Wanda Orlikowski

Wanda J. Orlikowski

Orlikowski in 2008
Residence Cambridge, Massachusetts
Fields Information systems
Organization Studies
Alma mater New York University
Doctoral students Elizabeth Davidson
Natalia Levina
Carsten Osterlund
Melissa Mazmanian
Known for Practice lens
Critical genre analysis
Influences Anthony Giddens
Karl Weick
Lucy Suchman
Karen Barad
Influenced Brian Pentland
Daniel Robey
Ulrike Schultze
Paul Leonardi

Wanda Janina Orlikowski is a South African-born, US-based organizational theorist and Information Systems researcher, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography

Orlikowski received her B.Comm from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1977, an M. Comm from the same university in 1982, and a Ph.D. from the New York University Stern School of Business in 1989.

She has served as a visiting Centennial Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was a visiting professor at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. She is currently the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

Orlikowski has served as a senior editor for Organization Science, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Information and Organization and Organization Science.

She is a member of the Academy of Management, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Institute of Management Science, the Society of Information Management, and the Society for Organizational Learning.

Work

Orlikowski's research examines relations between technology and organizations over time, with emphases on organizing structures, cultural norms, communication genres, and work practices. She is best known for her work in studying the implementation and use of technologies within organisations by drawing on Giddens' Theory of Structuration.

Orlikowski has written extensively on the use of electronic communication technologies, most notably collaborating with JoAnne Yates, a professor of communications at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has also written papers on research methodology and her 1991 paper with Jack Baroudi in Information Systems Research is particularly widely cited. Her most recent work examines the sociomaterial practices entailed in social media.

Structurational studies of technology and organizations

Structurational studies of technology and organizations have been highly influenced by the social studies of technology. Initially arguing for a view of the "duality of technology," Orlikowski went on to argue for a practice-based understanding of the recursive interaction between people and technologies over time. Orlikowski (2000) argues that emergent structures offer a more generative view of technology use, suggesting that users do not so much appropriate technologies as they enact particular technologies-in-practice with them. The ongoing enactment of technologies-in-practice either reproduce existing structural conditions or they produce changes that may lead to structural transformation.

Based on a series of empirical studies of collaborative technologies (groupware), Orlikowski identified at least three types of enactment produced within different conditions and producing different consequences associated with humans engagement with technology in practice.

New ways of dealing with materiality in organizational research

In more recent work, Orlikowski argues that our primary ways of dealing with materiality in organizational research are conceptually problematic and proposes an alternative approach that posits materiality as constitutive of everyday life. This work draws on Karen Barad's agential realism and the notion of sociomateriality as influenced by the work of Lucy Suchman and Annemarie Mol.

In co-authored work, Orlikowski and Susan Scott of the London School of Economics argue for a focus on sociomaterial practices within organizational and information system studies. This recognizes that all practices are always and everywhere sociomaterial, and that this sociomateriality is constitutive of the contours and possibilities of everyday organizing.

Awards

Orlikowski won the Lasting Impact Award from the ACM CSCW conference in 2015 [1] for her paper "Learning from Notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation".[2]

Select bibliography

References

  1. ↑ "Lasting Impact Award". ACM. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
  2. ↑ Orlikowski, Wanda (1992). "Learning from Notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation". Proceedings of CSCW. CSCW. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ACM. pp. 362–369. Retrieved 17 March 2015.
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