Why the Internet Makes Buying a Car Less Loathsome: How Technologies Change Role Relations

r Academy of Management Discoveries 2015, Vol. 1, No. 1, 31–60. Online only http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amd.2013.0016 WHY THE INTERNET MAKES BUYING A CAR LESS LOATHSOME: HOW TECHNOLOGIES CHANGE ROLE RELATIONS STEPHEN R. BARLEY Stanford University Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a two-year period in two car dealerships, this paper employs role theory and a dramaturgical analysis of sales encounters to show how the internet has changed the relationship between car salesmen and their customers. The paper explores why Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to analyzing encounters provides a way of analyzing technologically occasioned changes in the interaction order of a work system that allows students to grapple more holistically yet systematically with the social and material aspects of such change. In a world enthralled with tweeting, texting, so- for merchants in cities (Fischer, 1992). The internal cial networking and shopping online, to proclaim combustion engine’s implications for livery drivers that the internet and technologies built on it are (who became taxi drivers) were substantially differ- changing the way we live is hardly news. Only a ent than they were for blacksmiths (who went out catatonic could miss the almost daily pronounce- of business). Accordingly, there is no reason to ex- ments by high-tech evangelists that some new in- pect the internet to alter the work of academics or ternet tool is ushering in another brave new world. doctors in ways even remotely akin to how it shapes Academic literatures in medicine (Demaerschalk what purchasing agents or car salesmen do, how- et al., 2012; Ross, Sepper, & Pohjonen, 2010), business ever signifi cant those changes might be for each (Turban, Lee, King, Peng, & Turban, 2009; VanHoose, line of work. 2011), engineering (Kühnle, 2010; Smite, Moe, & Faced with such heterogeneity, social scientists Agerfalk, 2010), the sciences (National Research have three options. The fi rst is to move up levels of Council, 1999) and the social sciences (Castells, analysis until they can elide differences in context. 1996; Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002) testify to This is precisely what most research on the internet the same story, albeit less passionately. But even does. Rather than ask how the internet has affected though the internet is rapidly becoming as infra- the daily work of car salesmen, travel agents, or aca- structural as electricity, there is surprisingly little demics, scholars ask how the internet has infl uenced research on how it is altering work systems or the patterns of automobile sales (Ghose, Mukhopadhyay, work that people do. Studies of email’s use (Barley, & Rajan, 2007; Kuruzovich, Viswanathan, Agarwal, Meyerson, & Grodal, 2011; Dabbish & Kraut, 2006; Gosain, & Weitzman, 2008; Viswanathan, Kuruzovich, Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) and distributed teams Gosain, & Agarwal, 2007; Zettelmeyer, Morton, (Hinds & Bailey, 2003; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002; & Silva-Risso, 2006), the structure of the travel O’Leary & Mortensen, 2010) are exceptions, and industry (Buhalis & Zoge, 2007; Lang, 2000), or even this research pays more attention the experi- the breadth of a researcher’s scholarship (Evans, ences and performance of individuals and groups 2009). In fact, much research on the internet even than to work systems or the way work is done. seeks to span industries by speaking broadly Perhaps it is unsurprising that we know so little about e-commerce, long tails, and mediated com- about how the internet affects work aside from the munication. Second, researchers can opt for pro- diffi culties people have coping with fl ooded in- ducing a corpus of situated studies of how the boxes and collaborating with people they never internet has altered work in this or that workplace. meet. Email overload and distributed teams are With enough studies, we might fi nd general pat- among the internet’s best known consequences be- terns. But given the current emphasis on making cause so many people experience them regardless theoretical if not generalizable contributions in every of employer, industry, or occupation. More impor- paper, aside from the efforts of an occasional eth- tantly, changes occasioned by infrastructural tech- nographer, any widespread move toward empirical nologies like the internet accrue over the long haul, nominalism of a concerted sort is unlikely. Finally, are maddeningly diverse, and are often occupation- researchers can seek to develop perspectives that ally specifi c. The telephone, for example, had very focus less on the effects of a specifi c technology, different ramifi cations for rural farmers than it did than on the processes by which technologies 31 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only. 32 Academy of Management Discoveries March (including those of the internet) bring about change structures faded into the background. If the contin- in a line of work or the organization of a production gency theorists had cast their eye at too high a level system. The agenda would be less to reveal what of analysis by focusing on the alignment of types of the internet does to any particular occupation than environments with production systems, the con- to help researchers decide how, when, and where structionists ratcheted their resolution down to to look for changes that might occur. where it was diffi cult to see larger patterns of or- This paper plays the third approach off the sec- ganizing. Ideally, one would like an analytic ap- ond. Drawing on role theory and Erving Goffman’s proach that preserves the constructionists’ concern dramaturgical analysis of encounters, it proposes with the concrete, while linking situated action to an approach to studying how technologies change meso-level, if not more molar, changes in organi- interaction orders or systems of role relations and zations and occupations. role playing and, by extension, work systems. The Put differently, analysts need a way of leverag- narrative fi rst sketches a framework for studying ing action and structure simultaneously. Giddens technologically occasioned change in role relations theory of structuration has offered one such lever in a line of work or a workplace. It then illustrates (Barley, 1986; Orlikowski, 1992; Orlikowski & Robey, the framework’s utility with ethnographic data on 1991; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990). Role theory offers how the internet has been altering the work of car another. Roles (or more precisely, the patterned salesmen and the tenor of their encounters with cus- ways in which people play them) allow us to pivot tomers. The paper ends by exploring the implications from an ongoing stream of action to a more ordered of a dramaturgical approach to studying technolog- world of social structure. As the Chicago school so- ically occasioned change in a work system. ciologists understood, role is a Janus faced concept: it simultaneously looks in one direction toward the individual and in the other toward the social order A ROLE-BASED PERSPECTIVE ON HOW (Becker & Strauss, 1956; Hughes, 1937). Unlike struc- TECHNOLOGIES CHANGE WORK AND turation theory, which at best provides a broad on- ORGANIZATIONS tological perspective, role theory, especially as As organizations began to adopt computers and developed by interactionists like Goffman (1959, other computational technologies, organizational 1961b) and Turner (1968, 2006), tells us what to scholars gradually became dissatisfi ed with existing look for empirically. In other words, role theory approaches to studying technology. Contingency provides analysts with a set of concepts with which theory (Gerwin, 1979; Harvey, 1968; Perrow, 1967; one can structure observations. Woodward, 1958) and even socio-technical systems theory (Emery & Marek, 1962; Rice, 1963; Trist ROLES, TECHNOLOGIES AND INTERACTION & Bamforth, 1951), once it fi xated on autonomous ORDERS teams, seemed unable to account for variations in organizing that were sometimes occasioned by iden- Barley (1990) was the fi rst to propose a role-based tical machines. Accordingly, by the 1990’s students theory of how technologies change work systems of technology began to jettison deterministic theo- and organizational structures. To devise a strategy ries of technological change in favor of a philosophy for documenting when and how new technologies of social construction and to study how specifi c change organizations, Barley linked Nadel’s (1957) technologies were construed and used in situ to un- theory of relational and non-relational roles to net- derstand how they might trigger diverse outcomes work theory’s dictum that every organization’s (Barley, 1986; Fulk, Steinfi eld, & Schmitz, 1987; structure is a network inscribed by the relations Orlikowski, 1992, 1996; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990). among its members. Specifi cally, he argued that The shift had two major consequences: In addition technologies trigger change by altering workers’ to encouraging an ontological shift, construc- non-relational roles: the tasks they perform and tionists advocated studying concrete, situated prac- how they perform them. Such changes may then tices that emerged as people used specifi c artifacts lead to changes in the nature of the interactions and software (Boczkowski & Orlikowski, 2004; workers have with members of their role set (the Leonardi & Barley, 2010; Orlikowski

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