Abstract:

Drawing upon European contemporary social theorists (Suchman and Latour) and the latest research in Information Technology (IT) (Orlikowski and Leonardi), this paper illuminates three major perspectives used in conceptualising Human-Technology Relationship (HTR) in organisation studies namely: technological determinism, social construction and sociomateriality. Each perspective provides particular useful knowledge that would contribute to the enhancement of human practice in contemporary organisations and society. From my own academic experience over 15 years, I would claim that most of Arab Research Agenda (ARA)–academics and practitioners– has extensively focused on the technological determinism perspective –based on contingency theory– as the only explanation to HTR, ignoring the other two perspectives. I will demonstrate that technological determinism has its limitations as it focus on formal-rational conceptions of the capabilities of IT in human practices, and largely ignores the complexities of the social setting, subjectivity of human action and history of the social context into which IT is developed or used. The managers are assumed to make rational, non-political decisions based on accurate, plentiful information.  For example, improved user satisfaction leads to improved individual performance. Better systems design leads to a good job performance.  That, in turn, is assumed to better improve organisational effectiveness.  That would exclude and ignore the large number of moderating variables that may intervene in any improvement. Such ignorance could cause failure in IT implementation, especially when those pieces of technology have been designed and transferred from a different context. In addition, this perspective focuses on the materialist relationship between technology and organisational structure, it does not in any substantive manner address how individual actions and perceptions influence those who adopt, implement and use a particular technology. It is obviously seen as a deterministic model for organisational analysis.  X–e.g. ease of use– causes Y–e.g. user satisfaction–; thus it should be possible to isolate and measure X and Y, and to determine the strength of the relationship. If the relationship is sufficiently strong, causality can be assumed.  Therefore, there is no room for explanation on reciprocal social relationships or complex crucial relationships among organisational variables (Benson, 1977; Pfeffer, 1978; Markus and Robey, 1988; El-Kassrawy, 2001) that could facilitate or deter IS implementation.