12 - How Does Innovation Shape Organizing?

Summary

As innovation changes society, so too does it change organizations and work. In some ways, the same questions arise: What kind of work will we be doing, and what work will disappear or be changed? How does technology make it possible to increase worker productivity, possibly through ever more exploitative means? At what timescales should we expect technologies to impact industries, professions, and workers in different ways? But these are, in a way, “just” societal questions writ small. We should not leave them behind when we turn our attention to organizations. They should stay with you, but you also want to be asking additional ones. In this chapter, we raise some of these additional ones and ask how technologies change how we work and organize. The paper by Bodrozic and Adler looks at the longue durée and takes an incredibly broad view, showing how management concepts evolve in response to the possibilities and problematics of (Neo-Schumpeterian) technological revolutions. Beane’s paper does almost the opposite. It looks very closely at how a very specific technology influences how people learn in organizations, highlighting all the variation and nuance and complexity that plays out at the micro-level of organizations. To close, we turn to Dell’Acqua et al.’s very recent working paper and its examination of artificial intelligence and how that particular technology might influence work and organizing as we know them.