Organizations Revisited: Human and Technological Agency in Networks within Organizational Theory

The concern of this paper is twofold: It acknowledges the contribution of the actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986; Law, 1991; Latour, 1993; Latour, 1997; Bloomfield & Vurdubakis, 1999; Lee & Hassard, 1999; Latour, 1999; Law, 1999; Amin & Cohendet, 2003; Collins, 2004; Latour, 2005) in offsetting common opposites, such as humans and technology or structure and agency, which are applied in order to categorize organizational literature. ANT was adopted in organizational theory (OT) due to offering a distinctive view on boundaries of organizations in developing a network approach. While networks are constituted by acting and consisting of relations of heterogeneous material, non-humans are granted an actorship as well. As a meta-level of acting is repudiated, the historicity of networks allows for an explanation of stability of organizations. Furthermore, the paper aims at bringing the research on the role of technology in organizations and its relation to humans of the information studies (IS) to the attention of organizational theory (OT) as to overcome its stated under-theorization in OT (Barrett et al., 2006; Orlikowski, 2007); hence, bridging the gap between these two scientific fields.