Impacts of Programmable Manufacturing Technology: A Review of Recent Studies and Contingency Formulation <s> Research propositions <s> New medical imaging devices, such as the CT scanner, have begun to challenge traditional role relations among radiologists and radiological technologists. Under some conditions, these technologies may actually alter the organizational and occupational structure of radiological work. However, current theories of technology and organizational form are insensitive to the potential number of structural variations implicit in role-based change. This paper expands recent sociological thought on the link between institution and action to outline a theory of how technology might occasion different organizational structures by altering institutionalized roles and patterns of interaction. In so doing, technology is treated as a social rather than a physical object, and structure is conceptualized as a process rather than an entity. The implications of the theory are illustrated by showing how identical CT scanners occasioned similar structuring processes in two radiology departments and yet led to divergent forms of organization. The data suggest that to understand how technologies alter organizational structures researchers may need to integrate the study of social action and the study of social form. <s> BIB001 </s> Impacts of Programmable Manufacturing Technology: A Review of Recent Studies and Contingency Formulation <s> Research propositions <s> Thank you for reading designing effective organizations the sociotechnical systems perspective. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their chosen books like this designing effective organizations the sociotechnical systems perspective, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some infectious bugs inside their computer. <s> BIB002
We began with some a priori expectations about what the literature would reveal. We present these in the form of propositions to help frame the literature review. The first two propositions have to do with average trends across studies, i.e., main effects, while the second two are contingency propositions. We anticipated that there would be different average impacts of technology depending on whether we focused on organizational structure and processes or individual reactions. A summary of the social impact variables we examined is provided in Table 1 . Impacts on organizational structures and processes that we examined were "Coded 1 (positive impact), -1 (negative impact), or 0 (mixed impacts or no main effect). bPercent agreement between two coders on whether social impacts were negative, positive, no impact, or mixed. job and organizational design, skill requirements, communications, and employee involvement in decision making. The OTA report ( 1984 ) and National Research Council (NRC ) studies (Manufacturing Studies Board, 1986 ) argue that new technology requires more organic organizational forms that include broader, more flexible job definitions, higher-level cognitive skill requirements, more open two-way communication across levels and across functions, and employee involvement in day-to-day decisions. This is also consistent with common STS interventions. While these interventions aim to achieve a fit between the environment, technical systems, and social systems, there is a remarkable consistency in the actual organizational solutions proposed. These solutions generally include the use of semi-autonomous work groups and an attempt to create an organic organizational environment  BIB002  . The basic argument is that programmable automation is effective at automating repetitive, manual tasks, but does not completely control itself. In part because the technologies are new and unproven, and in part because of their complexity, these technologies often fail in unpredictable ways. In  terms, programmable manufacturing technologies are high on "equivoque". The result is that humans need to be an integral part of the deviation detection and correction loop. They need to monitor the technology, respond quickly to failures, and learn how the technology fails and ideally how to improve the technology. This requires initiative and autonomy that goes far beyond the repetitive, manual work characteristic of the age of scientific management. Thus, it is theorized that to effectively exploit PMT, organizations must be organic, providing workers with extensive training, timely and accurate information, autonomy, flexible jobs that allow workers to flexibly adapt to the situation, and involvement in technological improvement decisions. The proposition that derives from this is: Proposition 1. Most studies will look only for main effects and report that programmable automation is associated with more organic organizations. Given the prevailing reasoning about the impact of PMT, it should not be surprising that researchers will generally expect to find more organic organizations. However, why should they find that PMT is associated with more organic organizations? If, in fact, the world is such that a contingency model is a best fit, one might presume that researchers who fail to consider these contingencies will consistently find no effects of technology-positive and negative effects should cancel out. However, as discussed earlier, a contingency model does not mean that there are counterbalancing positive and negative effects. As examplified by BIB001 study discussed earlier, it is possible to find that a technology leads to reduced social distance in general, but to different degrees under different conditions. Someone not recognizing the contingency would find a positive main effect which was the average of Barley's two different positive slopes. Moreover, a researcher may be capturing in their sample only a limited range on the contingency variable. For example, if the existence of a strong union prevented companies from laying off workers when they introduced PMT but researchers only studied non-unionized companies, they may find large numbers of jobs lost as a result of PMT despite the fact that, on average, across unionized and non-unionized companies the impacts are much less profound. As discussed in the next section, most of the studies of PMT impacts focused on quite small samples of manufacturing firms and often on a single plant so they were not likely to capture a range of the different cells in a contingency model. If the organization adopting PMT, on average, becomes more organic and workers have more "enriched" jobs, does this mean workers will be happy? The answer is not necessarily affirmative. In a case study of the implementation of programmable automation in a small manufacturing firm, the first author and associates found general trends toward a more organic organization, but very mixed employee reactions depending on their position in the company  . Employees who had jobs that were central to the functioning of the new programmable automation were generally enthusiastic about the new technology and the changes to their jobs. However, many long-time employees who worked on old equipment that was being phased out feared they would ultimately lose their jobs. Interestingly, employees selected to work with the new automation seemed excited but also reported more work-related stress than employees working on the old equipment. It seems that dealing with the project delays, uncertainty, and pressures of installing the new equipment led to long work hours and a stressful work environment. Thus, we see mixed results of the technology on individuals, depending on their work role, and some individuals had mixed reactions, enthusiasm tempered by stress. This leads to the second proposition: Propositon 2. Individual reactions to programmable automation will be mixed, with neither positive nor negative reactions predominating. The first two propositions focus on central tendencies, but we also expected considerable variation in the findings of studies. As discussed at the beginning of this article, one can find papers that report a very positive scenario of organic, open systems with enriched challenging jobs, those that report a negative scenario of degraded jobs and massive layoffs, and still others that identify mixed positive and negative results that can be explained by contingency variables that condition the impacts of technology. We suspected that these differences in findings are partly attributable to the types of research methods used and the quality of the studies. For example, qualitative case studies might lead to different general findings than largesample surveys and peer-reviewed articles might have generally different findings than papers that have not undergone the scrutiny of the peer-review process. We attempted to develop specific propositions about the effects of various study characteristics, but this led to too many individual propositions to list here, as well as some contradictory propositions. For example, one can argue that qualitative case studies are more likely to lead to findings of contingent impacts as the researcher is confronted with all of the rich complexity of technology implementation, or one can argue that large-scale surveys are more likely to find contingent impacts as the larger sample provides more cross-site variation to analyze. Rather than attempt to precisely define the numerous possible propositions, we use the following summary proposition: Proposition 3. The social impact of programmable automation varies systematically with the research method employed to study it. We also expected that the theoretical framework of the researcher(s) would influence what they saw. In particular, we were interested in the difference between studies that reported main effects only and those that reported mixed impacts, e.g., varying slopes. We suspected that this depended on whether the author started out with a main-effects-only model or a contingency model as reflected in Proposition 4. That is, by failing to think in terms of contingencies, some authors will report only the average impact and interpret these as main effects. In this sense, what the researcher sees is influenced by what the researcher looks for.