Same technology, different outcome? Reinterpreting Barley's Technology as an Occasion for Structuring

In the last few decades, several studies have found the same technology implemented in highly similar organizational settings to be associated with very different consequences for structure and process. The seminal study in this stream of research is Barley's (1986) Technology as an Occasion for Structuring, which reported that two similarly composed radiology departments implemented the same technology (computerized tomography scanners), yet experienced very different structural outcomes. In this paper I re-analyze the original study's data under three different statistical assumptions. First, I performed an arcsine transformation on the dependent variable where the original study used the raw probabilities. Second, I specified a power regression model in which the original study employed a linear regression. Finally, I user fewer dummy variables in the `combined' regression models to determine the distinct phases through which the two hospitals evolved. Taken together...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: EJIS
• Authors: Starling David Hunter III
• Keywords: EJIS 2010, Original Study, Radiology Departments, Technology