Abstract
Organisations are good places wherein to explore the social dependence and embeddedness of technologies, technological relations, and technological systems. Like organisations, technologies are tied to goal-oriented, purposive action, and thrive on hope and imaginaries, often in a future-oriented manner (e.g. the latest slogans of ‘digitalisation’ and ‘disruption’). The chapter reviews organisational anthropological studies of technology companies, from shop floor ethnographies and studies of organisational culture to the first anthropological studies of computerisation and digital infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic cases from the robot industry in Germany (interconnected, sensor-equipped, collaborative robots) and the shipping industry in Denmark (digital navigation tools), the chapter demonstrates how powerful imaginaries of digital technological transformation and everyday work experiences with the development and use of digital technologies form the perceptions of decision makers and managers and transform the working lives of operators and navigators. Digitalisation opens up new ways of organising industries, companies, workplaces, and work tasks, but these new ways cannot be predicted or inferred from the technologies. To analyse how digitalisation influences organisational realities, upsets hierarchies, affects professional identities, and changes work practices in multiple, unanticipated ways, the authors resort to the classic organisational anthropological concepts of culture, power, knowledge, and practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Many important ethnographic studies have been conducted in, or in the vicinity of, scientific organisations and laboratories: Knorr-Cetina 1981; Lynch 1985; Latour and Woolgar 1986[1979]; Cohn 1987; Traweek 1988; Gusterson 1996; Rabinow 1996; Fujimura 1996; Helmreich 1998; Hasse 2000 to mention just a few.
- 2.
In the work of Michel Foucault, the rationalities of government are often described as technologies, for example, ‘technologies of government’ and ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1990[1976]), and Foucauldian understandings of government and power have been very influential in organisational studies and ethnographies of technology companies. These particular forms of rationality, discipline, and power have, however, rarely been linked directly to the material technologies involved through ethnographic studies.
- 3.
For a critique of the instrumentalisation and absorption of the concepts of situated learning and communities of practice into the technology industry, see chapter by Sims, this volume.
- 4.
Hakken and Andrews (1993) wrote an ethnography on computerisation and the transformation of class structures in the UK.
- 5.
While based in the R&D department of one of Germany’s leading producers of industrial robots, the fieldwork also expanded into many of the company’s other departments and beyond the company to ‘affected stakeholders’ from labour unions, works councils, and industry organisations. A total number of 28 interviews were carried out. The study was part of a larger strategic research project on Responsible Ethical Learning With Robotics (REELER, https://reeler.eu) that traced 11 different robots in different sectors and different European countries.
- 6.
The fieldwork was part of two research projects, ‘The robot as a “colleague”’ and ‘Open Innovation in Blue Denmark—in spite of DNA and NDA’, that took place in 2019–2020 and aimed to understand the role of technology in the shipping industry. The first project focused on navigation technologies and involved two to four-day field visits on board eight different ships, participation in business fairs in the maritime tech industry, seminars and conferences and 42 interviews with tech developers, maritime authorities, tech developers, and navigators (see https://projekter.au.dk/blaa-danmark/).
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Bruun, M.H., Krause-Jensen, J. (2022). Inside Technology Organisations: Imaginaries of Digitalisation at Work. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_25
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