Making the numbers : agency in computer-generated formal representations of sales work

Abstract

This research builds on the literature on information technology and organizations to suggest an alternative to the current understanding of the production of computer-generated formal representations of work. This literature sees computer-generated formal representations of work as automatic outcomes of information technology that managers use to scrutinize employees. My ethnography of a desk-based sales unit suggests that managers have incentives to forfeit surveillance and instead apply their efforts to use information technology to build a facade of compliance with prescribed goals and prescribed rules, roles, and procedures. I show that such a facade requires continuous maintenance work and that it is employees, not managers, that have to engage in this work. Specifically, I show that employees need to engage in unprescribed work to earn the right to use formal information systems to represent work that they have not actually carried out. I explain how employees improvise a shadow information system to coordinate their unprescribed work across time.

(cont.) I also show how employees enact a set of personal and impersonal tactics to enlist the cooperation of other parts of their organization in their unprescribed work I seek to shed light on the many hidden labors behind representations of compliance and place agency again in the center stage of the process of producing computer-generated formal representations of work. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the understanding of visibility of action in social theory by showing that it is possible to manage how visible one's action is, even when that action unfolds in a front stage.