What's Under Construction Here? Social Action, Materiality, and Power in Constructivist Studies of Technology and Organizing

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Abstract Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology's affects on organizations are socially constructed. Construc-tivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology's constraints and affordances, as well as to each other. Although most students of technology and organizing generally agree on the ontology of constructivism, there are considerable differences in what scholars mean when they say that a technology's affects are socially constructed. We show that research on the social construction of implementation clusters into five coherent perspectives, which we call perception , interpretation , appropriation , 2 • The Academy of Management Annals enactment , and alignment. The perspectives differ with regard to the social phenomena they study and the processes by which they claim that construction occurs. The perspectives also focus on different phases of the implementation process and operate at different levels of analysis. After elucidating each perspective, we argue that students of technology and organizing could more directly engage issues central to organizational theory if grappled with materi-ality and power, which they have heretofore downplayed in an attempt to counteract the field's earlier tendency toward technological determinism. Like other people, scholars become stuck in the webs of culture. In fact, they may be more vulnerable than anyone else, because scholars make their living with ideas, and it is with ideas that the trouble begins. Especially pesky are the opposing ideas, or antinomies, that structural anthropologists say lie at the core of all cultures and with whose resolution a significant portion of a culture wrestles. Core antinomies suffuse a culture's dominant symbols, validate cleavages in social structure, and often fuel everyday …