1

Draft of Chapter Three from: Neil Pollock and Robin Williams (2009) Software and

Organizations: The Biography of the Enterprise Solution Or How SAP Conquered the

World, London, Routledge.

Chapter Three: The Biography of Artefacts Framework

Here we describe the approach that we will adopt to study these various technologies.

Building on earlier studies that have examined the mutual adaptation of technology

and organisation, we develop a framework for investigating the ‘biography’ of

software systems. Drawing on work from Science and Technology Studies, Material

Culture and Cultural History, amongst others, we suggest an approach that follows the

actual packages themselves as they evolve and mature, progress along their lifecycle,

and move across sectoral and organisational boundaries. In this endeavour we address

multiple timeframes and locales.

HOW MODES OF RESEARCH FRAME THE ANALYSIS

STS has from the earliest days been concerned to resolve the question of adequate

models for the analysis of technological innovation and associated societal change –

as these frame the analysis and guide the methodology adopted and thereby what it is

we can and cannot find out. This project in particular seeks to apply and further

develop the biography of technology perspective, which emerged from our earlier

work on organisational technologies (Brady et al. 1992; Clausen and Williams 1997;

Pollock et al. 2003; Pollock and Cornford 2004). Our aim is to build a comprehensive

understanding of the evolution of a technology – encompassing both technology

design and implementation/use - and how it is shaped by its specific historical context

across multiple social locales.

This research project was designed to exploit the opportunity to achieve insights from

a longitudinal contemporaneous study, building upon our earlier research, including

studies of Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM) and other integrated

automation systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s that were the progenitors of

ERP and other ‘enterprise’ software packages of today (Fleck et al. 1990; Webster

and Williams 1993; Fleck 1993; Clausen and Williams 1997). Underpinning this

endeavour was an attempt to develop modes of enquiry that might be adequate to

2

explore these complex technologies in terms of both the design of empirical research

and the conceptual tools advanced to explore them.

The project was inspired by our unhappiness with the way that most existing research

into packaged software and ERP in particular was framed. As we noted in the

previous chapters, there is a huge literature addressing ERP and the development and

adoption of workplace technologies more generally. This research is often weaker in

theoretical and conceptual terms than STS (which only constitutes a small share of

this literature), particularly in its understanding of innovation, and is less concerned to

consider issues of methodology and epistemology. The bulk of these studies are

framed, somewhat unreflexively, within particular well-established modes of

research, constrained within particular loci, timeframes, disciplinary perspectives and

concerns. Our contention is that the framing of these studies can produce unhelpful

readings about the character and implications of these technologies. Moreover, as

Grabot and Botta-Genoulaz (2005) observe, particular types of research (e.g.

quantitative survey, qualitative case studies) give salience to certain kinds of issues.

We need to be in a position to reflect upon the implications of research choices for the

outcomes of an investigation.

In this chapter, we first advance a critique of the dominant modes of enquiry into ERP

and similar workplace technologies. We then go on to develop a research framework

– based on our Biography of Artefacts Framework – that will be more adequate to the

task. Here we draw upon research within our own tradition of STS, and also on

related work from Organisational Studies and Information Systems perspectives

which shares some of our presumptions and concerns (and we note that there is not

always a clear dividing line between these disciplines, particularly in relation to work

informed by constructivist insights, much of which has been influenced by STS

perspectives).

We want to explore how some of the general debates within STS, outlined at the end

of the previous chapter, relate to the concept of the Biography of Artefacts, about

what would constitute an adequate analytical framework, equipped to address the

multiple interfaces between technological artefacts and society. Studies of particular

socially/temporally bounded locales, for example, the typical ‘ERP implementation’

3

case study or survey are, we contend, ill-equipped to get to grips with these complex

technologies which are instantiated at multiple sites (Clausen and Williams 1997;

Kallinikos 2004b). Koch (2007) suggests that we need better spatial metaphors for

addressing such objects. He draws attention to the evolution of perspectives, moving

away from single site studies to multi-locale studies, and has further advanced the

suggestion that we should analyse ERP as a ‘community’ (Koch 2005, 2007).1 These

suggestions are thoroughly congruent with the broader social learning perspective we

outlined in the previous chapter (Sørenson 1996; Williams et al. 2006). The task of

this chapter is to chart out an analytical framework for such an endeavour.

Existing studies of technology and work organisation have in general paid inadequate

attention to these kinds of debates (which is not to overlook outstanding exceptions to

this generalisation and the increasing strength of social science research in Business

Schools for example). There is a large amount of unreflexive research, including the

many ‘impact studies’, addressing the organisational consequences of particular

technologies, which pay little attention to questions of research design and theory.

Amongst academic research, disciplinary divides have served to separate those

studying technology supply from its adoption/use and technical from organisational

issues.

The success of the organisational case study as a research model within Business

Studies (as well as Information Systems and Technology Studies research) valuably

focuses attention on local negotiations and choices around the design or the

implementation and use of new technologies. Studies of technology and work have

benefited greatly from the growing influence of interactionist perspectives (inspired

for example by the exciting work of authors such as Lucy Suchman [1987]) and an

associated enthusiasm for local ethnographic studies, which has been very effective as

a research methodology in producing a rich local picture. However, this emphasis on

local processes and actors may be at the expense of paying less attention to more

generalised and long-term shaping processes.

Our work however seeks to explore how these local struggles are taking place within

broader circuits of knowledge and influence including economic and social structures

and material structures (and we suggest that a study of technology needs to engage

4

with technology as a materialised institutional form) which mobilise beliefs and

visions and provide various incentives, resources and penalties and which thus set the

parameters in which local actions are played out. We are also keen to explore how

local outcomes may react back on and transform the broader setting, through diffuse

and gradual processes of influence, which may not readily be detectable within short-

term local studies (Williams 1997).

Within the study of technology, the SST perspective has been marked by its insistence

on the need to pay attention:

i. to the specific material characteristics of technological artefacts and systems;

and,

ii. to the influence of social structure and history which pattern innovation, and

which explain the patterns of uneven access to resources and sites of

influence.

These considerations inform our search for a research strategy that addresses the

multiple locations and different timeframes in which technologies operate. To this

end, we examine the utility of various conceptualisations of ‘arena’ (Fleck 1988b;

Jorgensen and Sørensen 1999), to explore the hybrid spaces in which different actor-

worlds interact, and of an ‘agora’ of technological and organisational change

(Kaniadakis 2006), which provides a framework for looking at the relationship

between different arenas and levels, and how local actions are set within broader

settings. The agora is conceived in a relational sense; it is a complex space captured

through the viewpoints that different actors (and analysts) make of this. Within this

framework, we may wish to focus upon local, immediate settings of action or more

widely dispersed institutionalised patterns. And this endeavour also suggests that we

need to provide a register of the multiple different historical timeframes at play: from

the immediate moment of action to the long term in which institutions emerge and

evolve.

Before we turn to these questions, we shall first review the different kinds of research

that have been carried into technology and work organisation and in particular ERP.

5

We wish to explore how these characteristic modes of empirical study impinge upon

the framing of the research and on their findings.

EXISTING STUDIES OF TECHNOLOGY AND WORK ORGANISATION

AND THEIR SHORTCOMINGS

Snapshot Studies

When a new technology comes to the fore, many of the first papers appearing are

from the trade press and practitioner journals. The concern is to demonstrate the

benefits of the technology and how these benefits may be successfully achieved. As a

result the focus is typically on what Botta-Genoulaz et al. (2005: 574) describe as

‘impact factors’. Moreover, impact studies are also often what might be called

‘snapshot studies’. This is research that typically describes the organisation before and

after the implementation of the particular innovation in question.2 There is a tacit

technological (or other) determinism embedded in the research design and

temporal/organisational framing of such enquiries, in which observed changes are

attributed to the effects (‘impacts’) of the technology, apparently disconnected, for

example, from the prior organisational setting which motivated and shaped the

innovation as well as the subsequent organisational processes through which the

outcomes were achieved.

Importantly, snapshot studies are often conducted a relatively short time after the

introduction of a new technology, arguably before the complete consequences of an

innovation can be reasonably assessed. This is problematic because as we have

already seen, it can take years before the full benefits and costs of major changes such

as ERP or Business Process Redesign materialise. As a result, researchers may be

forced to anticipate projected benefits/costs, and therefore run the risk of being unduly

influenced by the programmatic goals and visions of the promoters and suppliers of a

technology, as well as the hopes of the managers pushing these changes through

within their own organisations.

As discussed in Chapter Two, these kinds of studies are important in developing and

circulating ideas about an emerging technology. They thus contribute to the rhetorics

of technology supply and often also suffer from its shortcomings. They are however

influential in framing understandings – and many of these studies are geared towards

6

influence rather than analytical accuracy and distance. Even though they might

provide interesting information and insights, snapshot studies are typically only of

limited analytic value and the data and claims they contain need to be interpreted with

caution.

Implementation studies

We include under the heading of ‘implementation studies’ the large body of writings

concerned with the introduction of new technologies into organisational settings,

(whether from sub-disciplines within Business Studies, such as the Management of

Technology and Innovation, or from Technology Studies and the Computer Sciences).

This involves work with a stronger analytical grounding than the snapshot ‘impact

studies’ characterised above, which addresses how the technical and business

outcomes are closely related to (indeed generated in) the process of implementation

(Clark and Staunton 1989).

Implementation studies account for the bulk of research into new organisational

technologies such as ERP. There is a huge literature on ERP systems (for reviews see

for example Esteves and Pastor [2001]; and Al-Mashari [2003]). The ERP Research

Group (2006), for instance, has 600 articles in its on-line bibliography and the

overwhelming majority, over 95% of these, correspond to what may broadly be

described as ERP implementation studies (including also closely related topics such

as the management of ERP adoption, organisational outcomes and ‘critical success

factors’).3 Though most of the earlier papers were of the sort we have described as

impact studies, scholarly research tends to appear later (Grabot and Botta-Genoulaz

2005). This recent work has a stronger social scientific grounding and has been more

rigorous and offered more critical insights. We note the growth across a range of

disciplines (including for example Information Systems, Organisation Studies,

Management of Change etc.) of more sociological work informed by a processual

understanding of technical and organisational change and deploying qualitative, often

ethnographic, research methods, which yields a richer knowledge base, going beyond

the standard unitary managerial view of the organisation and addressing different

perspectives within the organisation and the particular processes which underlie these

outcomes.4

7

Problems of the temporal and societal framing of implementation studies

While welcoming these studies we draw attention to potential forms of bias that arise

from the temporal and societal framing of implementation studies (Williams 1997).5

The severe limitations of impact studies and methodological shortcomings of snapshot

studies have already been outlined. Though many implementation studies may be

more grounded, they are still typically retrospective accounts and of short duration

compared to the extended timeframes involved in the complete adoption cycle

(involving the initiation, procurement, implementation, use and subsequent review)

for such kinds of radical technological and organisational change.

Retrospective studies suffer the risk that respondents will modify their responses with

hindsight and often align with a managerially sanctioned view. For example, as

McLaughlin et al. (1999: 104) observe, the selection of an information system will

typically be described by informants as having occurred in a ‘carefully managed’ and

‘rational’ manner. There are likely to be biases in empirical access, since user

organisations, let alone supplier firms, are not necessarily keen to promulgate

accounts of failure or allow researchers access to projects that are the subject of overt

conflict and controversy.

It is moreover necessarily difficult for external researchers to gain access to the

earliest stages of a project to address its inception, what Gerst (2006) calls the ‘pre-

project stage’. One obvious reason for this is that, in developing studies of the

adoption of a particular technology, the selection of firms for inclusion in the case-

study or survey is on the grounds of their having already taken at least the ‘in

principle’ decision to adopt. As Pozzebon & Pinsonneault (2005) point out, choices

by organisational actors at this stage configure the initial context of an

implementation project and can have important consequences for its conduct and

outcomes.

Researchers, limited by the practicalities of research funding and agreeing access, are

also liable to leave too soon as well as arriving too late. Implementation studies are

still often based on short- or medium-term access, with fieldwork covering a few

months or at most a year or two, and are therefore weak in terms of assessing longer-

term outcomes of innovation episodes for organisational users. This may be important

8

given the large body of research, dating back to Arrow’s (1962) analysis of ‘learning

by doing’, that stresses the significant post-implementation improvements in

productivity as organisation members discover and refine ways of using artefacts

more effectively. This process of trial and error learning and struggling is key to our

social learning perspective, which highlights crucial innofusion and domestication

processes. Recent studies of ERP implementation, and especially research concerned

to assess its outcomes, increasingly stress the need to look at this extended ‘post-

implementation’ phase (Berchet and Habchi 2005). Various analysts have further

divided this into the ‘shakedown phase’, and the ‘onward and upward phase’ as these

complex systems are coupled with organisational practices and as their further utility

for the organisation are discovered and exploited (Markus & Tanis 2000; Somers and

Nelson 2004; Robey et al. 2002).

Implementation studies that end too soon may thus underestimate the eventual

organisational consequences of an innovation. Indeed many critical researchers, keen

to highlight the gulf between promised benefits of an innovation and its outcomes,

may have unintentionally replaced the ‘Can Do’ rhetoric of technology supply with a

misleading ‘No Can Do’ scepticism about its ability to reshape organisational

contexts, emphasising the barriers to fulfilling their promise of delivering rapid

organisational transformation – barriers that are rooted in particular in the diversity of

local working practices (Williams 1997). In the short term, organisational structures

and practices appear to be more robust than the organisational templates embedded in

the machine (Webster 1990). However, there is a danger, and this is a very real danger

when extrapolating from individual implementation studies, of overlooking the

gradual alignment and harmonisation of organisational practices that may occur

around the organisational templates embedded in the technology (Williams 1997). For

example, Webster and Williams (1993) describe a case in which a 2nd implementation

of CAPM succeeded, after the first ‘failed’, aided by the informational and change

management practices that had been put in place in the course of the original

implementation.

Various writers pursuing a deeper understanding of the organisational consequences

of technologies have sought a more intricate, dialectical understanding of the interplay

between organisational structures and artefacts (Orlikowski 2006). Thus Kallinikos

9

(2004a) sees ERP systems as embodying organisation templates and taken for granted

views of the firm and at the same time reinforcing the routinised view of

organisational activities, thus conditioning the behaviour of organisation members.

Benders et al. (2006) similarly suggest that standardised organisational technologies

like ERP, with their general models of organisational centralisation and standardised

business processes, encourage diverse organisations to align with their embedded

organisational models. They argue that this may constitute a new form – that they

term ‘technical isomorphism’ – of the isomorphic pressures asserted by neo-

institutional theory as causing organisations to become increasingly similar. We are

sceptical, however, of accounts such as the neo-institutionalist isomorphism thesis,

which simply emphasise stability or change. Our analysis seeks to explore the

intricate interplay between stabilising and dynamising factors, which often lead to

more uneven outcomes. Thus, changing managerial alliances and circumstances may

promote ‘drift’ over time as a result of misalignment between an ERP programme and

evolving organisational exigencies (Lee and Myers 2004; Nandhakumar et al. 2005).

Studies conducted from a technology-supply perspective tended to see the user

organisation as a blank slate, amenable to technology-induced transformation.

However, organisations are robust socio-technical systems, with their established

technical and managerial divisions of labour and assemblages of routines and working

practices, formed through their particular history and earlier phases of technical and

organisational change. We therefore need better tools to characterise organisations.

Clausen and Koch (1997), for instance, have analysed these under the heading the

Company Social Constitution (CSC), pointing out that particular episodes of

technological change are just small and localised moments in the evolution of the

CSC.

Many other implementation studies demonstrate the reverse of this problem and have

tended to treat the software and its supplier as a something of a ‘black box’. This is

partly due to the framing of their research. Lacking access to sites of technology

development, studies of implementation had little opportunities to scrutinise the

development processes and history that had given rise to it.6 Any inference about

supplier behaviour made in these studies is thus primarily derived from observations

and perceptions within the user organisation. Implementation studies have been

10

mainly reticent about the world of technology design. Rather paradoxically, perhaps,

the software package vendor appears to have been made ‘other’, and, where

discussed, one-sided accounts, and on occasion negative stereotypes have often been

deployed to characterise the behaviour of vendors and of consultants. Drawing

perhaps on critical perceptions of supplier offerings and behaviour within the user

organisation, these accounts often convey a negative sense of the role and

contribution of external technology and knowledge providers that seems hard to

reconcile with the fact that it is the user organisation that hires the vendor.

Technology design/development studies

This brings us on to consider how to address technology supply. This is linked to our

concern to understand the material properties of organisational technologies. This

aspect has not received sufficient attention overall. Rather few studies have been

undertaken of the contexts in which organisational technologies have been developed

and have evolved. We can identify some practical reasons for this, which include the

difficulties in obtaining access to commercially sensitive sites of technology

development, and the fact that there are far fewer developer firms than users. No less

important may be disciplinary divisions: Organisation and Management Studies are

concerned with organisational process and outcomes and have therefore tended to

focus on the organisational user and black-box the supplier and their technology.

However, a number of writers have shared our concern about the need to look at the

historical development of these artefacts prior to their organisational implementation.

This is in relation to earlier systems like MRP II (Clausen and Koch 1999) and current

ERP systems (Kallinikos 2004a; Koch 2005, 2007). There has also been some

research into technology development processes, notably within a Technology Studies

perspective. These latter studies have, however, often been carried out in isolation

from technology implementation and use (MacKay et al. 2000). This fragmentation

and framing of enquiry has consequences. In particular those analysing design may

succumb to the temptation of seeking to infer the implications of particular design

choices for those using the artefact, as exemplified by Woolgar’s (1991a) much cited

idea that the designer ‘configures the user’. This kind of approach to analysing

technology design, with its rather simplistic presumptions about development

11

capabilities and how design choices will affect the user yields a bizarrely over-

politicised account of design (Stewart and Williams 2005). This temptation is

understandable perhaps. Social scientists want to develop an understanding of design

choices and their attendant social implications and outcomes but run into the problem,

when studying sites of design, that most of the work is ‘mundane’. Design choices

have a ‘taken for granted’ quality and not much seems to be happening in relation to

the user. In this context, every comment made by designers about the user and their

context is liable to be seized upon. However, an understanding of the everyday reality

of design and development work and the internal exigencies that exist within supplier

organisations is important – and it is one of the things our book has attempted to

investigate especially in Chapter Eight.

In terms of exploring the implications of design choices for organisational users, one

approach might be to look for internal technology controversies that have emerged, to

find sites where competing options are being contested and where choices and their

implications become highlighted. However, This, however, is perhaps more easily

done in historical research (Hard 1993). Another approach, and one that we have

followed in this study, is to focus upon the various interfaces between suppliers and

users which constitute key nexuses in which competing requirements are presented

and worked out. In our study, for instance, we focused on the ways in which an ERP

supplier utilised groups of users (Chapter Five) to help guide the evolution of its

packaged solution. Design – and the coupling between artefact design and its

implementation/use - is thus being worked out through a range of different networks

and intermediaries linking supplier and user. It is also being worked out over multiple

settings of organisational implementation (implementation cycles) and in aggregated

form over multiple product cycles. It is important to address these implementation-

design-implementation cycles. For example, as we have previously mentioned,

numerous ERP implementation studies have highlighted the problem of ‘fit’ between

the package and the various settings in which it is applied. However, upon

examination, this problem can be seen to be rooted not simply in the lack of fit

between ‘the technology’ and ‘the organisation’ but between the implementation sites

for which the technology was initially developed and the sites in which it is currently

being applied (Brady et al. 1992; Webster and Williams 1993; Soh and Sia 2004).

12

Need to attend to technology design and implementation in tandem

These observations underline our argument about the need to attend to technology

design and implementation in tandem. Yet there are almost no studies addressing

design and implementation together. Why is this? One reason, as well as the above-

mentioned disciplinary divisions between those studying organisational users and

software developers, is the very practical one that technology development is in most

instances not only socially but also temporally separated from implementation.

Moreover, the lag between design of a technology and its implementation typically

exceeds the duration of most social science research projects (Williams et al. 2005).7

Researchers, contemplating the trade-off between depth of fieldwork and the number

and range of fieldwork sites of technological innovation have tended to opt for one or

other setting. This trade-off is arguably made more difficult by the emphasis within

contemporary social science on ethnographic approaches. Though strong in capturing

the richness of local processes in real time, ethnographic methods are labour

intensive. Ethnographic researchers therefore have often therefore opted for simple

research designs – mostly involving single site studies or studies of a number of

closely-related settings.

In this study we sought to overcome these problems, going beyond the current fashion

in qualitative social science with deliberately naïve methodologies and utilising our

theoretical and substantive knowledge – in particular our theory of the biography of

packaged software - to sample a selected array of locales of technology design and

implementation. Our multi-site analysis thus addressed settings of technology

development and implementation/use and focused in particular on nexuses between

design and use and the interactions between them. It integrated the historical and

contemporary; and it addressed different locales in the design implementation cycle.

We further argue that researchers need to look at artefacts at different stages in their

biography. We thus observed packaged developments at early and late stages of this

cycle, studying both the birth and evolution of new artefacts, as these differ

significantly in terms of the relations between actors and the institutional structure –

in short, the mechanisms for mutual shaping of technology and society. Let us look at

these points in turn.

13

Addressing the social fabric

Let us recap our point of departure from mainstream constructivist approaches to the

analysis of technology and work. Early contributors to the self-styled ‘New Sociology

of Technology’ (Pinch and Bijker 1984) primarily addressed innovations and

innovators that established a new field of techno-scientific practice. As these were

often at the interstices of existing institutional structures, ANT and SCOT theorists

were able in their analyses to ‘foreground’ the actors directly involved. These often

focused particularly on ‘heroic’ technical specialists, who were conceived as ‘Sartrean

engineers’ (Latour 1987), apparently outside or able to operate free from constraint

from the social structure. They thereby relegated to the background, or ignored

entirely, the historical and institutional factors which underpinned these

developments. However, such actor-centred accounts yield unbalanced explanations.

Their shortcomings are particularly problematic when we try to use these frameworks

to analyse the development of workplace technologies and other instances of

incremental innovation within well-established institutional settings. Local actions are

sustained and constrained by an extensive network of technical, organisational and

social arrangements whereby some (material, institutional) elements are difficult for

local actors to change (Kallinikos 2004a; Koch 2005).

Clearly, we need a ‘contexted view’ (Morrison 2002) that can address the complex

social fabric and its history which pattern the activities of those involved locally.

Moreover, our explanatory frame needs to be one which avoids the simplifying logics

of particular disciplinary approaches or schools, and which can match the intricacy of

the settings and processes we are studying. We start by an observation that the

character of these applications is being fought for, and shaped, at a number of levels

ranging from local contestation around features of design or its organisational

implementation to the broad macro-level concept. The complex web of relationships

involved moreover changes over time; it is as Koch (2007) observes a ‘moving

target’.

Thus far, we have established the importance of sites of technology development and

its implementation and use in understanding innovation. This alerts us to the need to

address how individual actors (e.g. suppliers, potential users, intermediaries) and the

14

relationships between them are conditioned by their broader setting. How then shall

we conceptualise the broader setting?

Koch (ibid.) has criticised the existing explanatory frameworks of ERP studies as

being too simple. In an important series of articles, he maps out a broad framework:

local studies (e.g. implementation studies) will no longer suffice he argues; ERP is

both ‘local’ and ‘an institution’. However, he also expresses dissatisfaction with

dualistic analyses that counterpose local and institutional developments (2005). He

proposes, instead, that we should examine ERP as ‘a community’ (Koch 2003)

constituted by joint involvement in a technology. Koch (2007: 440) observes that in

future ERP studies need to ‘…go beyond the single space enterprise, as well as

moving away from implicit assumptions of stable states of the system’ and to adopt

instead a ‘multi-local’ analysis of technology. To this end Koch (ibid.) proposes as a

conceptual frame, a six-field matrix, encompassing short- and long-term, and Micro,

Meso and Macro elements, of which implementation is but one out of six aspects. We

find ourselves in complete agreement with Koch’s analytical project (and particularly

his call for more effective analytical templates addressing multiple locales and

histories). We hope in this work to contribute to this common goal in some way.

However, we have some reservations about the Macro-Meso-Micro distinction.

Though these are very convenient and communicative labels (and we will use them as

such) they run the risk of being mechanistically mis-construed as fixed and separate

levels when in fact they are interpenetrating (a point which Koch of course recognises

in his critique of the local-institutional dualism). Moreover, these need to be seen as

relational categories. In other words, what is seen as Macro and Meso is relative to the

sets of (‘local’) actors and issues under examination (Kaniadakis 2006). It is perhaps

more useful to develop a generic model of the social shaping of complex,

commodified organisational technologies such as ERP, rooted in empirical analyses,

that can provide a complex template for our analysis.

Developers, users and the developer-user nexus

The need to attend to the developer-user nexus is flagged by various approaches. It is

for example axiomatic to the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) perspective which

15

insists that the development of industrial IT applications is not just shaped by

strategies of designers/developers in the domain of technology supply but also, as

previously noted, the settings of implementation and use. Fleck’s innofusion concept

(Fleck 1988b, 1993; Fleck et al. 1990) flags the innovation processes taking place in

the so-called diffusion stage in the process and arenas of technology implementation,

and the possibility that these experiences may feedback into future technology supply.

It also highlights instances where this experience was not effectively utilised. The

social learning framework builds upon this important observation and proposes an

integrated picture of the development and implementation of technologies (Williams

et al. 2005). Like Evolutionary Economics, the Social Learning perspective draws

attention to the importance of the coupling between supply and use. However, unlike

the main tradition in Evolutionary Economics with its concern to assess the

differential overall efficiency of such coupling in particular national or sectoral

innovation systems, the Social Learning perspective seeks to explore the detailed

processes and mechanisms for this coupling and its consequences for innovation

pathways.

The importance of paying attention to these coupling mechanisms comes immediately

to the fore when we examine COTS solutions. Here we find an extraordinarily

intricate web of formal and informal linkages between package vendor and

organisational users. Here our analysis takes us beyond the immediate inter-

organisational level of direct interaction between supplier and user. For example, our

concern to analyse procurement stimulates us to address the broader terrain of

suppliers of classes of products. New industrial technologies develop in parallel in a

multitude of user sites and through the activities of many vendors and associated

players (e.g. consultants). It is to this Meso-level, beyond the direct user-supplier

linkage that we now turn.

The fine structure of external experts, intermediaries and knowledge networks

We can track an array of relationships out from the organisations contemplating

COTS adoption. Here we note first the various avenues of information the user

organisation draws upon in deciding to resort to a packaged solution like ERP and in

selecting a particular vendor and providers of complementary products and services.

Finkelstein et al. (1996: 1) have drawn attention to the influence of advertisements,

16

supplier literature and demonstrations. They also point to the importance of observed

use of the packages in other settings (for example, demonstration sites where COTS

have been installed) and comparative studies provided by third parties (trade papers

etc.). As well as drawing information from knowledge and technology suppliers,

potential adopters seek more impartial information through informal links with similar

organisations. In addition, our study (Chapters Six and Seven) will highlight the

growing influence of industry analysts as providers of community information about

the provenance of particular vendors and their offerings.

Once a packaged solution is determined upon, a more tightly coupled set of

contractual relationships will be established by the adopting organisation with those

charged to deliver an ERP implementation, involving a wide range of actors. As well

as the vendor itself, there could be the suppliers of associated products (hardware and

bolt-ons) and various sorts of external knowledge providers. These include groups

such as consultants who offer expertise in ERP implementation and who, in turn,

might be assisted by external providers of other sorts of relevant expertise such as

systems integration or change management experts more generally.

The management fashion for outsourcing organisational functions increases the range

of external experts utilised, which may also include, for example, training providers.

This trend is reinforced in the case of ERP by the explosive growth of the market,

which outstripped the capacities of suppliers to provide this expertise, as well as the

exigencies of supply of generic solutions that motivated the deliberate decision by

suppliers such as SAP to focus on generic supply. These decisions are buttressed by

an array of firms, such as the suppliers of interoperable products, systems integrators,

implementers, trainers, change management experts, and so on (Sawyer 2001; Koch

2005, 2007). Koch points out that this differentiation is crucial to the value-

maximising strategy of the package suppliers, for:

ERP is (big) business and design of these systems occur under strategies of

mass customization, where the encoding of the generic user is a necessary tool

to reduce development costs and time to market (Koch 2005: 43-44).

17

We can also track these webs of knowledge and influence from the vendors as they

seek to manage and sustain their existing user base and expand their markets. It arises

in the course of their efforts to provide service and support to users and also to guide

the development of new products, and through linkages to existing customers. In this

latter respect this is often indirectly through knowledge arising from their services

(e.g. help-desk queries) and also more directly and explicitly through permanent

knowledge linkages (e.g. through user-clubs; marketing department discussions with

potential customers).

The increasing resort to outsourcing the supply of business solutions (and their supply

as packaged rather than bespoke solutions) and the increasing role of consultants in

the supply of knowledge services radically transforms the institutional terrain in

which changes in industrial technologies are adopted (though there may be some

similarities in the process of implementation [Brady et al. 1992; Fincham et al.

1994]). In particular, it changes the character of the conflicts of interest from a

primarily intra-organisational contest for political legitimacy and access to resources

to a primarily inter-organisational contest for contracts and streams of income and

services. As already noted, this also changes the character and role of internal

expertise and sets up complex alliances between organisational interests and external

economic interests (such that public and private organisations carefully regulate such

linkages) (Procter et al. 1996; Howcroft & Light 2006).

The selection of consultants and the role delegated to them, shaped by established

ways of working and reputation from previous projects, configures the arena in which

the project unfolds in ways that may give consultants more or less autonomy and

influence over the outcomes (Hislop 2002; Pozzebon & Pinsonneault 2005). We find

that change is taking place in a complex social setting, and one that is patterned by

pre-existing social relationships. Clausen and Koch (1999) similarly identified more

or less stable couplings between particular groups of user organisation and vendors,

which they have described as ‘segments’ of the ERP market.

The segment

Clausen and Koch (1999) explored how the shaping of ERP in the 1990s took place

across a structure comprising the CSC of the adopters, with their own internal

18

dynamics, and various ‘segments’ of IT suppliers and customers.8 They suggest that

knowledge flows within these segments were shaping the evolution of ERP. This

included implementation experiences, and the new demands and visions circulated

between suppliers and their customers. Drawing on theories of ‘organised capitalism’

(see Lundvall 1985), Clausen and Koch (1999) see the persistence of these segments

in terms of the benefits of these knowledge flows and a coalescence of similar views

about business improvement. Crucially, they argue that different segments, and the

different procurement strategies and associated forms of supplier-user coupling, offer

different opportunities for local influence over the design of the ERP system (see

Figure 3.1).

FIGURE 3.1 NEAR HERE

Later work by Koch points to the influence of broader and longer term changes

affecting these ‘Meso’ structures, including the restructuring of the ERP supply sector

in the 2000 economic downturn which swept away some of the weaker and small

players. These segments are not stable. There have also been some realignments in the

constellations of players around ERP provision (generic solution providers, suppliers

of complementary products, implementers and other Value Added Resellers) in a

complex pattern which combines elements of stability as well as dynamism (Koch

2004, 2005).

Our earlier work on CAPM had highlighted the influence of similar Meso-level

features on the way these artefacts were shaped and promoted in part through

industrial and professional networks (notably in the UK by the British Production and

Inventory Control Society,9 a body strongly influenced by vendors and consultants as

well as industrial managers). CAPM was also influenced by more general (and

changing) models of best industrial practice (Williams and Webster 1993; see also

Swan and Newell 1995; Robertson et al. 1996; Hislop et al. 1997).

And today, as we already noted in Chapter One, there is a marked re-orientation of

ERP supply. This is motivated, on the one hand, by the fact that it has largely

saturated its original established markets in large manufacturing organisations and

now must find new customers or develop new functionality for existing customers,

19

and, on the other, by a desire to respond to criticisms that its offerings have lagged

behind the latest business concepts, in particular of value-networks. So we see ERP

being re-oriented towards new targets (public services and SMEs whose requirements

it has been criticised for neglecting), the development of new technology architectures

(in particular of the internet and web-services), and new functionality (CRM and

supply chain management) which brings it into competition with established players

in these niches. Its future is being debated and contested in this inter-organisational

space as much as through organisation level implementation.

Macro-level - Visions and Imaginaries

This final observation forces us to consider developments at a more Macro-level. This

is, first, in terms of the relationship between these changing conceptions of an

organisational technology and the circulation of broader views of industrial

improvement (which inform prescriptions of good/best practice). And, second, with

visions of how these may be fulfilled by emerging technologies.

Previous work has noted the correlation between technologies and business

programmes. For example, in the 1990s, the European Union invested heavily in

electronic trading as it matched their vision of an open international market (Williams

1997). Similarly, 1980s conceptions, such as integrated information systems, were the

technological correlate of the integrated, customer-focused finance organisations

(Fincham et al. 1994).

Swanson and Ramiller (1997) have highlighted the role of ‘organizing visions’ in

information systems innovation, encompassing interpretation, legitimation and

mobilisation, which help mobilise the material and intellectual resources needed for

innovation. Wang and Ramiller (2004: 12) analyse the evolution of attention (in what

they call an ‘innovation community of vendors, consultants, adopters’) from:

i. knowing-what: Interpretations that help to conceptualize the innovation;

ii. knowing-why: Rationales for adoption that help to justify the innovation;

iii. knowing-how: Implementation and utilization strategies and capabilities

that capacitate the innovation.

20

Whilst initially the focus of attention is on what the technology is, and why it should

be useful, later attention shifts to issues in its successful implementation and

exploitation by user organisations.

Judith Gregory has developed the concept of ‘incomplete utopian project’ to ‘describe

the phenomenon of envisioning as constructed, evoked, and employed within an

innovative intra- and inter-organizational effort, and to open up theorizing about

innovation, work practices, and technology’ (2000: 180). The word ‘utopian’ draws

our attention to the influence of ‘longstanding deeply shared desires simultaneously

characterized by their unrealizability and their devotees' tendencies to over-reach

reality in their pursuit’ (ibid: 194). Building upon this as well as a shared tradition in

activity theory, Hyysalo (2004, 2006) has developed the concept of ‘practice bound

imaginaries’ to refer to such visions which provide an intellectual resource that helps

frame, mobilise and pattern expectations around an array of players. Instead of

portraying visions as disembodied, the concept of Practice Bound Imaginaries

conveys the extent to which they are coupled with existing and achievable practices

and artefacts:

relatively integrated sets of visions, concepts, objects and relations that are

regarded as desirable, relevant and potentially realizable in and for a practice,

and as having cognitive and motivational power for organizing this practice.

(Hyysalo 2006: 602).

This bears directly upon our analysis of the evolution and biography of ERP (and for

example Koch’s [2003] analysis of ERP as a political programme for organising

change). A key part of the ‘heterogeneous assemblages’ (Koch 2005) of human and

material elements that constitute ERP is comprised by inter-subjective elements:

promises, visions of best practice and prescriptions for industrial improvement, and

criteria for assessing technologies alongside artefacts, techniques and practices. The

biographies perspective however helps us analyse how these communities operate

across the diverse set of social actors involved: suppliers and users, consultants,

industry analysts, policymakers and commentators (Koch 2007).

21

Macro-level – external developments

These final observations force us also to consider changes in wider terrains that shape

and are reshaped by these developments in the world of ERP. These include, for

example, at the broader level:

i. changing models of economic life in an increasingly globalised networked

economy;

ii. the structure of the information technology sector;

iii. the emergence of new technological models such as web-service architectures,

which could herald major changes in how the information infrastructure is

created through third party hosting etc.;

iv. the structure and recent restructuring of corporate knowledge services

involving the increasing influence of a small number of global management

and accountancy firms, and the convergence of information systems

integration and change management organisations upon high value-added

opportunities from deploying these in tandem (and the associated linkages and

mergers between these firms).

This brief review of developments around ERP brings us nearer to being able to

sketch out a schema for analysing these multi-local developments in more abstract

terms.

ARENA AND AGORA: CONCEPTS FOR EXPLORING THIS COMPLEX

SPACE

Arenas of technology development and implementation

How then can we conceptualise this complex space, linking together material

artefacts, practices and visions within an extended fabric of individuals, organisations

and inter-organisational structures and associations. As Koch (2007) argues, we need

better spatial metaphors for addressing this rich tapestry, which is characterised by

gaps in time and space (e.g. between developers and users, as well as by more or less

sharp differences of interest, expertise and commitment). We could theorise this as a

22

‘distributed innovation process’ (a concept recently advanced by innovation

economists) or as the operation of a ‘network’ (in the way Actor Network Theorists

might do). These however represent a very imprecise way to characterise what is in

fact a rather structured set of relationships. As others have noted (see Knorr-Cetina &

Bruegger 2001, 2002), the concept of network has come to be widely adopted but in a

remarkably loose as well as inconsistent manner.

We have been attracted by Jorgensen and Sørensen’s (1999) concept of ‘development

arena’. The value of the concept for us is that, seeking to provide tools for Actor-

Network Theory based explanation to deal with the broader interactions evident in

global technology developments, it conceives of the arena as a space, using the

analogy of a circus ring drawn in the sand, in which a number of more or less

conflicting actor-worlds collide. In addition, they flag the possibility of radical

reconfigurations of an arena through changing boundaries and realignment of players,

providing tools to explain destabilisation as well as alignment:

…a development arena is a visualizing spatial expression of processes of

competition and co-operation. It should convey the idea that several actor-

worlds are being construed within the same problem area. It depicts the idea

that several actor networks co-exist and interfere with each other within a

certain problem space. A development arena is our attempt to bring together

processes or entities that would otherwise seem to be dislocated. It can be seen

as the place where actors relating to a certain set of problems meet and

exchange ideas etc (ibid.: 417-8).

Fleck’s (1988a) innofusion framework had similarly flagged the arena of

implementation as a key site of innovation in industrial technologies. He has a rather

similar concept of the arena as an inter-organisational space comprising members of

supplier and user organisations, that constitutes a setting for practical learning and

struggling, in which different kinds of competence and knowledge are deployed (e.g.

the engineers’ knowledge of computer science techniques and artefacts and the

organisation members’ knowledge of their context and purposes). Indeed our initial

concept of the biography of an artefact was based on the idea of an artefact alternating

23

between moments of innovation in technology supply and implementation (see

Williams 1997).

This kind of formulation seems less adequare to us today as our attention has turned

to look in more detail at the myriad forms of direct and indirect relationships linking

supply and use and also shaping the overall character of offerings in a technological

field. It would be possible to scale up Jorgensen and Sørensen’s (1999) development

arena to include implementation, but this would be to overlook the asymmetries and

tensions between development and implementation. It is useful to examine moments

of design and development separately from implementation and domestication as we

see these moving not always in synchronisation but often exhibiting different

dynamics.10 Industrial and organisational technologies are characterised by a small

number of global supply side players, a larger array of complementary product

suppliers, and huge numbers of adopters.

Clarke and Casper (1996) have also deployed the concept of arena in their

interactionist analysis of medical and scientific developments, as part of an

endeavour, which parallels some of our concerns, to address power dynamics that

have been muted in ANT and SCOT analyses. They address the relative power of

actors by analysing outcomes: the consequences of the actions of social actors within

their particular sub-cultures/social worlds and a shared arena. Their approach

…centres on grasping and representing the perspectives and properties of all

the major actors (including collective social worlds and nonhuman actors) in a

particular arena of mutual concern or in which certain actors are implicated

(ibid. : 602).

How then can we characterise the complex spaces in which technologies like ERP

emerge and evolve? To characterise these as a single arena may be to underplay the

very different textures of the fabric of social relations (which for example range from

contractual linkages between firms to weak associations of opinion across dispersed

communities). We could alternatively describe the setting for development and

evolution of organisational technologies such as ERP in terms of a multiplicity of

overlapping arenas: these could be development arenas, implementation arenas and

24

specific Company Social Constitutions (for CSCs are surely arenas too). This

however might distract attention from the fact that many players will appear in

multiple arenas. Characterising these as separate spaces may not be helpful to our

current concern to develop multi-local theorisation of both the many kinds of

supplier-user relationships and of the overall development of a technological field.

Instead, we want to look at the various different kinds of relationships established

between broadly similar or at least strongly overlapping groups. We also need to be

able to analyse these at different levels of generality and timeframes.

The ‘agora of technology and organisational change’

Antonios Kaniadakis (2006) has introduced the concept of the ‘agora of technology

and organisational change’. He sees the agora as a meeting place and a market in

which all producers and consumers of organisational technologies potentially interact.

The agora, thus conceived, is diffuse and not clearly bounded. However various

particular bounded perspectives on the agora are drawn (by actors and analysts) for

different purposes (of action and analysis) depending upon their particular context and

purpose. In other words, actors construct particular viewpoints of the agora: they see

and engage with particular slices of the complex multi-local multi-actor space of the

agora and set boundaries depending on their purposes and relevancies. How the agora

is conceived depends upon the actor’s relationship with it. Thus, a user organisation

has very different view and orientation towards the agora than a technology vendor.

Viewpoints are active constructs; it is not simply a question of where you stand. It is

also a question of the purposes of players constructing it. The agora is also, and

perhaps primarily, an analyst’s construct. The researcher makes choices about which

tranches of this complex structure to sample and with what closeness of view.11 The

arenas we have discussed may be seen as particular viewpoints within the agora. The

agora has a structure (which we shall attempt to map empirically and conceptually).

Thus, Kaniadakis sees the agora as having Micro-Meso- and Macro-levels. However,

what appears as local and as broader context also depends crucially upon what is

being examined and how. For a study of interactions in a particular workgroup, global

technology developers may appear as established features of the macro-environment,

along with other legal and institutional structures, that are not amenable to influence

by the actors in the timeframes involved. In a study of these technology developers,

25

however, the market of (unknown, distant and thus impersonalised to them) potential

users may appear as an obdurate and immovable constraint. This is then a relational

(not a relativist) conception. The concept of agora would seem to meet Koch’s (2003)

call to go beyond a dualistic local-institutional conceptualisation and address ERP as

‘a community’. Moreover, it opens up opportunities to address the intricate structure

of this community and develop methodologies to capture this.

The concept of ‘viewpoint’ gives us a means to discuss the necessary choices in

research design when trying to address complex social phenomena. It provides a

means of steering between naïve undifferentiated approaches to approaching the

social setting and adopting a particular conception of social structure. It links with our

argument that research design needs instead to adopt a ‘variable geometry’.12 The

viewpoint concept flags that choices must be made in terms of sites of access and

tools for investigation, depending upon the phenomena being investigated, the kind of

access the researchers have secured and their analytical purposes. Effective research

design calls for thoughtful selection of sites and methods of investigation. The same

phenomena could, for example, be addressed through large-scale survey methods or

ethnography. Which is most appropriate depends on the research questions involved.

The dynamics of the agora

The agora may be a diffuse and plural array of players. However, it is not an open and

equal community – in the way in which we might conceive of scientific communities

operating under the Mertonian ideal, for example. Its internal structure comprises not

just peer-like communities of practice (a la Wenger 1998), but also communities of

(often conflicting) interest. It is characterised by asymmetries and entrenched

conflicts as well as alignments of interest. Criticisms have been advanced of the

failure of community of practice theory to develop an adequate analysis of power,

ideology and conflict, particularly in inter-organisational settings and despite its initial

recognition that these were potentially important (Fox 2000; Roberts 2006). Many of

the points made by Koch (2007), explaining why his analysis of ERP as a community

could not be in terms of a ‘community of practice’, are applicable here.

Moreover, the agora is not only comprised of diverse and heterogeneous elements, it

is also a disjointed space, perhaps better understood as an heterogeneous assembly of

26

physical and abstract spaces. For example, the agora of technology and organisational

change though viewed perhaps from particular national settings is closely coupled

with bodies and groups with international scope. However when we consider a

developing country like China, for instance, we find a space only partly integrated

with the Western agora for Enterprise systems and organisational technologies more

generally, with very different traditions amongst ‘user organisations’ and national

software suppliers despite the presence of some Western multinationals (Liang et al.

2004; Xue et al. 2005; Wang 2007b).

Commodification of knowledge networks

The ERP community is a knowledge network. It is also, however, a locus of struggle

and conflict. Many parts of this segment of the agora are subject to commodification.

This imparts a complex dynamics to the agora. We have already discussed the

difficulties of trading in informational and non-material products. Thus in the case of

ERP, we find various commercial suppliers of knowledge based products (ERP

solutions, and complementary products) and services (ERP consultants and other

change management and integration specialists). In Chapter Six we will analyse in

detail the attendant difficulties in establishing the provenance of a provider and its

products, and of demonstrating the benefits of that solution to a particular user

organisation and of overcoming mis-fits. Not least, because ERP is a generic product,

a substantial investment must be made in implementing it within an organisation

before its outcomes - before actual and achievable fit - can be realistically assessed.

These difficulties in assessing the qualities of a product mean, on the one hand, that

the market is a rather inefficient discovery mechanism, but must be supplemented by

network or community types of relationships. On the other hand, outsourcing and

commodification radically change the incentives faced by players in commercial

relationships in the procurement of technology or (consultancy or integration) service,

with sharp and very obvious conflicts of interest between competitors but also

differences of interest and of commitment/world view between consumer and

producer. Once the procurement process has been concluded, the arms-length

externally-policed contractual relationships invoked by economists might be

presumed (hypothetically) to apply. However, in a context of necessarily ‘incomplete

contract’ issues, this strict contract relationship remains notional. Though the

existence of contracts changes the legal and governance character of previously

27

voluntary relationships, the exigencies of joint learning in implementation are

characterised by the erosion of boundaries and lines of responsibility. Here we may

infer a spectrum of market relationships between what we might provocatively term,

following Burns and Stalker (1961), mechanistic and organic relationships, between

those in which a more strict versus a more collaborative relationship prevails.

Thus, we see that in both phases of the market relationship, market forms are

supplemented by communitarian and network forms of relationship (Fincham et al.

1994; Adler 2001). This is one way in which the relationships of the agora are unlike

a community of practice or a scientific community but are shaped by the dynamics of

commodification.

Another important way in which commodification shapes the agora is in the making

of markets through the alignment of expectations. Here the providers of knowledge-

based goods and services find themselves facing another paradoxical situation in

mobilising general expectations. On the one hand, they may be drawn to collaborate

with their competitors in building expectations that a particular technology/technique

represents the way forwards for business improvements. They have an incentive to

raise collective expectations about this class of offerings, to establish a market for

such offerings, and to promote its provenance amongst other possible ways forward as

a road for organisational improvement. Simultaneously they need find some way to

promote particular claims about their own offerings, to convey that their particular

product offers competitive advantage over its rivals. Thus, we find developers, on the

one hand, competing with other providers to build their own particular solutions, to

position themselves within their market niche, and build their share of the market, but,

on the other hand, also operating in tandem with their competitors to establish the

generic idea of utility of classes of artefact.13

This paradoxical situation: the simultaneous necessity of self-promotion and building

trust in the class of solutions places interesting constraints upon vendors and

consultants. In practice, they often find themselves operating in a complex

collaborative array with suppliers of competitive and complementary products and

services of the sort that have been characterised as co-opetition. As Swanson and

Ramiller (1997) point out, in discussing organisational visions, though some diversity

28

may lead to richness and robustness in innovation, too much diversity and

competition may lead to dispersal and loss of commitment.

James Stewart (1999) coined the term ‘poles of attraction’ to explore the ways in

which (ICT supplier) firms seek to mark out their plans and visions of future

technology in very clear ways: that is to mobilise the expectations of potential

customers and thereby build confidence in, and win commitments to, an emerging

technology, or, at times, to ward off competitors, to mobilise fear, uncertainty and

doubt and thus frustrate a competing technology. This concept highlights the

influence powerful players can achieve within the agora based on resources they are

able to mobilise.

That there are benefits in aligning expectations around new organisational

technologies is evinced by the way in which a series of technologies and change

management techniques have acquired solidity and momentum (often by identifying a

class of more or less disparate vendor offerings as a ‘technology’, of the sort

described by the succession of three letter acronyms such as CRM, ERP, MRP, and

BPR), only later to see that term ultimately replaced as supplier strategies and user

expectations migrate to the next new solution.

Power and conflicts within the agora

The agora refers to a linked array of locales in which economic and organisational

interests as well as meanings, are at play and are being played out. From our Social

Shaping perspective, we are particularly concerned with economic interests and

technological commitments. The agora is a site of conflict and struggle and of

negotiation and alignment. The kinds of activities that we note within the agora

include many of the processes that have been analysed effectively by ANT (e.g.

enrolment and alignment). However, ANT, with its roots in Machiavellian political

theory (see for example Latour [1988]), tends to portray these processes in markedly

voluntaristic ways that are perhaps more characteristic of struggles in a political

realm. However, the agora is a site of economic and political power - that is, of

political economy.

29

This is not the place to argue for a particular theory of power or of society – and our

biographies framework may be compatible with diverse approaches. However, in our

analysis, we are seeking to address the ways in which local struggles are taking place

within a broader institutional context - conceptualised in terms of circuits of

knowledge and reward: creating visions and providing resources which constrain and

enable local actions. We seek to draw insights from both semiotic and institutional

accounts of power, and are attracted by Clegg’s (1989: 186) analysis of power

relations within the organisation in terms of the operation of multiple ‘circuits of

power’ at different (micro-macro) levels. Clegg’s analysis focuses upon the inter-

group competition for resources and influence within an organisation, building upon a

tradition that could be traced back to Burns and Stalker (1961). The resort to

outsourcing of technology and knowledge-based products and services, coupled with

transformations in the organisation of external supply, change the character of the

actors’ interest-pursuing strategies. In the struggle for influence within the

organisation, it places greater salience upon inter-organisational as well as intra-

organisational relationships. Members of external suppliers equally must act on an

inter-organisational as well as intra-organisational terrain to sustain themselves as

‘points of passage’ for their customers (Law and Callon 1992) and in this way to

secure resources and commitments to their own project. There is thus a close interplay

between organisational political and commercial struggles and between economic and

organisational political power. For our purposes Clegg’s model needs to be adapted to

consider the inter-organisational (e.g. Meso) structures as well as the

organisational/occupational dimensions he focuses upon.

We seek to explore how local actions and outcomes depend upon a context of

knowledge and beliefs and which, in contrast to a narrowly semiotic interpretation of

power, provides material as well as intellectual resources which generate incentives

and penalties for local players and pattern the conduct and outcome of local actions,

by framing discussions. We are also seeking to explain the ways in which local

actions collectively react back onto and produce/reproduce social structures.

In this analysis we are anxious to avoid dichotomising action and structure or

reducing outcomes to the operation of one or the other – whether an actor-centred or

institutional account. Unlike ANT, we do not wish to do this by dissolving everything

30

into the homogenising framework of the language of actor-networks, compressing all

the different components into an actor-centred account and linked by ANT’s limited

repertoire of relationships (such as Callon’s [1986b] generic translation strategies).

Instead we wish to pay due attention to the complexity of operation of socio-technical

phenomena, differently constituted and observed at multiple levels of generality.

In terms of our analysis of the agora, the distinctions between Micro, Meso, and

Macro refer not to different things, insofar as they all are of the stuff of human socio-

technical action (a point made by ANT writers that we are happy to take on board).

Furthermore, in this relational framework, scales and perspectives of analysis can

shift: what appears as an external Macro constraint could figure as a Meso layer in

another analysis, as may be evinced by considering the example of the status of

corporate strategy in a study of the short-term behaviour of a work group or in a study

of the management of a major technology change programme. The distinction instead

relates to the very different practical experience from particular viewpoints of

immediate short-term and local actions and the more generalised aggregate outcomes

of those actions – embedded in norms, practices, habits, organisations and

technologies. This Micro-Macro scale then is in part a distinction based upon the level

of generalisation, whereby Macro analyses may address widely-adopted routinised

behaviours that constitute institutional constraints, as well as being a question

regarding their level of local malleability to local actors.14 Standardised technology

artefacts thus present themselves as part of the objective landscape for firms choosing

organisational technologies, though in a study of settings of technology design, their

embedded technological choices will be more accessible and malleable to members of

the vendor organisation.

The agora for technology and organisational change, analysed by Kaniadakis (2006),

is a site for the mobilisation of promise and expectation (and likewise a site for

counter-enrolments and mobilisation of uncertainty and doubt) at various different

levels of generality. This may, for example, range from particular organisational

implementations and supplier offerings, to classes of organisational technology, and

ICT capabilities more generally.

31

We thus see the agora as itself a product of a series of enrolment efforts and struggles,

which may be described from different perspectives and at various levels of

generality/pervasiveness and historical timeframes, ranging from immediate contexts

of local action to more generalised patterns of behaviour, sustained over longer-terms,

which in turn constitute economic, technological and institutional structures. These

broader ‘structures’ act to pattern innovation, providing resources and material

constraints to actors in terms of their choices regarding which options appear doable,

which factors can realistically be changed, and which are to be taken as part of the

landscape.

This double-sided character of the agora, as both shaping and shaped by

sociotechnical processes, may usefully be approached through the concept of

negotiation, with its two distinct connotations. Firstly, this is negotiation as a meeting,

a place for alliance building, conflict and struggle with more or less obdurate or

amenable human and non-human elements; and secondly negotiation as a set of

manoeuvres needed to accommodate or by-pass those elements which are effectively

‘non-negotiable’. This second usage of negotiation, which is akin to the way we might

negotiate ourselves down a mountain pathway, is informed by the fact that some of

the things we encounter present themselves as more solid and permanent from the

view of particular local actors, including institutions and technologies, which in this

sense, are a kind of materialised institution, and have to be negotiated around.

This is not to say that these external factors directly imposed determinate constraints

on local actors. Instead, we note another form of negotiation, as a kind of bridging

between these spaces. For example, whereby key organisational players/systems re-

presented external factors within the organisation. Finally, though we have for

illustrative purposes discussed the case of elements seen as malleable or as fixed to

local actors, there is no necessary polarisation between these. Actors can exercise

choice about which ‘black-boxes’ to accept as fixed and which to open up –

depending, for example, on the relative costs and benefits of so doing. An

organisation could, in principle, choose to develop a bespoke solution rather than be

constrained by existing availability of packages but this would depend on the level of

resources they can deploy to such ends and whether such an investment would appear

justifiable.

32

Finally, we notice that the agora is a space where very different kinds of commitment

are being played out. There are, in particular, important differences in orientation to

the agora between suppliers and organisational users of technologies and other

knowledge-based products/services. Thus for a technology supplier or a consultant the

agora of technology and work organisation is the space where their commercial future

is worked out. In contrast, a user organisation will have a more contingent orientation

to the agora; they are keen to benefit from technologies but it is not normally part of

their perceived mission to carry forward their experience with implementing

technology as a resource for technology development.

Intermediaries as strategic players in the agora

The agora concept provides a space for analysing the various kinds of social

relationship beyond the immediate inter-organisational level of direct interaction

between supplier and user. To be useful, however, the detailed operation of the agora

needs to be filled out and explained. Our concern to analyse procurement stimulates

us to address the broader terrain of suppliers of classes of products and the ways in

which beliefs about the provenance of a technology are constructed across a

community of supplier and user organisations. Our final addition to the framework is

to examine the emergence of new kinds of intermediaries who are also market makers

and conveyors of community information. In Chapter One we reviewed research

findings regarding the powerful influence of the technology supply side over views or

what constitutes ERP. In Chapter Seven we will draw attention to the role of various

kinds of intermediaries, and in particular the growing importance of a relatively

distinctive class of intermediary, industry analysts.

Our Social Learning framework flags the importance of different kinds of

intermediary in innovation, in linking supply and consumption and the wide range of

roles they play (Howells 2006). However, industry analysts appear to occupy

particularly strategic sites in the agora. Our work will flag the importance of the

Gartner Group in two ways:

i. we will show how this actor acts as a repository and organiser of what we call

‘community knowledge’ about the implementation of particular products and

about the reputations of their suppliers’;

33

ii. we will see (as noted in Chapter One) how Gartner’s sectoral reviews

consolidate the existence of a domain of technological activity (in this sense of

constituting a technology like SAP’s R/3 as an instance of ERP), charting the

overall development of particular technologies and their future development

trajectory (Mabert et al 2001; Judd 2006).

The industry analysts seem thus to play a crucial role in configuring particular

development arenas and in mobilising consensus. It might appear that in some

instances it is they who hold the ropes and set the rules of game – defining the

boundaries of technology and the criteria by which particular vendors and their

offerings may be judged. However, it is also important, while addressing their

influence, to attend to the limits on how industry analysts proceed. Thus, we find that

they are not able to impose their views. Their ability to play their role (and sell their

services) depends on their being seen to operate in a close relation to practice,

reflected, as we shall see, in the strenuous attention they devote to legitimating their

position as impartial bearers of community knowledge in the face of criticisms of

partisanship.

We consider the existence and profile of industry analysts like Gartner to be

indicative of a broader development. Our review of the difficulties of the operation of

the market for complex technologies like ERP had pointed to the importance of

indirect indicators of the behaviour or suppliers and their products – in particular of

experience-based trust. However, this kind of trust is slow and expensive to acquire.

In looking at the mechanisms for selecting management consultants, Glückler and

Armbrüster (2003), as already noted, highlighted the value of networked reputation as

a more effective mechanism for overcoming the buyer’s uncertainty. The role of

industry analysts in IT procurement points to one mechanism for enhancing the

efficiency of networked reputation formation through the commodification and

canalisation of the circulation of community knowledge (and how this is subject to

particular forms of accountability). We may see this as a response to the deep

uncertainties surrounding the procurement of organisational technologies that seem to

be compounded by the growing pace and increasing organisational significance of

technological change.

34

The need to address multiple historical timeframes

A corollary of our insistence upon the need to examine sociotechnical change at

multiple levels of generality, in terms of addressing immediate contexts of action and

broader contexts, is that we need to consider socio-technical processes temporally, in

terms of:

i. the unfolding of multiple histories; and also

ii. the different historical timeframes around which an object, event or activity

may need to be analysed.

Multiple histories and timeframes are intrinsic to our attempts to capture the evolution

of a new technology, addressing, for example, both its development and adoption. In

this way we seek to captures the complex set of developments taking place across a

variety of locales, encompassing both the ‘local’ context of immediate action and

interaction and its patterning by a broader context. This broader context is constituted

by the aggregate outcomes of previous actions which, in turn, provide a less-readily

negotiable set of factors that frame and pattern outcomes and which need to be

analysed over longer term timescales.

It is important to pay attention to the multiple dynamics and timeframes surrounding

innovation. We have noted that the dynamics of technology development and

appropriation may differ. For example in the case of ICTs, where development cycles

may have shortened to a year or two, appropriation cycles may be an order of

magnitude greater, with new consumer products taking decades to diffuse into

widespread use and having greater longevity (Williams et al. 2005) (though both

timeframes are becoming shorter). This longevity in appropriation and replacement

cycles is particularly marked in the case of organisational information infrastructures

such as ERP.

Particular episodes form part of multiple histories. Thus the implementation of a

technology constitutes a moment in the history of a particular Company Social

Constitution (Clausen and Koch 1999). It is also one of a number of sites of

implementation of a particular supplier offering, contributing through its innofusion

35

and appropriation to the further elaboration and wider adoption of that specific

artefact. And that specific story in turn forms part of the evolution of the class of

artefacts with which the supplier offering is associated. We have coined the concept

‘biography’ to refer to this history of relationships and sites implicated in the

evolution of a specific artefact and a class of artefacts. And the latter can, at a more

general level, be seen as a phase in the development of organisational technologies

more generally. In the latter three cases, the specific history is nested inside another

more long-term generalised set of relations. However, a technology implementation

can also be seen as the linking together of two specific histories that may not have

been previously conceptualised together: the Company Social Constitution of the

organisational adopter and the biography of a specific artefact.

In theorising the multiple tempos that we may need to address in analysing particular

episodes, we find considerable merit in the framework articulated by Hyysalo (2004).

He draws on Hutchins’ (1995) study of how quartermasters learn naval navigation in

a system of distributed action, which portrays the simultaneous unfolding of different

histories:

any moment in human conduct is simultaneously a part of the unfolding of a

task, the development of the individual doing it, the development of the work

community, and the development of the professional practice (Hyysalo 2004:

12).

Hutchins' cube (Figure 3.2) represents these as different speeds of change within a

single moment of practice (rather than portraying these as separate levels).

FIGURE 3.2 NEAR HERE

Hyysalo introduces us to attempts within Activity Theory to characterise time-scales

for analysing social and technological development.15 His study of the development of

new health care technology highlights three key time-scales in the coupling of design

and use:

36

i. the prevailing ways of organizing design and use in industrial production.

Hyysalo refers here to features of the innovation system liable to be stable over

many decades: ‘pervasive and relatively slow changing ways in which design

and use are generally organized in industrialized countries’ (Hyysalo 2004: 13);

ii. the coupling of a technological field and a societal practice. Which he sees as

relatively stable institutions, potentially stable over years and decades, though

noting the possibility of changes in practices, in technologies and in the ways

these are coupled together; and

iii. the development of a particular innovation and the organizations and people

connected to it.

We can adapt this schema to our own analytical concerns. Hyysalo’s longest

timescale (i) prevailing ways of organizing design and use would perhaps correspond

in our study to the resort to packaged solutions for organisational technologies. Our

concept of biography would encompass his other shorter timescales: (ii) the

technological field which corresponds to the biography of a class of artefacts (e.g.

ERP systems in general); (iii) and the development of a particular innovation to

address the biography of a specific artefact (e.g. SAP’s R/3 system).

The comments we made earlier, in discussing viewpoints and research design, about

different ways of slicing through the complex social space represented by the agora,

depending upon our location/orientation to it and our concerns, also apply to the

historical framing and timescales of our research. Such choices about the temporal

framing of enquiry have important implications for what may be viewed. For

example, local studies of immediate settings of action inevitably draw attention to the

scope for discretion (such as ‘user work-arounds’) but provide a poor vantage point

for exploring longer-term processes of technology-organisational alignment (for

example around common business process templates within enterprise systems). This

may need to be captured by other modes of research (for example larger-scale surveys

or longitudinal studies).

37

Rather than invoke one modality of research, our approach seeks to retain awareness

of the multiple historical registers that surround a particular phenomena. The choices

we make regarding which timeframes and historical registers are to be centrally

addressed and parallels our earlier discussion of choices regarding the adoption of a

local or of a more global gaze. Whilst the agora concept provides tools for looking at

social space, the temporal distribution also needs attention.

We are minded here of the critique of constructivism made by Kallinikos (2004a: 12)

on the grounds that the ‘study of technology and its social impact cannot be exhausted

at the very interface upon which humans encounter technology. Essential strips of

reality are not observable…’.16 Kallinikos is highlighting issues of social structure, of

particular relevance when we consider technologies that typically come to us as the

result of a more or less elaborate (occupational, organisational, and industrial)

division of labour. If we are to address the material character of artefacts, many

elements are developed at a remove (socially and temporally) from their sites of

implementation and use and are not under the control of actors in user locales. This

observation can also usefully be applied to the existing institutional context that

provides resources and sets constraints for local action.

We are proposing a relational approach that brings to the foreground certain features

for detailed analysis – but within a broader historical register that also records other

levels of generality and tempi.17 Our work seeks to find ways of probing and

addressing these other levels/tempi through the adoption of a complex methodology.

We contrast this, inevitably messy, endeavour to other dominant social scientific

research approaches which recognise only a single register for analysis (whether of

immediate action or of broader structuring). We see this failing, for example, in

economic accounts which are founded upon conceptions of human behaviour that are

demonstrably flawed, and also in the ‘atomistic individualism’ which characterises

much recent work from a constructivist background which only recognises immediate

contexts of action. We contend that this yields an unhelpful reductionist account of

complex social processes.

Rather than propose a particular level of analysis, we emphasise the benefits of multi-

level analyses, which may have different depths and centres of focus depending on the

38

issue under analysis. The particular scope and framing of analysis selected depends

upon the matters under examination. For us the matter of research design and

epistemology should be driven by a critical reflection about which (spatial/temporal)

slices of complex techno-social fabric are brought into the centre of our analytic gaze

by particular modes of research and from what viewpoints.

MULTIPLE METHODS

We propose the concept of biography as an instance of a ‘variable research geometry’

that can be applied to diverse issues and in differing contexts, depending in particular

upon what issue(s) are being addressed and which entities are being tracked. The

biographical approach focuses upon social (or rather sociotechnical) processes

involved in innovation and how these are shaped by their context and history. Many

kinds of biography are thus possible. For example we could address the biography of

an organisation – indeed this is how we understand Clausen and Koch’s concept of

Company Social Constitution (Clausen and Williams 1997; Clausen and Koch 1999);

the biography of an occupation; or indeed the biography of a managerial innovation

such as BPR or TQM (see Mueller & Carter [2005]).

Our concern here is to understand the biography of an artefact which may be

conceived narrowly in terms of the development/implementation of a particular

innovation, or more broadly of a class of artefacts, or of a technological field and their

complex couplings with social institutions, actors and practices. This has been the

(often tacit) objective of a diverse array of Social Shaping of Technology studies.

These have deployed various research geometries in terms of the historical scale and

the level of generality of the phenomena under study. However, what is at stake here

is not only a matter of temporal and social framing – of zooming in and out, to use our

photographic analogy – but also involves important choices also in terms of the

methods and concepts deployed and the relationship of the study with existing

knowledge. Multiple methods may be required, knitting together different kinds of

evidence including historical studies, ethnographic research, qualitative studies of

local and broader development and the use of larger-scale research instruments and

quantitative data. These differing kinds of evidence have differing strengths and

contributions to mapping the dimensions of an issue. For example local qualitative

research may be provide better tools for drawing out intricacies and particularities of

39

social process and is particularly pertinent to exploratory research opening up new

understandings of a novel and emerging phenomena, whilst larger-scale research

provides a more effective base for addressing regularities and trends as well as for

testing hypothesis and models and confirming findings from exploratory qualitative

studies (MacKenzie 1988). It may be further adduced that combinations of different

kinds of evidence are liable to produce more robust and richer understandings.

Multiple theoretical orientations

As well as proposing a ‘variable geometry’ in relation to the temporal and

technical/societal framing of research, we argue for a certain level of critical

eclecticism in relation to broader worldview, and the theories and concepts that

inform it. Of course, theories and methods cannot simply be combined on a pick and

mix basis; they are underpinned by different and often incompatible presumptions and

tools. Though some have interpreted this truism as constituting a case for sectarian

theoretical purity, we suggest a different response. We argue instead that we can

interrogate differing analytical traditions in terms of their robustness and applicability

to the phenomena in question and their compatibility with other perspectives; we can

reason and make judgements about these questions.

Though informed by our close association with the Social Shaping of Technology and

Social Learning perspectives, particularly in our emphasis upon material and social

structural influences, the biographies approach is not ‘hard-wired’ to a specific

theoretical perspective. And many of the schools and analytical currents within STS

have common and convergent concerns (Williams and Edge 1996).

We contrast our analysis with the widespread espousal within current STS of what we

may call the ‘atomistic interactionism’ in many explanations of the world with roots

in social constructivism and phenomenology, which see the world as constructed and

reconstructed anew in sites of everyday action. A similar analytical consequence

arises from the rejection by ANT of explanation in terms of the operation of broader

social structures, accompanied by their rejection, as unwarranted generalisation, of

social scientific theories regarding the operation of these structures. Though

appealing, these exemplify what could be described as the ‘fairy cake theory of the

40

universe’. This theory was propounded in Douglas Adams’ (1979) now classic work

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that

…since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every

other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the

whole of creation - every Galaxy, every sun, every planet, their orbits, their

composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece

of fairy cake.

In place of basing their choice of research setting and methodology upon social

science theory, these actor-centred accounts generally resort, as noted in Chapter

Two, to a ‘naturalistic’ (or perhaps empiricist) approach; seeing society constituted in

the observable actions and interactions they study. For example, ethnomethodological

research is founded on the view that the social order is constituted in social

interactions: it selects particular sites of interaction for study and presumes that the

relevant social relations will be present or represented there (Lynch 1993). Studies of

particular sites and settings of action, what we may call ‘flat ethnography’, encounter

the problem, that Kallinikos (2004a,b) also identified, that many issues regarding the

material character of artefacts are determined outside the setting of technology

adoption (including the availability of technologies as well as the institutional context

which provides resources and sets constraints for local action). Perhaps as a result,

ethnographic researchers frequently have the sense of not being in the right place or at

the right time (Law 1994; Magolda 2000). One temptation faced with this

incompleteness of vantage point is to elevate the importance of the particular settings

and interactions studied. This could be exemplified by workplace studies of

technology that present organisational information and communication processes,

including the appropriation of IT, as of paramount importance, and correspondingly

neglect technology design and other distal processes. We would instead propose an

alternative solution involving what we describe as ‘strategic ethnography’, addressing

multiple sites, selected according to the matter in hand based on our preliminary

knowledge thereof. Such an analytical move requires researchers to explicitly

recognise and make accountable the strategic choices involved when deciding upon

the location and boundaries of ethnographic work. It would in turn require reflection

upon the theoretical commitments and presumptions that inform these choices (rather

41

than pretend that it is possible to avoid such choices for example by empirical

sensitivity). Some strands of ethnographic research, particularly associated with

Ethnomethodology (see for instance the articles with Button [1993]), have difficulties

in acknowledging such an approach (which, we would argue, is however more in line

with the anthropological tradition).

ANT, with its nostrum of ‘following the actor’, does not limit itself to particular

settings, but accepts that research involves making strategic choices about which sites

and people should be tracked. It justifies these choices, however, in terms of empirical

outcomes; in this sense ANT claims to be able to see ‘where the action is’ (Latour

1987). However, ANT does not provide tools to guide those choices or make them

accountable. This claim to be able to resort to a naturalistic method leaves ANT open

to criticisms of empiricism (Russell 1986; Williams and Russell 1988). Moreover, a

multiplicity of accounts would be possible from different perspectives; any ANT

account of necessity involves choices about which actors and perspectives to

foreground (Sørensen and Levold 1992). Since ANT has rejected other theoretical

knowledge, these choices are made based on largely unacknowledged presumptions

(though see Law 1991) and common sense knowledge.

What is at issue here is a particular orientation to theory with which we differ. Across

the social sciences, we can find a spectrum of styles and approaches to theorisation,

between work that in its insistence upon particular theoretical and methodological

approaches becomes purist, and more eclectic approaches.

Analytical purism has attractions. It is easier to justify the particular methodology and

epistemology within a well-honed world-view. However, this strategy also brings

weaknesses and intellectual rigidities. In particular such purism typically involves a

process of simplification of the object of study (as we saw in for example in Chapter

Two, in the construction of disciplinary domains in which phenomena were conceived

in narrowly ‘economic’ or ‘technical’ terms). This has unhelpful consequences,

particularly where it leads to the exclusion from consideration of other forms of

knowledge, theoretical and methodological tools and empirical evidence. As a result,

it generates accounts of the world that do not match the complexity of issues under

examination. Of course, this kind of reductionist analytical strategy has been

42

extraordinarily successful, particularly in Science and Engineering. Within the social

sciences, perhaps only Economics and Psychology have succeeded in replicating the

reductionist disciplinary strategy of the natural sciences. Processes of disciplinary

specialisation within other social sciences have more generally involved the formation

of specialised schools of analysis rather than cohesive broader disciplines. The

formation of these specialised schools has facilitated rigorous development of

analytical concepts and instruments – but we would argue, at a cost of narrowing the

frame of enquiry. In particular, we note the tendency for a single level/frame of

analysis to predominate. This is perhaps most evident in relation to what is perhaps

the key social scientific debate – between explanations of the world in terms of action

and structure – where social sciences tend to coagulate into either action centred or

institutional centred accounts.

There have at the same time been movements against theoretical purism in the social

sciences that have led some to embrace thoroughgoing eclecticism. However, as the

rather disappointing achievements of ‘systems theory’ indicates, this strategy has been

demonstrably unsuccessful. Much of this work is marked by a loss of rigour in

relation to the development of concepts and tools (Hoos 1973; Keat and Urry 1975).

We therefore do not propose a retreat from theory. Understanding in social science

proceeds by advancing competing interpretations of a complex and interconnected

world. Theory is needed to provide critical insight. Atheoretical approaches

perennially threaten to become overwhelmed by diversity – lacking the theoretically-

informed tools to help the analyst impose order on unruly reality (put boundaries

around problems, sort out and rank diverse potential influences, select sites for

examination, and so on). In consequence, we would argue, they end up with

empiricist and descriptive accounts; and they are hard pressed to extrapolate or draw

general lessons for practice. A clear theoretical perspective seems to be a pre-requisite

for effective social scientific enquiry.

Our work, and our view of the Biography of Artefact perspective, is rooted in and

inspired by STS, most immediately social learning and social shaping analyses, but

also deeply influenced by writings from ANT. However, we differ with the latter’s

rejection of existing social scientific knowledge (despite the articulate defence of this

approach found recently in Latour [2005]). What we are not proposing is not just an

43

‘in-between’ position – balancing between eclecticism and theoretical purism - but

rather a different relationship to theory.

Our approach to understanding the Biography of Artefacts Framework addresses the

technology-society relationship at multiple levels and timeframes and also

acknowledges the multidimensional character of these phenomena and thus the

potential pertinence of analyses of these phenomena from different (technical,

economic etc.) analytical perspectives. The analysis of the biography of an artefact,

by acknowledging these multiple dimensions of the phenomenon under study, brings

the researcher into contact with other areas of (social and technical) knowledge that

are pertinent to the questions under examination. A multiplicity of theories and

methods may therefore be pertinent. Acknowledging this point does not, however,

answer the question of how to bring them together. As is clear from the above, there

are dangers in eclecticism.

What is at stake here is the question of how we relate to (heterogeneous) theory. This

is a question of whether social science theory is to be used as an analytical machine or

as a tool for understanding.18 Rather than admitting all knowledge claims as being of

equal validity, we retain our STS perspective as our core analytical commitment. At

the same time, we can hold a range of other findings as potentially pertinent forms of

background knowledge that can inform a particular study. Social science theory and

methods do not constitute some kind of analytical machine (you turn the handle and

out come facts).19 Instead, these bodies of knowledge provide potentially valuable

resources, sensitising and guiding the analyst. Rather than rejecting and ignoring other

forms of knowledge (as espoused for example by ANT and some related approaches),

or accepting that somehow ‘anything goes’, we can make some assessment of the

relevance, robustness and pertinence of these theories. We can critically examine the

presumptions underpinning these concepts and methods and the available evidential

base, in terms of their consistency/compatibility and their applicability in other

contexts or for other analytical purposes. For a particular analysis it is necessary to

develop an analytical framework that advances our own understanding and

acknowledges other areas of relevant knowledge. Rather than resort to a single-

purpose analytical schema, in the way propounded by ANT or Ethnomethodology, we

44

suggest that it is necessary to argue for the adequacy of the methods and concepts

deployed according to the issue and phenomena in hand.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ARTEFACTS

In a moment we shall explore how our biographical perspective can be applied to

understand the history of ERP but before we do this we want to discuss some links

with other fields which also share our interest in investigating technology over longer

timeframes. This includes work on the social and cultural history of technology

consumption (e.g. Marvin 1988; Pantzar 1997) and by cultural and economic

anthropologists of technology (e.g. Appadurai 1988; Kopytoff 1988; Thomas 1991).

The latter have coined a parallel usage of the term biography of artefact – in a

discussion that we find informative but which differs from the aims of this book in

important respects. The most well known contribution to this strand is, perhaps,

Kopytoff (1988), who argues that an object cannot be properly understood at only one

point in time. Rather we should look across its whole life-history to analyse its

production, consumption and circulation. Just as we study the life course of people,

we should also do the same for technologies. In the same way the status of people

change over their life-time then so does the status of an artefact. Yet whilst Kopytoff

sets out these general aims for uncovering how objects ‘accumulate histories’ he is in

fact interested in objects for much more specific reasons; to explore how they mediate

social relations in particular settings and what they reveal to anthropologists about

those relations and places. He writes:

Biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure.

For example, in situations of culture contact, they can show what

anthropologists have so often stressed: that what is significant about the

adoption of alien objects – as of alien ideas – is not the fact that they are

adopted, but the way they are culturally redefined and put to use. The

biography of a car in Africa would reveal enormous amounts of information

about the relationship of the seller to the buyer, the uses to which the car is

regularly put, the identity of its most frequent passengers and those who

borrow it, the frequency of borrowing, the garages to which it is taken and the

owner’s relation to the mechanics, the movement of the car from hand to hand

over the years, and in the end, when the car collapses, the final disposition of

45

its remains. All these details would reveal an entirely different biography from

that of a middle-class American or Navajo, or French peasant car’ (1988: 67).

As we see it, Kopytoff’s conception of the term biography is useful for the following

reasons. Firstly he is interested in how artefacts are transferred from one place to

another, and denotes how they are ‘alien objects’ when they arrive in their new

settings. Though he is also careful to point out that even though they are ‘alien’, the

object is not imposed on actors since it is typically adapted and redefined according to

the needs of each new place. This has obvious parallels with the STS and Social

Learning work reviewed previously. Secondly it focuses on how various communities

in domesticating these artefacts leave ‘traces’ in the sense that they shape the object in

some form (though he falls short of suggesting that the users of the artefact actually

contribute to the production of the object which is what we are suggesting with the

development of software packages). Thirdly that the current significance and meaning

of an object today is always related to the settings and communities to which it was

once connected. Finally that the same objects would have different biographies

depending on the range of settings through which they travel.

Whilst this form of analysis might be applied to the study of ERP systems – and we

have attempted an initial analysis using this framework (Pollock et al. 2003; Pollock

& Cornford 2004) - we think there are limitations with the term as it is currently

conceived within anthropology. Kopytoff’s focus is principally on the significance

and meaning of an artefact and how this changes through its career. It is the multiple

ways an object is viewed and understood by the different communities who consume

it that make up its biography (the more and varied these meanings the more ‘eventful’

the biography). By contrast, whilst we think ‘meaning’ is important in the context of

generic packages we also want to show how systems are not only symbolically but

also materially changed over time. A system like ERP, as we have already described,

is a heterogeneous assemblage where the various affordances built into the

technology are constantly developing and evolving. In addition, whilst reading

Kopytoff’s work, it seems that the biography of his artefact turns out to be the story of

a highly bounded object20. As he describes it the notion of the ‘artefact’ is the

circumscribed one common to anthropology and not the messier notion of artefact

found with STS. In this respect, echoing the point above, enterprise-wide solutions are

46

not material artefacts in Kopytoff’s narrow sense but can more usefully be thought as

a heterogeneous assemblage (Koch 2007). Thus, we intend the biography of an

artefact in this wider more encompassing sense.

Finally we are not wholly convinced the most useful way to study artefacts is solely at

the place where the user encounters them. Nor are we convinced that these encounters

tell us much about the wider contexts in which the objects are situated (which is

Kopytoff’s intention). As we have suggested local studies of adoption offer an

inadequate lens for exploring the longer term development of a complex

organisational technology like ERP. Contrary to what Kopytoff suggests,

extrapolating from the specific object to the wider context can only ever be done in

quite general ways. Rather than study the variety of ways in which the same object is

adopted by different groups of users (these ‘horizontal biographies’ if you like) we are

interested in the production of ‘nested biographies’. Local adaptations, improvisations

and work-arounds etc., should be seen as one moment in the biography of a specific

object, which go onto form part of the evolution of the class of artefact, which in turn

is part of the history of the resort to packaged solutions. Arguably, through moving

out from the specific user’s interactions with a specific object in this way, the

technology and society relationship is bridged in a more sophisticated way.

However there are other aspects to Kopytoff’s approach that we find more useful,

such as his discussion of ‘commodities’, for instance, where he gives particular

attention to the movement of an artefact between different economic states (see also

Appadurai 1988). It was the way in which an object could be ‘commoditised’,

‘decommoditised’ and even ‘recommoditised’ that Kopytoff found interesting. Indeed

it the movement of objects between different commodity states that constitutes the

biography of a technology (Dant 2001). He cites the example of one of the most

common and exchangeable of technologies, the mass-produced car and notes the

process by which some vehicles grow older they may develop into a ‘vintage’. In so

doing they become ‘unique’ and no longer a straightforwardly exchangeable

commodity (a process Kopytoff describes as ‘singularisation’):

In the homogenised world of commodities, an eventful biography of a thing

becomes the story of the various singularisations of it, of classifications and

47

reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts

with every minor change in context… (ibid.: 90).

Now it is clear an object might acquire new meanings (or further develop its

biography) in other ways than through exchange (Dant 2001) but for Kopytoff, it is

the economic life of an object that has particular significance. This is what he intends

when he talks of things as having an ‘eventful biography’ in that artefacts are not

always commodities but can (and often do) move between different states (thus the

commodity phase is only one part of an object’s social life). Interestingly there is a

somewhat similar discussion by the economic anthropologist Thomas (1991) only he

reaches somewhat different conclusions. He is also interested in the process of

commodification but rather than simply signifying one more stage in an object’s

biography this is concerned with detaching an object from its history. For this reason

in his book Entangled Objects he describe commodification as a process of

‘alienation’:

Commodities are here understood as objects, persons, or elements of persons,

which are placed in a context in which they have exchange value and can be

alienated. The alienation of a thing is its dissociation from producers, former

users, or prior context (ibid.: 39).

His definition is interesting to us since it highlights the possibility that while

commodification/alienation can occur there are sometimes opposing forces present;

for some objects ‘disentangling’ can never fully occur. The notion of ‘entangled

object’ suggests that some artefacts are inextricably connected to their place of birth.

To exemplify this he contrasts those objects that have little difficulty in travelling -

i.e. those things that were specifically created for exchange - with those that have

become so entangled with previous owners that there is the impossibility of exchange.

There is, he writes, ‘[v]ery close association between people and some particular

objects…’ such that the object ‘may not be transmitted at all’ (ibid.: 72-3).

This strand of work is relevant because software packages as a class of technology

are, as we have already mentioned, not simply borne ‘commodities’ or as ‘generic’

products but only become so through various complex processes. One of which is that

48

software package vendors work to ensure that their systems are never too much like

the place(s) for which they were built and never too connected to specific people or

events. Their fear is that if the package becomes overly connected to, or identified

with, these places then it will weaken the potential/ability of their systems to move

beyond these places/settings. Thus, one of the things they do is to actively mange the

biography of their system, this is the history of relationships and sites implicated in

the evolution of a specific artefact, so that they avoid ending up with an ‘entangled

artefact’.

REINTERPRETING ERP THROUGH A BIOGRAPHICAL LENS

The starting point for this focus on biographies was the observation by Edinburgh

scholars past and present (Fleck et al. 1990; Fleck 1993; Webster and Williams 1993;

Pollock et al. 2003) that workplace technologies were often condensation of existing

work practices, coupled with a view of achievable change geared towards current

conceptions of best practice. In other words, information systems were not extrinsic

developments coming from outside the industry but at least in part were intrinsic

developments. This was obviously true in relation to the earliest phases of process

innovation that arose within the ‘user organisations’, for example, in the industrial

revolution (Rosenberg 1976) and in the earliest stages of the application of computing

(von Hippel 1994). However it continued even after a specialist supply-side had

emerged, which continued to be linked to the user inter-alia through the

implementation process. Building upon these debates, Brady et al. (1992) suggested

that packaged software artefacts had biographies. Williams (1997a) applied this

concept to analysing the evolution of CAPM describing its historical evolution from a

family of artefacts (MRP, MRPII etc.). And Pollock (Pollock & Cornford 2004) later

used a version of the same argument to study the transfer of ERP across other sectors.

In this early work, whilst the influence of the institutional setting was highlighted –

including the role of professional associations and of public policy in promoting ideas

of best practice (Webster and Williams 1993), our initial explication of the biography

framework did not include a comprehensive set of conceptual tools for analysing the

social fabric beyond the supplier-user nexus. And in this respect some valuable

further work elsewhere has been undertaken elsewhere, for example, by Swan et al.

(1999) who noted how national differences in the structure and operation of

49

professional associations had consequences for the uptake and manner of utilisation of

these technologies. Clausen and Koch (1999) likewise drew attention to the

fragmentation of the supply-user nexus into a number of distinct segments with

relatively stable linkages between suppliers and users within segments. However, the

challenge now is to theorise in more detail the structuring and operation of this

institutional setting.

This is what we will attempt to do now in the case of the emergence of ERP as a field

of technology where we will reinterpret its history through the lens of our biographies

framework.

Understanding the evolution of technological fields: the history of ERP

We have already suggested that the concept of biography could be applied to analyse

(in Hyysalo’s [2004] terms): the development of a particular innovation (and the

organizations and people connected with it), and the coupling of a technological field

and a societal practice. In relation to the former, this may encompass the evolution of

a particular supplier offering as well as particular episodes of its design,

implementation and use. In relation to the latter, the biography concept can be applied

to explore the operation of relatively stable institutions over a period of years and

decades in the emergence and evolution of particular technological fields. We can

explore this in relation to packaged organisational software – which became known as

ERP. Koch (2007: 428) reminds us that ‘ERP “systems” need to be understood as

heterogeneous networks, assemblages of human and material elements’. The concept

of biographies lets us explore the historical emergence and evolution of this

heterogeneous assemblage.

We briefly reviewed in Chapter One the extended biography of ERP which can be

traced back to early 1960s stock control systems in vehicle and aerospace production.

ERP, like many other popular technologies, has a remarkably well rehearsed history;

characterised by a clear succession of predecessors with their own acronyms (though

there is less agreement about the distinctions between these stages).21 We found a

process of incremental development of the artefact and conceptions of its business

application, punctuated by more radical changes, with discontinuities often loosely

associated with changes in terminology. We will discuss the role of a technology

50

name in more detail below. These labels refer not to specific homogeneous artefacts

but to a more or less heterogeneous collection of artefacts (software, management

techniques) which link a community (or rather several overlapping communities) of

suppliers, intermediaries and adopters.

It is instructive to focus on these discontinuities – and changes in designation. They

do not reflect simple ‘technical changes’, though they are often associated with

changes in the underlying technical architecture. They are also associated with

changes in overarching paradigms for business improvement. Perhaps the key

periodic driver of a change in name arises when suppliers decide to port new

developments to different technical architectures – and need to sell them to their

customers. Perhaps the key event in the evolution of ERP from its predecessor, MRP

II, was the 1992 launch by SAP of its R/3 product based upon client–server

architecture. The current debate about the future of ERP (and the idea of extended

ERP or ERP II) revolves around novel technology architectures based around the

internet and web-service architectures, though also accompanied by a shift in views

about the search for competitiveness from the enterprise to the value-network.

Software suppliers and management consultants (and latterly, commentators and

business analysts, as coordinators of community expectation) appear to exercise

particular influence over these changing prescriptions. A combination of factors thus

appears to be at play in these shifts. We shall explore the operation of these factors in

more detail by revisiting the historical development of ERP and its predecessors.

The origins of Materials Requirements Planning (MRP): techniques,

technologies, communities

Robertson et al. (2002) and Jacobs and Weston (2007) have analysed the origins of

MRP in a small group of US industrial practitioners and academics with a background

in operation research techniques and interested in applying these in manufacturing

organisations through computer-based systems. These accounts highlight the coming

together in 1966 of three individuals - George Plossl, Joe Orlicky and Ollie Wight22 -

who collaborated in developing the conception of Materials Requirements Planning

(MRP), and later became widely known as ‘MRP gurus’. Initially their emphasis was

on the application of production planning techniques within firms rather than software

– the systems depended upon computers but were developed in-house or provided as

51

bespoke systems, building upon existing stock control systems developed in the

manufacturing of complex assemblages in vehicles and aerospace. This informal

community (primarily of management specialists, connected to or employed by firms

adopting MRP techniques) had links with IBM which invested in the development of

solutions resulting in 1972 in a successful packaged solution. This was the

Communications Oriented Production Information and Control System (COPICS)

designed to run on their new IBM Model 360 series mainframe computers. Specialist

knowledge was codified, for example, through COPICS handbooks and commodified

not just in artefacts but also more saliently in consultancy. The shift to packaged

solutions was less marked in this period however than the movement towards the

education and professionalisation of managers and consultants (Mabey 2007), subject

to some certification and quality control procedures. Ollie Wight, for example, set up

a network of ‘Class A’ companies and consultants applying his concepts.23

Whilst the early stages of these innovations were characterised by opportunistic

encounters, later developments were pursued in a more organised manner (Robertson

et al. 2002). The three MRP gurus became the core of a broader network and in

particular promoted their ideas through the American Production and Inventory

Control Society (APICS) through what they described as an ‘MRP Crusade’ (Clark

and Newell 1993; Robertson et al. 2002; Jacobs & Weston 2007).24 In that decade

today’s major ERP providers were established including SAP (1972), JD Edwards and

Oracle (1977), The Baan Corporation (1978) (Jacobs & Weston 2007) and a host of

other providers which no longer exist today. APICS strengthened itself, building its

membership significantly through the MRP campaign – and we see the development

of the technology and of its supporting institutions proceeding hand in hand

(Robertson et al. 2002; Jacobs & Weston 2007). This is linked with a concerted effort

of education and professionalisation of production management, through the

production of textbooks and courses (Mabey 2007).

It is instructive to note that, in the first phase of MRP, the main institutional

repositories were practitioners: user organisations, management professions and

professional associations. A market was also being built for knowledge-based

products. We also note a familiar pattern as with other innovations: the establishment

of a division of expert labour and the partial convergence of knowledge in specialised

52

supply. During the 1970s, we see the increasing influence of management consultants

and of technology suppliers (and by the 1990s educationalists, suppliers and

consultants made up over 40% of APICS members [Clark and Newell 1993]). The

MRP crusade seems to have been successful. By the early 1970s only 150 US

companies were using MRP techniques, a figure which rose to 750 by the mid 1970s

(Robertson et al. 2002), and which by the 1990s had risen to over 60,000 (Mabey

2007).

From MRP Materials Requirements Planning to MRP II Manufacturing

Resource Planning

SAP launched its highly successful R2 software in 1978 (Jacobs and Weston 2007).

New systems emerged that could run on cheaper minicomputers such as the IBM

System 38 that were affordable by smaller firms. In the early 1980s, the progressive

extension of the functionality of Material Requirements Planning systems inspired a

search for a new name. Jacobs and Weston (ibid.: 360) describe how:

Ollie Wight began calling these new systems ‘Business Requirements

Planning’ only to find that this name had already been registered as a

trademark. So he referred to them as ‘MRP II’ systems, which by the late

1980s, was ‘translated’ as ‘Manufacturing Resource Planning’ to distinguish

this new capability from the original, simpler, system.

An alternative account suggests that Wight was happy to stick to the MRP acronym

with which he was closely associated.25 However MRP and MRPII are not wholly

distinct: at ‘the heart of any MRP II system was the fundamental MRP logic, now

typically re-written in modern code’ (ibid.: 360)26, and there was often ambiguity in

discussions as to what was being referred to (MRP or MRP II?).

Computer-Aided Production Management: the vision that was not sustained

In the late 1980s, we find a new terminology being introduced in the UK of

Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM), kicked off by a report published

by the Institute of Production Engineers (Cork 1985). The ACME Directorate, the

Science and Engineering Research Council’s Application of Computers in

Manufacturing and Engineering Directorate subsequently launched an Initiative in

53

CAPM Research (Waterlow and Monniot 1987). In this period, MRPII systems were

being strongly promoted (for example by BPICS, set up as the British subsidiary of

APICS and strongly influenced by vendors) and were being implemented in medium-

sized UK firms, with mixed results. In this context, we see attention directed towards

overcoming some of the shortfalls of existing technology. Chief amongst these were

the complexity and inflexibility of MRPII systems which made them difficult to

implement successfully, particularly for smaller firms which were very different in

their production environment and management systems from those in which MRP had

emerged. There was also a debate about the appropriateness of these tools as vehicles

for pursuing the current vogue for flexible Japanese-style Just-In-Time systems (Clark

and Newell 1993; Webster and Williams 1993; Swan et al. 1999). Though MRP

systems were designed to operate in stable and predictable batch manufacturing

environments, there was an attempt to offer these as vehicles for Just-In-Time even

though these were based on very different principles and approaches.27

The availability of research funds and other support attracted a range of suppliers of

MRP and MRP II and related systems, which were motivated to rebrand their diverse

offerings as CAPM. The CAPM terminology acquired a certain stability in academic

writings particularly in the UK and in some associated research centres; but did not

catch hold in the USA and was not sustained.28 In 1990-1 when our investigation of

CAPM was concluded, there was no clear sense of the future of MRP.29 As suggested

at the outset of the book, the keynote paper for a high-level European Workshop on

the future of MRP (Wijngaard 1990) noted three competing scenarios: the evolution

of MRP offerings by current large suppliers; partnerships of MRP suppliers and users;

and the emergence of Factory Management Systems offered by systems integrators

rather than today’s generic MRP suppliers. The workshop emphasised reducing

software complexity for the user (not necessarily for the designer) through context

specific systems.30 Though there was no clear vision in 1990 of where MRP was

going, in the aftermath of SAP’s launch of R3 only two years later, we find the

sudden and all-encompassing resort to the alternative terminology of Enterprise

Resource Planning developed by Davenport and industrial analyst Gartner (Lopes

1992).

54

From Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) to Enterprise Resource

Planning (ERP)

The factors underpinning the shift in terminology from MRPII to ERP seem rather

amorphous. On the one hand, there was the widely expressed dissatisfaction with

earlier MRPII systems regarding the shortcomings identified in discussions of CAPM

(Maskell 1993). On the other, early ERP systems were not distinct from MRPII.

Gartner’s key paper that coined the term ERP and proclaimed it as the new paradigm

was entitled: ‘ERP: a vision of the next-generation MRPII’ (Wylie 1990).31

Definitions of ERP, despite the ambiguities we reviewed in Chapter One (Klaus et al.

2000), generally emphasise the addition of accounting and Human Resource

Management functions onto the core MRPII systems (see for example Chung and

Snyder [2000]). However, these were already a feature of MRPII systems in existence

and being implemented in the early 1990s (Kampf 2001). These extensions did

however take these systems beyond the manufacturing process; and the

Manufacturing Resource Planning terminology no longer seemed appropriate.32

Perhaps the one clear technical feature is the adoption of client server architecture

offering cost and implementation flexibility advantages (Lopes 1992; Knutton 1994),

coupled with a high level of integration between modules whereby a transaction on

one module would be accessible to all the system modules, achieved through an

integrated database.33

After Gartner coined the term ERP, other players (most notably vendors and

consultants) began to flesh out what ERP was and how it worked, followed by adopter

accounts of the organisational benefits of its adoption (Wang and Ramiller 2007). The

theme of integration and process orientation seems to have been very attractive to

corporate managers, which appeared to dovetail with ideas about good industrial

practice in the context of the prior espousal of Business Process Redesign, together

with a view that packaged solutions represented the way to achieve these goals

(Deloitte and Touche 1997).34 Wang’s (2007b) analysis of the (mainly

trade/practitioner) press points to the explosive growth in discussion of ERP in 1997-9

coinciding with a corresponding reduction in papers on BPR. He concludes that the

ERP community has benefited from recruiting members and attracting attention from

55

related innovation communities hitherto looking towards BPR and MRP (see Figure

3.3).

FIGURE 3.3 NEAR HERE

De facto what seems to be driving the shifting terminology and the new paradigm is

the success of SAP’s newly launched R/3 system (launched in Europe in 1992 and in

USA in 1995) which, along with other similar offerings, establish themselves as a

standard (Lopes 1992; Davenport 1996; Pairat and Jungthirapanich 2005). Existing

MRPII users were early adopters of these new packages, and SAP in particular

became widely adopted by global organisations. Added to this, organisations such as

APICS promoted ERP (Berchet and Habchi 2005). However, in contrast to the

previous stages in the growth of the MRP (the so called ‘MRP crusade’), the

institutional basis for promoting ERP had already been put into place. As we saw in

Chapter One, a range of factors reinforced the adoption of ERP, leading to the

explosive growth in uptake, which was initially within manufacturing, but was

progressively extended to other areas as versions of these offerings were created for

process industries and various service sectors.

From Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Extended Enterprise Resource

Planning (ERPII)

While the shift from MRP II to ERP appeared seamless, its further development has

been subject to much debate. We already noted how a number of inter-locking factors

have underpinned calls for radical repositioning:

i. technology push: in the form of radical new technical concepts; in particular of

web-service architectures, and software as a service, and component-based

architectures (Kumar and van Hillegersberg 2000; Markus et al. 2000);

ii. market pull: the saturation of its core markets provoked a search for additional

markets (notably in smaller firms for whom ERP had been to expensive and

cumbersome) and for new value opportunities in linking ERP with related

technologies concerned with decision support, customer relationship

management, and supply chain support; and

56

iii. new business concepts: notably the imputed shift from an enterprise to a value

chain perspective (Moller 2006).

Industry analyst Gartner declared ERP dead in late 2000 and proposed a wholly

different vision under the label of extended ERP or ERPII. The changes involved are

summarised below in Table 3.1.

TABLE 3.1 NEAR HERE

Gartner’s death sentence has been shown to be premature. Rather than the radical re-

orientation of ERP proposed by industry analysts under the label Extended ERP, we

find an incremental development described elsewhere as ‘ERP 1.5’ (Judd 2006). This

involves the adding on of functions rather than Gartner’s vision of a wholesale shift

towards componentisation and a value-chain focus (Light et al. 2000; Jakovljevic

2001; Pairat and Jungthirapanich 2005).

Looking at this brief review of ERP and its predecessors we note a constant pattern of

incremental development, progressively extending the scope of integration,

accompanied by more radical re-presentations of the technology. Though each of

these transitions has been subject to historical contingencies we can see some overall

homologies in these innovation processes. We note the discontinuities occasioned by

a coincidence of changes in Business Prescriptions and in technology supply

strategies (in relation to both the development of specific application elements

product and in the overall Technology Architectures of the product). We find an

interesting pattern of linkages between classes of technology/their nomenclature and

managerial prescriptions of best practice and broader visions of business

improvement. We can observe stable linkages for example between ERP and the idea

of process improvement. We can also find instances in which looser, more

opportunistic and ephemeral couplings are made (between JIT and CAPM or between

ERP and e-business). Finally, we note the longer-term intertwining of more general

conceptions of technology and organisation; above all regarding the evolving

concepts on the one hand of information integration and on the other of process

integration. Thus we found the linking of the idea of the flexible customer-oriented

57

firm and CAPM and broader visions of Computer Integrated Manufacture (Webster

and Williams 1993) and again today linking ERP systems and BPR.

The timelines for the Evolution of ERP points to something like a 10 year cycle: a

periodicity which (doubtless not coincidentally) broadly approximates to the

replacement cycle for corporate information infrastructures (see Figure 3.4).

FIGURE 3.4 NEAR HERE

As well as these cyclical processes, there is also a clear progression in the process of

building a technology and associated organisational and institutional framework. At

the outset, the new institutions of information technology and business improvement

were rudimentary and inchoate. The early accounts emphasise improvisation and

chance encounter. As time progresses, we find the gradual laying down and

elaboration of technical frameworks in terms, for example, of the sedimentation of

component technologies and their incorporation into solutions. The first stock-control

and MRP systems were written from scratch (to work on whatever mainframes were

used by the firm concerned). Later we see the recycling of code. In other words,

porting functionality from the particular technical and organisational context in which

it arose to other areas.35

Importantly, over the decades, the institutional frameworks for promoting enterprise

system become better established (evidenced by the shifting terminology of a crusade

(1972) to a movement (2005)). We suggest that the weave of the ‘socio-technical

fabric’ changes over this period from a loose and open weave to a denser and more

intricate pattern. Finally, we can reflect upon changes in the processes of assessment

of technologies in the course of procurement. Thus, in the 1990s, consultancy

organisations were beginning to collate information about supplier offerings, whilst

by the twenty first century we find a much more elaborate system of consultancy and

advice, and the emergence of specialist industry analysts making available community

experience on a more commodified basis, and providing the basis for more formalised

and systematised assessment of particular vendors and their offerings.

58

What’s in a name?

This analysis has pointed to technological continuities between ‘different

technologies’ or to, be more precise, different terminologies applied to a class of

broadly similar artefacts. What is at stake in these classifications and

reclassifications? The name applied to a technology is far from trivial. It proposes

boundaries that link a class of often quite various artefacts whilst differentiating them

from others. As we shall see, the designation of a technology field reduces uncertainty

for adopters and for developers:

i. it allows adopters to develop a generic case for particular innovation pathways

(based upon an analysis of the potential performativity of that class of

technology for certain types of organisational challenge), and, once this is

accepted, paves the way for a comparative analysis of the relative advantages

of particular offerings for their specific organisation;

ii. the designation of a technology draws boundaries around a set of artefacts and

their suppliers, and thereby creates a space in which some ranking may be

possible; and

iii. it allows developers to assess their offerings, their promotion, and

enhancement in relation to the features of broadly comparable products and

their likely future development trajectories. In addition, we see a clustering of

offerings that may serve to reinforce expectations about what functionality

should be included and where the technology will go in future.

1 There has been a certain theoretical convergence of view between a number of analysis – despite competing terminologies –

around the study of a range of supply-side players and users, consultants and others involved in ERP, conceived as a community

(Koch 2007), as a movement (Grabot and Botta-Genoulaz 2005), or innovation community (Swanson and Ramiller 1997).

2 Here we discuss technological changes such as ERP adoption though the observation could equally be applied to studies of the

introduction of a new management technique – for example BPR.

3 Al-Mashari (2003) has produced a taxonomy of the topics addressed in the ERP implementation literature.

4 See for example the Journal of Strategic Information Systems that recently published a special issue on Understanding the

Contextual Influences on enterprise systems in 2005.

5 Many of these shortcomings are relevant to other research into technology and work organisation.

59

6 Moreover, the process of technology development is a key interest for researchers from Technology Studies, but not

necessarily for those from Business Schools addressing technology implementation and change management.

7 As a result, almost the only exceptions to this generalisation about the absence of studies addressing design and use in tandem

are cases in which design was organised within the context of the user organisation (e.g. Mackay et al. [2000]; Williams et al.

[2005]).

8 This included the ‘IBM segment’ (which was often in partnership with local developers), the ‘SAP segment’, the ‘PC segment’

(a vendor named ‘Damgaard’), and the ‘self development segment’.

9 BPICS, the British Production and Inventory Control Society, emerged in 1975, having been a subsidiary of the American

Production and Inventory Control Society since 1963, established with support from the American management consultants

Arthur Anderson (Clark 1990). In 1996 it became the Institute of Operations Management http://www.iomnet.org.uk. Whilst

APICS was comprised primarily of practicing production managers, these constitute only half BPICS membership – the

remainder comprising consultants and suppliers who exercise considerable influence over its activities (ibid.).

10 These difficulties in applying Jorgensen & Sorensen’s (1999) development arena concept to organisational technologies

highlight differences between industrial ICT applications and consumer electronics (the sector in which they conducted their

study). In case of established organisational technologies like ERP, we find close coupling between suppliers and their users (and

innovation is a joint process). Workplace technologies have relatively local audiences concerned with industrial improvement.

By contrast, in the development of consumer ICT platforms, commodification involves a more separate development phase,

which, especially for network technologies, may involve prior collaboration between suppliers and complementary product

providers in standardisation (Williams et al. 2005).

11 Effective research design requires the researcher to consider these trade-offs in focus (for example between breadth versus

depth of field) and clever ways to manage these trade-offs effectively.

12 Our use of this idea of research geometry does not imply that we can apply simple triangulation (in the sense of trigonometry

or a physicist tracking an object in space); to the contrary, our choices about (the multiple) points of access to a phenomenon

shape what we may observe. In addressing variability of viewpoint, we rather make explicit the need for complex triangulation

that is aware of the ‘parallax effects’ that may result from particular points of insertion to a phenomenon.

13 Similar points have been made in relation to the selling other non-material goods – viz the change management techniques of

Business Process Redesign (Williams 2000). Similarly, Benders and van Veen (2001: 283) in their discussion of the uptake of

Business Process Redesign note ‘the importance of considering the process in which management ideas gain “good currency”

within the system of knowledge supply’. Their work for example mentions the importance of an idea having wide interpretive

flexibility. That is, that it can invoke meaning to diverse players, as well as establishing a standardised terminology.

14 And, as already noted, different tools (concepts, methodologies) may be needed to address these different (macro-meso-micro

etc.) levels.

15 Hyysalo (2004) draws on Braudel’s (1995) study about the speeds of change in Mediterranean history, to identify longer time

frames that may be at play beyond that of immediate action: these are the long-term change of societies and mentalities, and the

much slower periodicity of geographical change.

16 It might be argued that perhaps the object of Kallinikos’s (2004) critique might be more precisely characterised as ‘atomistic

interactionism’ rather than the more ambiguous term of constructivism, which has been applied in many different ways.

17 Goffman (1974) addresses these issues from his action-centred framework through the concept of frame analysis. He

distinguishes a number of concentric frames, conceived as different layers or laminations that frame a ‘strip of reality’. The frame

is thus moveable – and is conceived by Gamson (1975) as analogous to the zoom lens on a camera – an analogy that we find very

useful with its potential implications of breadth of field and depth of focus. We wish to raise two questions: first, about how

adequate the tools are for examining the framing process; and, second, if these tools are weakly developed, what are the risks of

overemphasising the immediate local construction over the broader and longer-term structuring.

18 Though we note with regret that the ‘toolbox’ metaphor has often been used as a device for eclecticism – as if it were possible

to simply combine tools on a pick and mix basis without interrogating their presumptions. To the extent that we are arguing for

some degree of eclecticism, rather than thoroughgoing eclecticism, where ‘anything goes’, we are proposing a critical eclecticism

which interrogates the different evidential bases and presumptions of theories and tools.

19 We note here that the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, in its critique of the positivist model of science, tends to invoke, as

the interpretation that needs to be refuted, this kind of mechanistic model of the scientific process: an account of scientific

60

method that provides epistemological guarantees. To our mind, this misconstrues the scientific project. This kind of absolutist

search for truth, as Bloor (1999) points out, is a feature of theological propositions rather than scientific truths. If the alternative

is theological absolutism of course, we must argue for relativism. However, we argue the need not to abandon the search for truth

behind radical relativism but pursue more complex understandings of truth (see Restivo and Croissant 2007).

20 Thanks to Sampsa Hyysalo for bringing this point to our attention.

21 The potted histories of the evolution of ERP all agree on the succession of technologies: MRP, MRPII, CAPM (for UK and

associated scholars), and finally ERP. They also agree about the core functionalities that have been accumulated. Intriguingly,

however, they differ in their account of with which technology these particular functionalities were associated. Compare, for

example, Chung and Snyder (2000), Robertson et al. (2002), Kuldeep and van Hillegersberg (2000) and Jacobs & Weston

(2007).

22 Joe Orlicky and Ollie Wight worked for IBM – though Wight later set up his own management consultancy (Wight 1977).

23 Chris Turner, Managing Director, Class A Limited, interviewed by Juliet Webster 6 July 1990 under ESRC PICT study of

Organisational Shaping of Integrated Automation.

24 IBM sponsored the production and distribution of a series of videos made by Plossl, Orlicky and Wight to explain the concept

of MRP that were made available to APICS members and their companies (Robertson et al. 2002: 14).

25 MRPII ‘It’s a kind of umbrella title isn’t it. I mean it’s almost a recognition that we’ve got all of these different tools out there

and we need to put them all in a tool bag…Although it was called Manufacturing Resource Planning, it wasn’t just for

manufacturing… I don’t think it’s bad in terms of wanting to get over a common message; the problem is that they’ve all got a

different idea of what it means. We’ve never got really worried about that…I personally wish it had a different name. We’ve

often said amongst the group it should have been called something different…Even if you just called it Business Resource

Planning (you know ‘manufacturing’ is the wrong word). It all started from this fact that it was called Material Requirements

Planning and Ollie [Wight] basically established that as a trade name and he wasn’t going to let that go and resource planning

was very good; manufacturing happened to be the only word that fitted. So that’s how it came about’, Chris Turner, Managing

Director, Class A Limited, interviewed by Juliet Webster 6 July 1990.

26 The development from MRP to MRPII was associated not only with the addition of extra-functions, including especially the

adoption of ‘closed-loop systems’ driven by changes in production progress, but also with changes in the underlying IT

infrastructure (notably the shift from mainframe to minicomputers). Indeed hardware and operating system features predominate

in discussion of differences between different offerings in this period (Juliet Webster interview with Anderson).

27 For example in 1991, a nationwide series of BPICS seminars was organised on MPS, MRP & JIT Today, claiming that ‘The

benefits of good forecasting integrated to master scheduling, in turn driving Material Requirements Planning is a pre-requisite to

a good production control. It is also a vital ingredient for a successful “Just-In-Time” implementation’ (BPICS 1991).

28 The lack of longer-term impact of this effort to promote and enhance CAPM highlights some of the difficulties surrounding

attempts by public policymakers to intervene in dynamic processes of technology development – that the target of intervention

may be by-passed by broader developments in the field (Williams and Webster 1993).

29 For example the Association Francaise de Gestion Industriel held a conference (Paris 21 November 1990) entitled ‘Three

Approaches to Production’ involving a debate between the main proponents of three competing approaches to manufacturing

improvement: Georg Plossl (‘father of MRP’ with Oliver Wight), Jamashim the exponent of JIT and Eli Goldratt whose Theory

of Constraints proposed an alternative approach to MRP/MRPII based on eliminating bottlenecks. The emphasis was on

competing models of business organisation rather than technology artefacts (Webster 1993).

30 The Association of Logistics Management in Holland and Eindhoven University of Technology, European Workshop on the

future of MRP (The Hague, 21 – 3 November 1990). Different scenarios for the development of MRP were sketched out in a

background paper by Wijngaard, ‘Beyond MRP – MRP and the Future of Standard Software for Production Planning and

Control’. The UK Department of Trade and Industry, influenced by these views, subsequently launched the Manufacturing and

Planning Initiative to promote cooperation between suppliers and users in developing applications.

31 The roots of ERP in the earlier discourse of MRP/CAPM as a vehicle towards Computer Integrated Manufacturing are

revealed by the observation that the Gartner Group’s April 1990 internal report espousing ERP as a ‘vision of the next-generation

MRP II’ (Wylie 1990) came under the generic heading ‘Computer integrated manufacturing’, a concept that has almost entirely

disappeared from later management or technology discourse (Mendham 2003).

61

32 Discussions about CAPM had flagged the shortcomings of the existing terminology of Manufacturing Resource Planning

(MRP II), Chris Turner notes: ‘even if you just called it Business Resource Planning. You know, manufacturing is the wrong

word’. Chris Turner, Managing Director, Class A Limited, interviewed by Juliet Webster 6 July 1990. Given that this particular

term was not available, the substitution of Enterprise for Business is perhaps unsurprising.

33 In 1990, Georg Plossl outlined a vision of the future of MRP II as ‘not MRPIII’ but ‘distributed processing…networks of

computers working…from the same basic file of data… Better networks of information within the organisation and therefore

smoother flow of data’ (Plossl 1990).

34 In the same way that MRPII/CAPM were promoted as a vehicle for Just-In-Time, despite their contradictory principles

underpinning, we see ERP being proposed as a necessary back-end for e-business (Norris et al. 2000) (though this attempt to

couple the two evaporates when the dot-com bubble bursts).

35 Though it should be noted that even as late as 1990, MRPII and CAPM systems available in the UK were typically linked to,

if not provided by, particular minicomputer or mainframe suppliers.