The Alignment of Technology and Structure through Roles and Networks
提出基于角色的方法，研究技术如何通过改变工作角色的非关系元素和关系元素，进而影响组织社会网络结构，并用放射科使用传统与计算机成像设备的田野数据验证。
This paper outlines a role-based approach for conceptualizing and investigating the contention in some previous research that technologies change organizational and occupational structures by transforming patterns of action and interaction. Building on Nadel's theory of social structure, the paper argues that the microsocial dynamics occasioned by new technologies reverberate up levels of analysis in an orderly manner. Specifically, a technology's material attributes are said to have an immediate impact on the nonrelational elements of one or more work roles. These changes, in turn, influence the role's relational elements, which eventually affect the structure of an organization's social networks. Consequently, roles and social networks are held to mediate a technology's structural effects. The theory is illustrated by ethnographic and sociometric data drawn from a comparative field study of the use of traditional and computerized imaging devices in two radiology departments.