People, Technology, and Processes: A further reflection in pandemic times

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced organizations to change the way they work. More specifically, to cope with the emergency situation, people within organizations have been required to confront an array of changes and related issues, such as “setting up” their offices inside their homes or getting used to technologies that were available but never really used. In the cases of physical isolation (e.g., quarantine), technology became the only access to the external world, either professional or personal. More than ever, technology has progressively become part of our lives. The subject of how technology and human lives interact is not new, whether humans are considered as individuals or organized collectives (groups, teams, companies, communities). In analytical scholarly terms, technology, people, and processes have traditionally been investigated as “boxes and arrows,” with boxes representing the elements and arrows signaling the causality of potential dominance of one upon the other(s). In fact, the understanding of companies, and other social entities, as “socio-technical systems” dates to the 1960s. In the 1990s, technology seemed to take advantage of the human dynamics, by incusing a form of “imperative” upon them, shaping and reshaping business process (e.g., technology-supported business reengineering). Later, the emphasis on humans as owners and carriers of knowledge and the rediscovery of their decision-making capacity opened the door to the possible prevalence of individual agents upon the tools, with technology considered (just) a “socio-material” construction, that is, the idea of technology making sense only to the very extent that it can be used by individuals and that it assumes different meanings according to the users (e.g., emails, social network platforms, mobile phones). However, other interpretations are possible. Rather than having technology dominate the organization, or organizational settings crafting the actual use (and sense) of technology, we may accept an osmotic relation between the two which dynamically generates organizational processes. This osmosis does not always happen spontaneously; it might instead be governed by the organizational leaders. The craft of the organizational processes is going to differ dramatically based on whether leaders adopt a “top-down” or “bottom-up” approach in decision making.