Technology Choices: Why Occupations Differ in Their Embrace of New Technology by Diane E. Bailey and Paul M. Leonardi (review)

This study of contemporary knowledge work asks whether you are an Arvind, an Eric, or a Sally. Arvind simulates car crashes for a global auto manufacturer. On his computer screen are side-by-side images of a crushed part from a physical test and its virtual model. His cubicle in a Bangalore office park has no personal effects so that it can be shared by the second shift. Half a world away, Eric designs hardware at a Silicon Valley chip manufacturer. X-Files action figures and a yo-yo collection show his "geek credentials" (p. 7) in an office dominated by a monitor that connects him to a fully digital realm of code. Eric makes espresso in the break room, while the company's computer, which has been running continuously for over a year, processes his latest test. Sally, a structural engineer, works down the road, and seemingly backward in time. Her desk is piled with drawings, notebooks, manuals, a calculator, and sticky notes. Hidden amid shelves of books is a generic computer, which remains off much of the day.

Why do these skilled design engineers conduct "fundamentally similar" (p. 11) tasks within different sociotechnical arrangements? Diane E. Bailey and Paul M Leonardi, two leading scholars of information and technology management, have spent over a decade seeking answers. Technology Choicessummarizes findings from a thousand observation hours in seven firms, across eight countries, collected by a team of twenty-seven researchers. The result, which originated at Stanford University's Center for Work, Technology & Organization, is among the most comprehensive ethnographic analyses of creative labor to date.

Technology Choicesambitiously claims to offers a "predictive" (pp. 169, 10, 13) theory of sociotechnical change that the authors call an "occupational perspective." Chapters follow Arvind, Eric, Sally, and co-workers as they negotiate relationships across human-technology, technology-technology, and human-human interfaces. The authors identify twelve factors (from government regulation to product interdependence) that dictate technology choices in different design occupations. Their findings are straightforward. For example, mass production industries, such as automobile manufacturing, rely more on computers and automation than do custom production industries. Occupations with high liability, such as structural engineering, are less likely to trust calculations not completed by hand.

The book is oriented toward management theorists and practitioners. It aims to improve how workplace technologies are selected, to assist organizations in arranging their workforces, to help employees to understand "how their work is likely to change" (p. 10), and even to shape government policy. But Technology Choicesis more a "proof of concept" (p. 193) than a toolkit. The authors offer broad suggestions on how stake-holders can apply their lessons, but close with an admonition that their approach may be "too onerous for practical use" (p. 216).

Technology Choicesis nonetheless valuable for historians of technology. Bailey and Leonardi intervene in debates about the agency of technology at the field's core. The authors argue for a middle path between technological determinism and social constructivism. Rather than a linear spectrum, they plot theories of sociotechnical change in a matrix with determinism vs. volunteerism on one axis, and materialism vs. idealism on the other. This creates two potential middle paths. The first, "materialistic volunteerism," includes the growing area of socio-material and critical realist studies, which Bailey and Leonardi argue are not sufficiently empirical. They thus champion "idealistic determinism" in which actors pursue "specific goals in accordance with their ideas and beliefs, which guide their actions, and […] these ideas and beliefs derive from external forces" (p. 38). In other words, the forces of change reside "neither [in] the technology itself nor [in] the realm of individual organizations but in the larger occupational environment" (p. 40). The authors position their work as a nuanced successor to deskilling and upskilling studies of computerization in the 1980s. Their approach also has echoes of the...