The regulative regime of technology

A widespread understanding across the social sciences construes the impact or influence which technology has on institutions and organisations as being heavily contingent on the local practices and the specific characteristics of the contexts in which the technology is applied. Such an understanding is, wittingly or unwittingly, premised on a strong contrast between, on the one hand, technologies (i.e., the functionalities they embody) and, on the other hand, the complex fabric of local practices and conditions in which technologies are thought to be embedded. It assumes accordingly that the forms through which technological artefacts become involved in local contexts do not depend, at least not predominantly, on the properties of these artefacts. They rather emerge during the process of local implementation, as the functionalities of technologies are negotiated, shaped, undone or undermined in situ (see, for example, Suchman, 1996; Orlikowski, 1992, 2000; Grint and Woolgar, 1997; Woolgar, 2002). In other words, the character and the design of a technological artefact do not dictate the way it is used. Only local practice seems able to do that.