x02019; actions but also offered opportunities for autonomous discretion. Some shifting between networked and hierarchical controls occurred in larger organizations.Research implications/limitations – The role of networks in the labor process is not well understood; this study provides a starting point.Social implications – Socio-technical networks are heterogeneous and lack common status metrics, making inequality among workers difficult to gauge and address. Further, since networked controls are decentralized, their pressures are not easily identified or resisted by workers.Originality/value – This chapter describes a form of labor control that may characterize some postindustrial fields more closely than traditional models. In addition, it contributes new insights on how work is shaped by technical networks and abstract typifications.

This article aims to focus attention on users of information technology (IT), especially mobile telephony. It focuses on what people actually say about mobile technology but also aims to pay attention to what they do not talk about, what is found in the silence, especially with new technology when much can be taken for granted. This latter is, according to Foucault, even more important to understand.

The research draws on empirical research through 11 semi‐structured interviews and interviews with five focus groups, comprising between four and eight care assistants in each group. The interviews were with three women and three men between 25‐70 years old, five female public sector middle managers and care assistants from five focus groups at social services departments in the north of Sweden. A Foucauldian approach is adopted to interpret the findings and explore how their locations within the circuits of socio‐technical networks engender uncertainty with mobile technology. The present spread of IT reinforces a belief that people are integrated into the circuits of socio‐technical networks.

The findings suggest, on the one hand, that new technologies like mobile communication can be used to organise our everyday lives, whilst, on the other, there are risks with the new technologies, which can discipline discourses.

These issues are discussed from a sociological and informatics perspective.

Fighting the drought. Based on this idea, for almost two centuries now the Brazilian State has elaborated policies and programmes intended to stimulate rural development in the semiarid region of the country. It is this idea which has nourished the illusion that immense infrastructures need to be built to capture, store and transport large volumes of water in order to supply production activities in the region. Associated with this proposal is the attempt to reproduce the same pattern of development adopted in other Brazilian biomes, the main characteristic of which is the use of monoculture practices on large properties managed according to entrepreneurial modes of production. However the rich social experience promoted by rural worker organizations in the region has challenged this model by proposing living with the semiarid (Convivência com o Semiárido) as the guiding principle for alternative trajectories of development. Inspired by the experience of territorial development under way in the Agreste da Borborema region of Paraíba state, the chapter shows that the evolution of these new paths of development depends on revitalizing and mobilizing locally available resources, such as ecological potentials, social mechanisms for organizing labour and for producing and sharing knowledge, local forms of connecting food production to consumption and so on. The text concludes by emphasizing the need to design and implant institutional frameworks that enable a more balanced distribution of power between the State and civil society organizations, thereby allowing the latter to assume a more substantial role in identifying and managing endogenous resources that underpin self-centred development strategies.

This paper aims to address the need for responsive methodologies to investigate how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in non‐business and non‐corporate environments.

The paper presents a case study on developing an IT strategic plan in a community organisation using the process modelling and analysis methodology called “Co‐MAP”.

Co‐MAP as a methodology is significant in being a participatory, responsive, and non‐obtrusive tool to work with welfare workers in getting to articulate information, knowledge and technical issues for decision making.

The research provides a way of obtaining knowledge about structuring of social‐technical relationships in a welfare organisation through a sympathetic approach to its business and culture.

Co‐MAP could be fruitfully used in other organisations, though whether this needs an external facilitator to carry out the process and manage the complex data analysis process is a moot point.

The significance of this case study is that it develops a model for adaptation of how to research and represent data, information, and knowledge flows within a social services organisation, for which there are few other detailed case studies.

In an increasingly connected age, information technology can be argued to have become more politicized. The attempts to establish network technologies to promote the development of an information society are tokens of an increasingly vested interest that politics has in information technologies. Recognition of the entanglement of politics and technology is crucial in understanding contemporary organizational change. Instead of taking organizational stability for granted, we assume organizational change to be the norm. In this paper, we point to the many organizing efforts needed to prevent technologies from drifting away into non‐existence. We present two cases of IT ventures – one seemingly failed and one seemingly successful. Together, they illustrate the point that technological networks, as stable as they may seem, can only survive as long as they permanently fascinate actors from other techno‐economic networks and thereby attract their unconditional love, affection and commitment.

This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations.

Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring.

The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the interface between projects is of particular interest when organizing development projects. It offers a theoretical discussion of translation and inscription phases, not only because they are important to the understanding of mobilizing action in development projects, but also because they are crucial in a chain of sequential projects that are organized as responses to new situations.

The paper uses illustrations of development projects in public management in Sweden to discuss a fundamental organizing problem of projects: how project delimitation and formation take place.

The paper has focused on organizational change and development projects regarding environmental and health care organization renewal projects. It has analyzed how such projects are organized and linked to context. Development problems and their solutions cannot be divided into a functional structure since they overlap and demand attention by a multitude of perspectives during translation.

It is theoretically interesting to highlight certain slices of the organizational reality in projects. The paper has chosen a project perspective and focus at the beginning and end of projects. In theoretical terms, it has chosen to call these phases translation and inscription.

Projects are different compared with permanent organizations due to the existence of beginnings and endings. On the one hand, permanent organizations are normally “going concerns” where the start is back in history and the end is clouded in a distant future. On the other hand, in a project, translation and inscription phases are unavoidable as they are triggered by the specific conditions underlying beginnings and endings.

Projects with clear boundary‐overlapping character cannot be judged with concepts stemming from the methods of construction project management. In contrary, the paper argues that there are two other concepts that can better explain the special organizing problems invoked by the cases cited here: translation and inscription.

Maintaining a high level of situation awareness (SA) is considered one of the most essential elements for safe and effective flight operations. In a study of accidents among major air carriers, 88 per cent of those involving human error could be attributed to problems with SA. In complex domains such as aviation, SA is inherently distributed over multiple people and groups and over human and machine agents. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative perspective to the hegemony of the cognitive approach to SA that focuses on the systemic nature of SA.

An alternative approach to the hegemony of the cognitive perspective of SA has been presented, that focuses on a systemic or holistic conceptualisation of SA through the application of Somerville's actor network theory (ANT). By advocating a seamless web composed of actors, the actor network approach dissolves the dichotomous relationship between humans and machines and society and technology into a non‐anthropocentric framework. This paper further develops this systemic perspective of SA through an analysis of the tragic 2002 mid‐air collision over Überlingen, Germany case study.

The application of ANT to this case study brings to light some insights with wide ranging consequences for how we think of SA and accident aetiology.

The systemic perspective of SA has far‐reaching design implications with regard to complex socio‐technical systems.

This paper facilitates the perspective that looks at the inter‐connectedness of the heterogeneous elements characterized by the technological and non‐technological (human, social, organizational, political) elements of complex socio‐technical systems.

This chapter aims at building a conceptual framework that could inspire innovation policies able to take into account the emerging agricultural and rural agenda, based on a comprehensive conceptualization of the innovation system. The systems of innovation and the broader processes of knowledge creation (and co-creation), transfer and adoption represent a crucial set of conditions influencing family farms' trajectories in response to the various opportunities and drivers of change, as well as their capability to contribute to sustainable food systems and FNS. This chapter analyzes the concept of innovation in relation to transition towards new configurations with a non-linear and multidimensional vision based on actors assembling themselves in a geographical space where resources and information are used to generate change. This leads to consider knowledge as an asset co-generated by the interaction of different actors within agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS) (Leeuwis & van den Ban, 2004). Agriculture and countryside are experiencing deep transformations towards concentration and globalization on one side and post-productivism and rural development on the other (Van der Ploeg et al., 2000). These processes of change require innovation policies aimed at pursuing ‘second-order’ innovation based on new goals and new rules. From a transition perspective (Geels, 2004) these radical innovations can develop within niches to a certain extent protected from mainstream market forces, to be then progressively embodied into higher structuration levels (the ‘regimes’).

This paper aims to clarify a paradox in an organisation: in the past, formally powerful “central” actors confronted important limitations in their relations with formally less powerful actors. However, three innovations – the financial accounting module of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a corporate centre (CC) and a shared services centre (SSC) – substantially changed and re-centred network power relations. The authors adopt a critical discourse to explain this paradox, contributing to the emerging literature on SSCs and bridging the management control and power literatures.

An in-depth, processual, actor-network theory-inspired three-year case study of a large Portuguese manufacturer.

As the intertwined accounting-related innovations were (re)mobilised by actors, dynamically adjusting to unfolding repercussions, control and power effects emerged, enabling enhanced organisational steering.

Based on a single case, this paper highlights effects of managerial technologies, in particular ERPs and SSCs, on control and power relations, and refines Clegg’s model for future research.

The transactional, low value-added activities typically performed by SSCs should not lead to underestimating their potentially profound organisational consequences. However, the surrounding socio-technical network is decisive for the emerging, inter-related repercussions.

This paper explains the relative capacity of actors to influence the practices and configuration of the organisational network structurally, fixing power relations within the socio-technical network through innovations in the accounting area, in particular ERPs and SSCs. By revising Clegg’s circuits of power framework, this paper contributes to understanding possibilities and limits of accounting techniques in management control procedures.