The Power of Human-Technology Interaction:When New Technology Shifts the Political Landscape

Abstract

The reliance on Information Technology (IT) within contemporary organizations has in-creased conspicuously within the past few decades, and this has changed the way in which work is conducted. In this article, attention is dedicated a case study of a company that re-cently went through a major technological change where several new IT solutions were implemented. The article investigates how tasks and formal roles of employees may change when new IT solutions are implemented, and how this in turn affects the employ-ees’ social roles and work politics. We illustrate, by applying concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), how administrative non-core business tasks can be replaced by IT-related non-core business tasks. We also demonstrate that the entrance of new technol-ogy is able to force a competence shift, in which some of the administrative formal roles are replaced by new positions obtained by individuals with high knowledge in IT. The competence shift generates in turn a shift in the workplace politics, since the organizational power structure is altered.