Triadic Technology Configuration: A Relational Perspective on Technologists’ Role in Shaping Cloud-Based Technologies
通过民族志研究，考察工人、管理者与第三方技术专家之间的关系如何影响基于云的职场技术的持续配置，发现技术专家因创新和经济关系而成为关键角色，需纳入当代技术分析。
Through an ethnographic study of a manufacturing monitoring technology, the author examines how the relations among workers, managers, and third-party technologists impact the ongoing configuration of cloud-based workplace technologies. Because these technologies are broadly networked, data-driven, and highly malleable, the author argues that technologists have an increasingly prominent role. By tracing issues raised by workers and managers in the focal customer firm, the study shows that the employment relation can explain only a limited set of outcomes. An analysis that accounts for technologists’ innovative and economic relations with their users fully explains which issues are resolved and how. In contrast to research that implies technologists amplify institutionalized patterns of labor–management relations through their design choices, this study shows that technologists are complex organizational actors with situated interests, values, and identities. Through the development of a triadic model of relations, the author demonstrates why technologists must be included in analyses of contemporary technologies.