The workflow application as an unintended medium for organizational learning: A longitudinal field study [An article from: Information and Organization]

This digital document is a journal article from Information and Organization, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Research on information technology (IT) and organizational learning has treated IT as either a subject of or an intentionally designed platform for organizational learning. In contrast, this study investigates the unintentional effects of IT use on organizational learning processes. The findings of this longitudinal field study suggest that an IT platform can serve as both reification and propagation media for experimentation with new work practices. The use of an IT platform can produce online profiles of new work practices and spread them within a user community immediately and simultaneously in a decontextualized fashion. As a consequence, the intensity of collective learning in the process of institutionalizing new work practices can be reduced.