Business Process Transformation - Spring 1997 Business Process Transformation - Spring 1997
In this lecture Kylie discussed the folowing paper, which was pesented at ACIS97 in Adelaide in September 1997.
The Panopticon and the Rhetoric of Empowerment in Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
Kylie Sayer
School of Computing and Information Technology
Griffith University
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Email: ksayer@cit.gu.edu.au
Professor Lynda Harvey
School of Information Systems
Curtin Business School
Curtin University of Technology
Perth, WA, Australia
harveyl@cbs.curtin.edu.au
Ph: (09) 351 2867
Fax: (09) 351 3076
Abstract
Business process reengineering (BPR) is a methodology for organisational transformation which promises employee empowerment through the adoption of IT as a leverage for change. This paper argues that the managerial principles of BPR are in conflict, adopting both an empowerment rhetoric and a mechanistic model of control. Further, it is argued that BPR is naïve in its interpretation of the management of culture and politics in organisational change. An ethnography of a BPR implementation using cc:Mail as a leverage for change is presented to demonstrate how politics can prevent a BPR implementation. The discourses from the ethnography are deconstructed using Foucault's concept of The Panopticon to show the controlling nature of BPR as a technology of power.
Key Words: Business process reengineering (DD0402); Ethnography (AI0112); Resistance to change (AA1102); State government (BC0103)
There is a recognised need for organisations to adapt new forms to enable them to exploit the capabilities of information technology (IT) and to operate more effectively in the changing environment of the 1990s and beyond. Within the context of organisational change, business process reengineering (BPR) is offered as a revolutionary, radical change approach to improving organisational performance. Manganelli & Klein(1994) argue that the "rate of change in the business world has accelerated to the point that initiatives capable of achieving incremental improvements cannot keep up. Breakthrough and discontinuous performance gains are the only way to equal or exceed the rate of change going on in the world around us" (p.ix). BPR promotes a flatter organisational structure, with empowered process workers who use IT in radically new ways to carry out operations.
The BPR approach has dominated much of the business and academic literature (Davenport & Short, 1990; Davenport, 1993; Hammer, 1990; Hammer & Champy, 1993; Champy, 1995). Many different BPR methodologies are being developed yet there are still issues of concern surrounding reengineering (Craig and Yetton, 1992; 1994a; 1994b). The successes promised of the reengineered organisation have been achieved by very few organisations. BPR as a concept needs investigating alongside BPR as a tool for practice. The research presented in this paper investigates the concept of employee empowerment as a key concept in the BPR rhetoric and as a problem in the implementation of BPR.
The paper presents a postmodern ethnography of BPR in practice to illustrate how employee empowerment is a barrier to BPR implementation. It is argued that this is due to a notable naivety in the BPR rhetoric regarding the politics of empowerment.
The success of BPR rests largely on how management empower their employees, and in the use of information technology in enabling this. IT provides the means for a more widespread and lateral dispersal of information throughout the organisation. This takes away from the traditional role of management as information controllers enabling flatter organisational structures with fewer levels of management and greater employee empowerment. The concept of empowerment has become rhetorical i.e., it is talked about frequently but rarely enacted. We suggest that it is inherent in the philosophy of BPR methodologies to reinforce the position and power of management and that this is in direct conflict with the espousal of the giving of power to employees.
BPR as shown in the research literature takes a highly deterministic view of organisational change which is essentially top-down in nature. The methodological principles of reengineering tend to focus on the process of what needs to change with relatively little attention given to the actual process of how to achieve that change. The research discussed in this paper demonstrates that the practice of reengineering introduce change into the organisation which is viewed as political and so will inevitably receive resistance.
The reengineering approach to empowerment allows for responsibility and authority to be devolved to lower levels of the organisation. This has the potential benefit of stripping out redundant levels of management, while at the same time giving the employees working at the customer coalface opportunities for job satisfaction through decision-taking and genuine involvement in a process. This concept of empowerment is often offered in conjunction with the use of IT to maintain control over empowered workers (Hammer,1990).
Thus empowerment is just part of a broader approach of organisational requiring a shift in culture. Within practice, BPR, this cultural shift has not been of the emancipatory kind, empowerment as wrapped in elements of control. Empowerment then, as approached by BPR, does not necessitate giving up control but rather changing the way control is exercised. As discussed by Limerick and Cunnington (1995), "The strength of the reengineered organisation lies in the empowerment of individuals. Empowerment is its strength. The assumption that all people are empowered is its weakness" (p.237). Empowerment is imposed by leadership, through the changing of worker values (culture) and through the use of IT to maintain this control. Both of these elements are invisible mechanisms of control. They are not the emancipatory means of empowerment as they provide empowerment only for those within the confines of the rules set out by the organisation's leadership.
Power in Organisations
The view of power in the reengineering literature is reflected in the approach it takes to empowerment. Power is a commodity to be exchanged and utilised. Its source can be discerned and its distribution can be controlled. It is treated as though it has an objective reality. This notion is rejected by many. As Boland discusses it, "power is not an entity. The dynamics of power are dialectic and found in human interaction. Power does not emanate from some location, but like meaning, is produced and reproduced through action and sense-making dialogue" (1987, p.373).
Power is socially constructed within the organisation and is not just commodity that can be taken from one and given to another. Power accrues through organisational discourse where a member is discussed to be powerful and where those that control the text have the power. Power is a relationship that is held between those with and those without power, it is symbolic. The reengineering approach glosses over the depth of value placed upon power. It does nothing to address the inevitable struggle that will ensue when attempts are made to change traditional power structures through the flattening of the hierarchy and empowerment of lower-echelon staff. (Spears and Lea, 1994).
In this paper we argue that a Foucaultian approach to power is a more appropriate means of understanding the effects of BPR on the organisation as it promotes the view of power as a relationship. Foucault argues that power is not an object, but a relationship among individuals. Power is a social construction, created through discourse among organisational members (Fiske, 1993). Foucault (1982) argues for the importance of the study of power relations.
By drawing on the theories of Foucault (1978,1979 1980) and his use of the panoptic principle further analysis of the concept of power within BPR can be explored. The metaphor of the Panopticon can be used to examine how BPR is itself a mechanism of power. Wilson discusses how, in using this metaphor for analysis, it is possible to understand 'the developments of industrial control' that are evident within the workplace (1995, p.67).
The Panopticon was developed by Jeremy Bentham in the early nineteenth century as a new design for prisons. The structural design of the building was to make continual observation and control possible but unnecessary. The circular building was to have a central tower in the middle of it that looked out of the periphery where the inmates were housed. The inmates were kept isolated and through the backlighting provided by the building design, the guards could see in and the prisoners could not see out. Hence, they did not know if they were being watched or not. The principle effect of the Panopticon then is to "induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers" (Foucault, 1978, p.201).
The key to this exercise of power and control is visibility. "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power " (Foucault, 1978, p.203). Self-control, self-discipline is imposed on one who is under the control of possible surveillance. If you know there is the possibility of being watched you act as if watched. This imposes a normalising discipline over the watched so they conform to the requirements of the overseers. This visibility creates what Foucault calls a gaze, 'an inspecting gaze'. A gaze that exerts a power to conform, not through a direct approach of control but an indirect approach of self-control and discipline. Foucault has used this idea of panoptic power to analyse many of the developments in our history. We now use these same principles to reflect on the mechanism of power inherent in BPR.
(b) Panoptic Power of BPR
While the panopticon originated as an architectural design, Foucault takes it as a mechanism of power detached from specific use, a "figure of political technology" (1978, p.205). In this same way we can observe BPR as a technology of power, a methodology that implicitly adopts the same principles of Bentham's Panopticon.
BPR exposes processes within organisations. It identifies them, maps them and makes them visible to analysts and organisational members alike. This process of identification highlights the flaws in existing modes of operation in order to reengineer them. The intent is to change the process, to get rid of the inefficient and bring in the efficient. As Hammer described it, "we must challenge old assumptions and shed the old rules that made the business underperform in the first place" (1990, p.107).
Those processes that are identified (made visible) as being inefficient are denied by the reengineers. This denial makes them invisible again. From knowing what the relevant knowledge is we render the irrelevant invisible, the reengineered processes are the relevant, and the old are the irrelevant.
Models (e.g. process models) are developed to detail and display the reengineered processes. This in itself is a means of control imposed by the reengineers. It imposes a discipline on organisational processes by formalising what was previously informal and unrecorded by the organisation. A formal model places in Foucault's terms, a 'gaze' over the organisation. The models depict the formal reengineered 'reality' of the organisation. The reengineered models provide the right way to operate by creating visibility. That is, only by having a model can you identify who does not work to it. Work thus becomes highly transparent to management.
The introduction of reengineering introduces a new distribution of power. This power is in the form of the discipline the reengineering imposes. As Foucault explains, this discipline comes with "its structures, its hierarchies, its inspections, exercises and methods of training and conditioning" (1980, p.158). In the same way BPR structures the new organisation, it inspects, it trains and it conditions. The organisation is subjected to the panoptic gaze. It is thrown back on its own conscience to produce a new morality. The reengineered model becomes the norm and movements are subject to the discipline of the reengineering model. As the reengineering model is portrayed as the norm, the choice is then to resist its gaze or 'interiorise' the gaze. This is where the individual internalises the new reengineered structures and values so that they become the norm. Through the metaphor of the panopticon, BPR can be shown as a technology of power. It promotes the same approach to discipline over the organisation through a new distribution of power that serves to make people 'unable and unwilling' to commit wrong. This illustrates the power of the reengineered model.
(c) Panoptic Power of IT
Parallels between the Panopticon and modern IT have also been drawn (Zuboff, 1988; Spears & Lea, 1994; Lyon, 1993; Wilson, 1995). The introduction of IT into the organisation has the ability to introduce a panoptic 'gaze' over individuals. BPR enables organisational processes to be explicated by IT, e.g. who does what and how well they perform can be translated into objective data. The BPR gaze locates and individualises organisational processes so that it can dominate. As Zuboff discusses "Such systems can become information panopticons that, freed from the constrains of space and time, do not depend upon the physical arrangements of buildings or the laborious record keeping of industrial administration. They do not require the mutual presence of objects of observation". The surveillance abilities of IT are reinforced when BPR advocates placing controls in the technology to maintain the discipline required of the reengineered organisation. IT can then take on a role traditionally held only by management, rendering the managerial gaze less visible.
Lyon suggests that this ability of IT to increase surveillance and control over users places them in what he terms a 'panoptic prison' (1993, p.653). The panoptic power of computer mediated communication in particular, has been discussed by Spears and Lea (1994). They identify the potential forces of the medium of both empowerment and control. Where electronic communications have the potential to empower people through increased information and access, it may also increase surveillance and control over people. Spears and Lea summarise the key elements of the panopticon "hierarchical observation, normalisation, and the objectification and individualisation of the subject" (1994, p.439).
The particular approach to the research adopted here is taken because of a gap in the existing research into BPR. The existing studies into the use of BPR are few in number, representing only the BPR success stories of reengineering projects, highlighting what the companies did right. With the much quoted, although unsubstantiated, 70% failure rate (Hammer & Champy, 1993; Champy, 1995) in BPR implementation, these studies are informative on the true state of reengineering. Case studies (Wastell, 1994; Hall et al, 1993, Kennedy, 1994; Buday, 1993, Hammer, 1990; Hammer & Champy, 1993; Watson, 1994) are given but these merely provide a brief snapshot in time of the end result of reengineering.
The research approach adopted here is influenced by a lack of empirical research on the nature of BPR methodologies. By empirical, we mean the real world research, derived from participation within the research setting, as opposed to experimental laboratory work. Due to the identification of the cultural and political problems encountered within reengineering, a research approach that focuses on these issues was chosen. Further, many of the previous studies have been lacking in their contextual and historical view of the organisations. The research methodology selected for this research is ethnography and its selection was motivated by the limitations seen in present studies on BPR.
Ethnography
Ethnography is adopted as a specific approach to the interpretation of a culture, denoting specific means of data collection and analysis of the culture under study (Van Maanen, 1979; Rosen, 1991). Ethnography is a long established research approach derived from the fields of social anthropology and sociology. After early ethnographic research in the IS field (Zuboff, 1988; Orlikowski, 1988), ethnography has become an increasingly used approach (Davies & Mitchell, 1994; Hughes et al, 1992; Bentley et al, 1992; Orlikowski, 1992; Davies & Nielsen, 1992; Lee, 1993). Harvey and Myers suggest this is a result of the fact that "information systems researchers are becoming more accepting of the need to adopt techniques which consider the historical and contextual aspects of information systems" (Harvey & Myers; 1995, p.16). It constantly questions reality construction and interpretation within the context to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the situation under study that is meaningful to those within the context of the study.
We have adopted a postmodern ethnographic voice. Within the ethnographic approach itself, there are differing schools of thought stemming from the debates in sociology and anthropology. These have been described as the different genres within the field of ethnography (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988; Atkinson, 1992). The postmodern approach focuses on the changing relationship between the interaction of the text, the author and the reader of the text avoiding authorial closure of the text from the reader(s).
Methods of Data Collection
The main instrument of investigation is observation which comes from being immersed in the 'field', hence the term field study. This involves observing people in the natural settings in which they work (Burgess, 1982). The principle method used in conducting field research is participant observation. This provides the researcher with close, long-term exposure to the phenomenon to enable the observation and analysis of situations relevant to the object of study.
The primary methods of data collection used in this ethnography included: interviews (unstructured and semi-structured), review of organisational and project documentation to develop an appreciation of the history of the context, and key informant collaboration. These are ethnographic techniques that are common in doing an ethnography (Orlikowski, 1992).
An ethnography was conducted over a ten month period during 1994. The ethnography took place in a section of a Queensland Government department which is one of Queenslands largest. It has an annual budget of more than $1.2 billion and employs in excess of 7000 people. The department is organised into nine operational divisions and five regions, with head office located in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, Australia.
The main activities of the Department include:
At the time of the ethnography, the Department was moving from centralised operations to regionalisation as part of a more decentralised approach to management.
The ethnography occurred within a branch which is referred to in this paper as "the RUMS Branch". RUMS is a pseudonym and an acronym for Road Use Management Section. The RUMS Branch employed approximately eighty people. The branch was a result of an amalgamation comprising half of one branch of Road Transport (RT), three quarters of another branch of RT and some from Road Safety (RS) "each with culturally diverse backgrounds".
At the time of entry, the communication within the branch formally followed a hierarchical chain of command. Informally, 'leapfrogging' regularly occurred. In some sections the structured approach to communication was more enforced than others, depending on the style of management. Comments were made on the relationship between structure and communication:
I see the Department as a pyramid system, my manager is really strict and we all have to go through him. My manager would probably kick my butt if I went around him.
Communication is cumbersome and ill-defined now, it changes ... The supposed system breaks down. People leap frog, they don't go through the required system.
The problem is communication has to go through a lot of official panels of paper. Its a well meaning but ineffective bureaucratic method.
The leader of RUMS was a Principal Manager (PM) who was the initiator of and champion of BPR within his unit. He sought to introduce BPR in alignment with a move towards IT-centred communication. By gaining IT-based communication and control, he saw process improvement capabilities and organisational flattening to hierarchies of command.
In this section we explore the ethnographic text using Foucault's theory of the Panopticon. We look at the perception of BPR and IT within the research site from the perspective of Panoptic principles, discussing power and culture in the context of the investigation.
Communication in the Branch was previously the domain of middle management. They controlled the flow and speed of communication up and down the hierarchy. They were the centre points for information, often deciding who would see what, when and where and this is where the inefficiencies occurred. While the strictness of hierarchy was not always imposed, this was always at the discretion of management. As one manager explained:
Odd things come through my intray and I send them back [to my staff] and tell them 'you can sign'. It's a confidence building exercise when you're empowering people. It gives them a thrill to sign something for themselves when they're coming up through the ranks.
The PM did not work to a strict hierarchy, he wanted information at the hands of everyone and he desired the ability to be able to immediately communicate with everyone directly. The technology of email would allow him to do that and he adopted email as an enabler in reengineering. The focus was taken off management in the communication process. Reengineering was to place information in the hands of all employees. With the nomination for the need to reengineer, the PM was acknowledging the inefficiencies management had brought to the process. This implicitly held them up for question, their inability's were discovered and outlined and a solution was found. This degree of focus imposes the power of the Panoptic 'gaze'. It opens communication up to inspection, surveillance and judgement.
Exposing the Power of the Gaze
While technology was relied upon heavily for much of the work carried out within the branch, its use as a means of communication was new for many employees. As a means of encouraging the reengineered communication process PM made the request for all communication to him to be via cc:Mail. PM had an intense dislike for paper and the electronic network made it possible for him to receive everything electronically. Everyone in the organisation knew of and discussed his dislike for paper, as this had always made him stand out in the predominantly paper-based organisation. It was quickly discovered if you wanted any contact with PM it had to be electronic. This stance by the PM was his way of supporting the effort through action, some comments by staff on his stand are given below:
If you're working to [PM] and you send him stuff on paper, he will send you back a little note 'cc:Mail please' or 'email please'. He doesn't want to get the paper.
[PM] likes responding to it, you phone him and you don't get an answer, maybe two days later and of course the encouragement is very strong for it there. If you want to communicate with [PM] you do it on his machine and he will respond to his machine with a quick answer.
PM communicated directly with all employees within the branch using cc:Mail and set the informal protocol for the reengineered communication. With PM instigating direct communication, this gave the employees the authority to also communicate directly. This took the communication control role away from middle management as they were no longer required as a necessary step in the communication process.
Having all information directed to the PM imposed a new discipline over the organisation and a new control over information. The new process promoted the panoptic gaze. The PM's requests for cc:Mail use were to encourage the freeing up of information from the layers of the hierarchy. The control over information traditionally held middle management as central to the information flow. What this did was to change that centrality, placing discipline on the employees to email PM direct. This created a new point of control over information.
This enforcement to communicate electronically and the requirement of cc:Mail to become a way of life were acts perceived as a top-down mechanism of control. This was required in implementing the reengineered process. The power of the Panopticon lies in the power of the unknown, the invisible. The power of the gaze is associated with its invisibility. However, PM had made that power visible when he began to request cc:Mail and even more so when it was discovered that this was the only medium through which communication with him could be initiated. By requesting electronic carbon copies (cc), the PM made the power of his required norm visible to other members of the organisation. Power was not in the hands of any one person, it was in the technology of power. Power was also not in the hands of the PM, it was in the reengineered process. By making that power visible to others it gives them the opportunity to use it and manipulate it.
Middle management was unhappy with this enforced communication structure. They adopted a discourse which denied both PM and his use of IT by referring to his insistence on cc-ing copies of communication to himself. They ridiculed his technology-centric view and discussed cc-ing as a cold, clinical and non-human activity.
It's the people that matter not the technology. Technology doesn't replace people ... I think it's important to get out and rub shoulders otherwise it all becomes clinical and you know, three cc's of this and ten cc's of that and a triple antigen there.
They used this discourse of denial to halt the use of cc:Mail as a means of bypassing their lines of communication control. PM had underestimated the importance of hierarchical control in this environment. He had introduced IT as his preferred means of communication and could not remove it. Instead, he was forced to put middle management back into the communication process, making it impossible for junior staff to use cc:Mail to bypass middle management.
The empowerment promised had become enclosed in a set of rules and protocol forcing its' use to be constrained. It's meaning had become rhetoric as the process of cc'ing a copy of everything to an employee's immediate manager, imposed management control over information deployment once again. The hierarchy and authority structure that valued information control, enabled middle management to retain control over information and resources. Constraining discourse is a means of control and establishing criteria governing communication is a means of establishing power.
The project was never officially labelled a failure. In terms of its original objectives however, the goals of reengineering were never achieved. There was little IT and employees could do within the branch except automating the process. The controls placed on the process only enabled automation of the traditional communication process. This meant that while process improvement was possible, reengineering was not.
In this paper, we have argued that much of the literature on BPR and its relation to organisational transformation takes a highly prescriptive and deterministic view in carrying out the social changes required for BPR to succeed. As a consequence, the research presented here, provides a reconceptualisation of this relationship by taking a social-symbolic view of BPR rather than the mechanistic view that prevails. The primary assertion presented in this research is that it is the implicit focus of control inherent within the BPR approach that makes the claim of empowerment rhetorical. This constrains both the cultural and the structural change required for complete organisational transformation.
The process view promoted by BPR challenges the notion of formal hierarchy. BPR approaches transformation with the notion of producing the 'flatter' organisation. While the efficiencies that are enabled through the removal of management layers are attractive they still promote hierarchy and control depending upon the existing cultural norms. This makes it difficult to truly empower.
Within BPR the emphasis lies on changing the formal patterns and using mechanisms of control to change the informal. This is approached through cultural change. However, BPR takes a prescriptive, engineered view of culture. Cultural change is non-deterministic, and so it is the managerial and the tribal powers of the organisation that are likely to reject the new 'reengineered' management symbols as powerful. Empowering workers by getting middle management to change is anathema to the views of managing in bureaucratic organisations.
This paper has highlighted the importance of power relationships and their role in the manipulation of reality construction, their effects on the outcome of reengineering and the importance of having a historical understanding of the power-political relationships within an organisation. BPR and its mechanisms of control have been shown to be perceived as technologies of power. BPR imposes a gaze and a shift in power as promoted by the gaze which prompts resistance. This resistance is inadequately dealt with in BPR methodologies through the enforcement of new cultural values to overcome it. BPR approaches the cultural change required as a top-down, executive-led imposition that may have little effect in actuality. BPR ignores that it is the power of what is already valued in an organisation that influences change. Cultural values are historical so any attempts at changing them through force induces political action.
In this paper, we have investigated the theme of employee empowerment and we have concentrated on the notion of the Panopticon. Many others notions are possible and some have been developed elsewhere (Sayer, 1997). In the spirit of postmodernism, no closure is given to potential voices and the reader is invited to interpret this ethnography in novel and creative ways. Our contribution is in seeking to evoke experiences of the field study in challenging the empowerment rhetoric of BPR.
Atkinson, P. (1992) The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual constructions of reality, Routledge.
Bentley, R., Hughes, J.A., Randall, D., Rodden, T., Sawyer, P., Shapiro, D. and Sommerville, I. (1992) "Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control", CSCW 92 ACM 1992 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.. Sharing Perspectives, ACM Press, 123-129.
Boland, Jr. R.J. (1987) "The In-Formation of Information Systems" in R.J. Boland Jr., and R.A. Hirschheim (eds.) Critical Issues in Information Systems Research, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Buday, R.S. (1993) "Reengineering One Firm's Product Development and Another's Service Delivery", Planning Review, 21, 14-19.
Burgess, R.G. (ed.)(1982) Field Research: a Sourcebook and Field Manual, George Allen and Unwin (Publishers) Ltd.
Champy, J. (1995) Reengineering Management: The Mandate for New Leadership, Harper Business.
Clifford, J. and Marcus, G.E. (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, University of California Press, Ltd.
Craig, J. and Yetton, P. (1992) "Business Process Redesign: A Critique of Process Innovation by Thomas Davenport as a Case Study in the Literature", Australian Journal of Management, 17, 285-306.
Craig, J. and Yetton, P. (1994a) "The Dual Strategic and Change Role of IT: A Critique of Business Process Reengineering", Working Paper 94-002, Australian Graduate School of Management, The University of New South Wales.
Craig, J. and Yetton, P. (1994b) "Top down and bottom up management of BPR" in B.C. Glasson, I.T. Hawryszkiewycz, B.S. Underwood & R.A. Weber (eds.) Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 Open Conference on Business Process Re-engineering, Information System Opportunities and Challenges, 217-226.
Davenport, T.H. (1993) Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology. Harvard Business School Press.
Davenport, T.H. and Short, J.E. (1990) "The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign", Sloan Management Review, Summer, 11-27.
Davies, L. and Mitchell, G. (1994) "The Dual Nature of the Impact of IT on Organizational Transformations".in R. Baskerville; S. Smithson; O. Ngwenyama and J.I. DeGross (eds.) Transforming Organizations with Information Technology, Elsevier Science Publishers.
Davies, L. and Nielsen, S. (1992) "An Ethnographic Study of Configuration Management and Documentation Practices" in K.E. Kendall; K. Lyytinen and J. DeGross (eds.) The Impact on Computer Supported Technologies on Information Systems Development, Elsevier Science Publishers, North Holland.
Fiske, J. (1993) Power Plays Power Works. Verso.
Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Random House, Inc.
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1980) in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1982) "The Subject and Power", Critical Inquiry, 8, 777-795
Hall, G; Rosenthal, J. and Wade, J. (1993) "How to Make Reengineering Really Work", Harvard Business Review, November-December, 119-131.
Hammer, M. (1990) "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate", Harvard Business Review, July-August, 104-112.
Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
Harvey, L.J. and Myers, M.D. (1995) "Scholarship and practice: the contribution of ethnographic research methods to bridging the gap", Information Technology & People, 8, 13-27.
Hughes, J.A., Randall, D. and Shapiro, D. (1992) "Faltering from Ethnography to Design", CSCW 92 ACM 1992 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: Sharing Perspectives, ACM Press, 115-199.
Lee, A.S. (1993) "Electronic Mail as a Medium for Rich Communication: An Empirical Investigation Using Hermeneutic Interpretation", Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Information Systems, Orlando, Florida, 13-21.
Limerick, D. and Cunnington, B. (1993) Managing the New Organisation: A Blueprint for Networks and Strategic Alliances, Business and Professional Publishing.
Lyon, D. (1993) "An Electronic Panopticon? A sociological critiques of surveillance theory", The Sociological Review, 653-678.
Manganelli, R.L. and Klein, M.M. (1994) The Reengineering Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Business Transformation, AMACOM, American Management Association.
Orlikowski, W.J. (1988) "Information Technology in Post-industrial Organizations: An Exploration of the Computer-Mediation of Production Work", Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Faulty of the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University.
Orlikowski, W.J. (1992) "The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organisations", Organisation Science, 3, 398-427.
Rosen, J. (1991) "Coming to Terms with the Field: Understanding and Doing Organisational Ethnography", Joumal of Management Studies, 28, 1-24.
Sayer, K. (1997) "A Critical Discourse on the Rhetoric of Business Process Reengineering", Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, School of Computing and Information Technology, Griffith University.
Spears, R. and Lea, M. (1994) "Panacea or Panoptic? The Hidden Power in Computer-Mediated Communication", Communication Research, 21, 427-459.
Van Maanen, J. (1979) "The Fact and Fiction in Organisational Ethnography", Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, 539-549.
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales From the Field, University of Chicago Press.
Wastell, D.G; White, P. and Kawalek, P. (1994) "A methodology for business process redesign: experiences and issues", Joumal of Strategic Information Systems, 3, 23-39.
Watson, G.H. (1994) Business Systems Engineering: Managing Breakthrough Change for Productivity and Profit, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Wilson, F. (1995) "Managerial Control Strategies within the Networked Organisation", Information Technology & People, 8, 57-72.
Zuboff, S. (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, Basic Books, Inc.
COPYRIGHT Sayer and Harvey (c) 1997. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the ACIS 97 conference papers, and for the documents to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.
BPT Lecture 9, 17/10/97
Any questions or comments, just e-mail me.
This page is maintained by
Jim Underwood
who can be reached at
jim@socs.uts.edu.au.
This page was last updated on November 11th, 1997.
http://linus.socs.uts.edu.au/~jim/bpt/s97l9.html
