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There is long-standing body of empirical research concerned with the consequences of
information technology for organization structure and processes. Several of those
studies have reported that the same technology, when implemented in similar
organizational settings, can be associated with vastly different, even diametrically
opposing, organizational consequences. The seminal study in this stream of research is
Barley's (1986) article entitled "Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence
from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments."
That study reported that two similarly-composed radiology departments implemented
the same technology yet experienced different structural outcomes, i.e. that the two
departments experienced different rates of decentralization and that they evolved
through a different number of distinct phases of structuring. This difference in outcomes
was attributed to differences between each departments' distribution of relevant
expertise and "specific historical processes" (Barley, 1986:107) in which the
technology was embedded. My reanalysis of the data uses different and arguably more
appropriate research methods and shows that the failure to transform the dependent
variable, as well as the exclusion, misspecification, and misinterpretation of several
dummy variables, biased the regression estimates and led to erroneous conclusions.
The methodological contribution of this paper is that it underscores problems attendant
to not recognizing two of the ways in which dummy variables can be interpreted: as a
means for capturing intercept shifts and as a means for controlling for the effects of
unobserved heterogeneity. The theoretical contributions relate to how the reanalysis
impacts our understanding of the information technology -organizational structure
relationship. In short, I conclude that research on the organizational consequences of
IT, particularly ethnographic research, may need to (1) exchange the assumption of
homogeneity among similarly-constituted organizations for one of heterogeneity (2)
take both the observable properties of technology and its context of use explicitly into
account and (3) and make more clear what is meant by "different structural outcomes |
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