Social Construction of Communication Technology

Abstract

According to social constructivist theories of communication technology in organizations, work group members share identifiable patterns of meaning and action concerning communication technology. Empirical evidence of these patterns was found in a study of electronic mail use among a group of scientists and engineers. Social influences on technology-related attitudes and behavior were consistently stronger when individuals were highly attracted to their work groups. For individuals with low attraction, the specific patterns of influence were consistent with predictions from conformity research for compliance effects only; for those with high attraction, both compliance and internalization effects emerged. 921 Academy of Management Journal & Wajcman, 1985), social constructivist thinking about technologies has penetrated the organizational context. Weick (1990) drew on Law's (1987) study of Portuguese navigation in the 13th through 16th centuries to argue that technology emerges from relations among a heterogeneous set of elements. Weick's conceptualization of the sensemaking of communication technology as "equivoque" captures a core assumption underlying this new trend in communication technology studies: technologies are equivocal because they can be interpreted in multiple and perhaps conflicting ways. Technologies provide unusual problems in sensemaking because their processes are often poorly understood and because they are continuously redesigned and reinterpreted in the process of implementation and accommodation to specific social and organizational contexts. Communication technologies in particular link disparate entities in a seamless web that engages joint sensemaking in the process of mediated interaction. If communication technologies are indeed equivocal, what is the essential character of this equivocality, how does it arise, and how is it resolved, if at all, in the process of utilization? Trevino, Lengel, and Daft (1987) drew on structural symbolic interactionism (Stryker & Statham, 1985) to argue that technology users create rich meanings in mediated communication through their choices of media with specific symbolic features. In McLuhan's (1964) terms, the medium is the message. For example, the use of a formal, written medium symbolizes authority and can represent a dominance move on the part of the sender. Yet symbolic features need not be fixed attributes of a medium. The symbolic meanings may well arise, be sustained, and evolve through ongoing processes of joint sensemaking within social systems. In their "adaptive structuration" approach to communication technology, Poole and De-Sanctis (1990), drawing on Giddens (1979), highlighted the joint production and reproduction of structure and action in the process of interacting via communication technology. From their perspective, a constantly evolving set of social structures and technological manifestations arises as groups selectively appropriate features of both a technology and the broader social structure in which the group is embedded. A...

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