Car Crashes Without Cars―Lessons About Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design

Every workday we wrestle with cumbersome and unintuitive technologies. Our responseis usually "That's just the way it is." Even technology designers and workplace managersbelieve that certain technological changes are inevitable and that they will bring specific,unavoidable organizational changes. In this book, Paul Leonardi offers a new conceptual frameworkfor understanding why technologies and organizations change as they do and why people think thosechanges had to occur as they did. He argues that technologies and the organizations in which theyare developed and used are not separate entities; rather, they are made up of the same buildingblocks: social agency and material agency. Over time, social agency and material agency becomeimbricated--gradually interlocked--in ways that produce some changes we call"technological" and others we call "organizational." Drawing on a detailed fieldstudy of engineers at a U.S. auto company, Leonardi shows that as the engineers developed and used aa new computer-based simulation technology for automotive design, they chose to change how theirwork was organized, which then brought new changes to the technology.Each imbrication of the socialand the material obscured the actors' previous choices, making the resulting technological andorganizational structures appear as if they were inevitable. Leonardi suggests that treatingorganizing as a process of sociomaterial imbrication allows us to recognize and act on theflexibility of information technologies and to create more effective work organizations.