These talks will summarize the concepts and results of that literature. Technology and society both have their own logic, and the phenomena are found in the interaction between those very different logics. A central result is that the technology presents an organization or society with a series of choices, and those choices are influenced by cultural understandings and by political conflicts. A technology might fail, for example, because it requires its users to share information, even though the users' organization creates incentives against sharing. As this example suggests, the benefits of information technology might only be obtainable when work methods and organizational cultures change as well.
Further problems arise from the diversity of professional languages and work methods.
Even though their functioning can be specified in formal terms, computer systems nonetheless embody numerous assumptions that probably cannot be fully spelled out. As a result, the potential for incompatibility on a semantic level is considerable. The shape of these issues is changing as the technology becomes globalized. The shift from custom to packaged software moves the political arena from the individual organization to global standards organizations, and to standards-based competition in the market. And the growth of global information infrastructures creates a tension between global compatibility and the diversity of local work practices.