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, social networking and shopping online, to proclaim that the internet and technologies built on it are changing the way we live is hardly news. Only a catatonic could miss the almost daily pronouncements by high-tech evangelists that some new internet tool is ushering in another brave new world. Academic literatures in medicine (Demaerschalk et al., 2012; Ross, Sepper, & Pohjonen, 2010) , business (Turban, Lee, King, Peng, & Turban, 2009; VanHoose, 2011), engineering (Kühnle, 2010; Smite, Moe, & Agerfalk, 2010), the sciences (National Research Council, 1999) and the social sciences (Castells, 1996; Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002) testify to the same story, albeit less passionately. But even though the internet is rapidly becoming as infrastructural as electricity, there is surprisingly little research on how it is altering work systems or the work that people do. Studies of email's use (Barley, Meyerson, & Grodal, 2011; Dabbish & Kraut, 2006; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) and distributed teams (Hinds & Bailey, 2003; Hinds & Kiesler, 2002; O'Leary & Mortensen, 2010) are exceptions, and even this research pays more attention the experiences and performance of individuals and groups than to work systems or the way work is done. Perhaps it is unsurprising that we know so little about how the internet affects work aside from the diffi culties people have coping with fl ooded inboxes and collaborating with people they never meet. Email overload and distributed teams are among the internet's best known consequences because so many people experience them regardless of employer, industry, or occupation. More importantly, changes occasioned by infrastructural technologies like the internet accrue over the long haul, are maddeningly diverse, and are often occupationally specifi c. The telephone, for example, had very different ramifi cations for rural farmers than it did for merchants in cities (Fischer, 1992) . The internal combustion engine's implications for livery drivers (who became taxi drivers) were substantially different than they were for blacksmiths (who went out of business). Accordingly, there is no reason to expect the internet to alter the work of academics or doctors in ways even remotely akin to how it shapes what purchasing agents or car salesmen do, however signifi cant those changes might be for each line of work. Faced with such heterogeneity, social scientists have three options. The fi rst is to move up levels of analysis until they can elide differences in context. This is precisely what most research on the internet does. Rather than ask how the internet has affected the daily work of car salesmen, travel agents, or academics, scholars ask how the internet has infl uenced patterns of automobile sales (Ghose, Mukhopadhyay, & Rajan, 2007; Kuruzovich, Viswanathan, Agarwal, Gosain, & Weitzman, 2008; Viswanathan, Kuruzovich, Gosain, & Agarwal, 2007; Zettelmeyer, Morton, & Silva-Risso, 2006) , the structure of the travel industry (Buhalis & Zoge, 2007; Lang, 2000) , or the breadth of a researcher's scholarship (Evans, 2009). In fact, much research on the internet even seeks to span industries by speaking broadly about e-commerce, long tails, and mediated communication. Second, researchers can opt for producing a corpus of situated studies of how the internet has altered work in this or that workplace. With enough studies, we might fi nd general patterns. But given the current emphasis on making theoretical if not generalizable contributions in every paper, aside from the efforts of an occasional ethnographer, any widespread move toward empirical nominalism of a concerted sort is unlikely. Finally, researchers can seek to develop perspectives that focus less on the effects of a specifi c technology, than on the processes by which technologies March 32 (including those of the internet) bring about change in a line of work or the organization of a production system. The agenda would be less to reveal what the internet does to any particular occupation than to help researchers decide how, when, and where to look for changes that might occur. This paper plays the third approach off the second. Drawing on role theory and Erving Goffman's dramaturgical analysis of encounters, it proposes an approach to studying how technologies change interaction orders or systems of role relations and role playing and, by extension, work systems. The narrative fi rst sketches a framework for studying technologically occasioned change in role relations in a line of work or a workplace. It then illustrates the framework's utility with ethnographic data on how the internet has been altering the work of car salesmen and the tenor of their encounters with customers. The paper ends by exploring the implications of a dramaturgical approach to studying technologically occasioned change in a work system. As organizations began to adopt computers and other computational technologies, organizational scholars gradually became dissatisfi ed with existing approaches to studying technology. Contingency theory (Gerwin, 1979; Harvey, 1968; Perrow, 1967; Woodward, 1958) and even socio-technical systems theory (Emery & Marek, 1962; Rice, 1963; Trist & Bamforth, 1951) , once it fi xated on autonomous teams, seemed unable to account for variations in organizing that were sometimes occasioned by identical machines. Accordingly, by the 1990's students of technology began to jettison deterministic theories of technological change in favor of a philosophy of social construction and to study how specifi c technologies were construed and used in situ to understand how they might trigger diverse outcomes (Barley, 1986; Fulk, Steinfi eld, & Schmitz, 1987; Orlikowski, 1992 Orlikowski, , 1996 Poole & DeSanctis, 1990) . The shift had two major consequences: In addition to encouraging an ontological shift, constructionists advocated studying concrete, situated practices that emerged as people used specifi c artifacts and software (Boczkowski & Orlikowski, 2004; Leonardi & Barley, 2010; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) . Emphasizing the concrete, however, had an unanticipated side-effect. Studying practices led scholars away from asking how technologies alter work systems and the structures of organizations in which they were deployed. Agency and interpretation came to the fore; work systems and social structures faded into the background. If the contingency theorists had cast their eye at too high a level of analysis by focusing on the alignment of types of environments with production systems, the constructionists ratcheted their resolution down to where it was diffi cult to see larger patterns of organizing. Ideally, one would like an analytic approach that preserves the constructionists' concern with the concrete, while linking situated action to meso-level, if not more molar, changes in organizations and occupations. Put differently, analysts need a way of leveraging action and structure simultaneously. Giddens theory of structuration has offered one such lever (Barley, 1986; Orlikowski, 1992; Orlikowski & Robey, 1991; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990) . Role theory offers another. Roles (or more precisely, the patterned ways in which people play them) allow us to pivot from an ongoing stream of action to a more ordered world of social structure. As the Chicago school sociologists understood, role is a Janus faced concept: it simultaneously looks in one direction toward the individual and in the other toward the social order (Becker & Strauss, 1956; Hughes, 1937) . Unlike structuration theory, which at best provides a broad ontological perspective, role theory, especially as developed by interactionists like Goffman (1959 Goffman ( , 1961b and Turner (1968 Turner ( , 2006 , tells us what to look for empirically. In other words, role theory provides analysts with a set of concepts with which one can structure observations. Barley (1990) was the fi rst to propose a role-based theory of how technologies change work systems and organizational structures. To devise a strategy for documenting when and how new technologies change organizations, Barley linked Nadel's (1957) theory of relational and non-relational roles to network theory's dictum that every organization's structure is a network inscribed by the relations among its members. Specifi cally, he argued that technologies trigger change by altering workers' non-relational roles: the tasks they perform and how they perform them. Such changes may then lead to changes in the nature of the interactions workers have with members of their role set (the people with whom they interact while doing their work) as well as who comprises the role set. If role relations change in either way, then the social network may change and, if it does, one can say the technology has altered the work system. Changes in role relations are, therefore, key to changes in work systems. Barley 33 Using a combination of ethnographic and social network data, Barley illustrated his analytical approach for linking changes in patterns of practice and interaction to changes in structure by showing how computerized imaging modalities (like ultrasound and CT scanners) challenged professional dominance in radiology departments. Historically, the production and interpretation of x-rays was bifurcated: technologists produced fi lms and radiologists interpreted them. With the arrival of computerized modalities, the separation of production and interpretation broke down. Technologists who operated computerized modalities could not produce medically viable studies without understanding something about how computers functioned and, more importantly, without being able to interpret images as they produced them. Because many radiologists initially knew little about the new images or the technology, role relations morphed. Relations between radiologists and technologists who operated computerized modalities became more collaborative and technologists acquired more autonomy. As these differences solidifi ed, radiology departments split into two work systems: a hierarchically organized main department run by administrators and the computerized departments run by radiologists where relations were more collegial and reciprocal. Subsequent studies have occasionally offered role-based accounts of how new technologies alter work systems. Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano (2001) examined the deployment of minimally invasive cardiac surgery at 16 hospitals. They showed that successful implementations occurred when relations among surgeons, nurses, technicians, and anesthesiologists became less hierarchical and more collaborative. In one of the few studies of how the internet alters role relations and, by extension, work systems, Schultze and Orlikowski (2004) studied an online quoting system deployed by WebGA, a fi rm that assisted independent insurance agents in determining which insurance companies offered the best policies and prices for the clients the agents served. To WebGA's chagrin, the tool allowed agents to generate their own quotes, thereby bypassing WebGA's representatives. As a result, the technology decreased the frequency and altered the tenor of interactions between service representatives and agents. Ironically, this change undercut the benefi t that agents once saw in working with WebGA's service representatives. Nevertheless, role-based studies of how technologies alter work systems remain relatively rare. One might argue that their rarity refl ects the fact that such studies usually involve ethnography, which is too time-consuming for most scholars. Irrespective of whether studying changes in roles requires fi eldwork, role analysts also face diffi cult epistemic problems. First, to the degree that role-based studies focus on patterns of relationships defi ned largely in network terms, one risks losing sight of how the technologies alter the tenor of the actual interactions that constitute the ties among members of a role set. We learn who interacts with whom and potentially about what, but not how they enact their relationships. To study how people play their roles we need a way of documenting repetitive patterns of typical encounters. Second, role-based studies have at least implicitly treated new technologies as exogenous shocks that break a prior social order. In fact, analystseven those who hope to avoid technological determinism and who appreciate that the actions of people and the particulars of a context will shape the chain's unfolding-often construe technology as a trigger in a causal chain. Barley's model, in particular, is sequentially causal. He proposed a sequence leading from changes in technology, to changes in tasks, to changes in role relations, to changes in network structures. If the chain is broken, the work system is unlikely to change significantly. Such a model may be useful for studying the implications of discrete, physical machines like CT scanners or even techniques like surgery whose occurrences can be identifi ed and counted, but it is less viable for studying technologies that lack tangibility or even ostension. This is precisely the problem posed by the internet. The internet is a cover term for a complex, pliable, changing and every-expanding portfolio of tools, information, and media that alters the grounds on which we act in situations where we previously would have acted differently. There is nothing mystical about the internet's capacity to reground action; the phenomenon is entirely practical. It involves our ability to do things that, in similar situations, we could not have done so easily before the internet. For example, before the internet it was impossible to communicate instantaneously as well as asynchronously across time and space. Before the internet, it was diffi cult to access vast bodies of information without leaving one's chair to visit a repository. Before the internet (and smartphones) one could not resolve disagreements over facts during a dinner conversation with one's spouse in a restaurant. (Of course, this may still be ill-advised.) With the internet, people now have easy access to information (e.g., what a particular car cost an automobile dealer in Tehachapi, or knowledge that there is a specifi c person in Tonapah who wants to start a relationship with a person more or less like you) that they previously could not have found. Academy of Management Discoveries To analyze such regroundings, we need concepts for grappling with how technologies are enrolled in the day-to-day fabric of social action such that they reconfi gure the web of constraints and opportunities that shape our behavior in specifi c contexts. In other words, we need a way to map what Orlikowski (2007) has called "constitutive entanglement:" how the social and material entwine. Actor-network theorists (Eriksson & Goldkuhl, 2013; Latour, 2007; Ribes, Jackson, Geiger, Burton, & Thomas, 2013) and students of sociomateriality (Leonardi, 2013; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008 ) have attempted to grapple with such entwining. Actornetwork theorists do so by reducing technologies and humans to analytical equivalents, known as "actants," and by studying their joint contribution to a system of action. In the process, however, actornetwork theory sacrifi ces our everyday understanding of the differences between technology and people in ways that sometimes border on the anthropomorphic. Furthermore, actor-network theorists do not focus on roles and situated interactions. Advocates of socio-materiality, on the other hand, offer a useful ontology, but little guidance about how to deploy the ontology empirically. Their analyses tend to gravitate to the micro-practices of how people use technologies rather than to people's interactions with each other, which role theory takes as the building blocks of all social organization. What would be useful are concepts and schemas that allow us to unravel how new technologies become entangled with the social such that they reconfi gure what Goffman (1983) called an "interaction order": the situated, patterned, and recurrent ways of behaving and interacting associated with a particular context. Ways of behaving toward others, which constitute the relational aspects of roles, are precisely what are lost in most previous research on technological change, sometimes even that which attends to roles. Dramaturgical analysis. On this score, Goffman's (1959 Goffman's ( , 1961a Goffman's ( , 1967 Goffman's ( , 1974 Goffman's ( , 1981 essays on encounters, interaction rituals and forms of talk are helpful because they provide a schema for analyzing the ways people play roles vis-à-vis each other and how settings and artifacts (including technologies) support and limit role-playing. Over his career, Goffman sought to understand why social life is so wellordered and to reveal why encounters of particular types (a lecture, a game of checkers, and so on) unfold so similarly regardless of who is involved. The key, for Goffman, did not involve understanding individual-level sense-making as occurs when people attempt to comprehend the unexpected, but rather sense-making and behavior that is contingent on a "defi nition of the situation" or what he later called a "frame" (Goffman, 1959 (Goffman, , 1974 . Although defi nitions of a situation are sometimes negotiated on the spot (as when we explicitly ask each other, "What's going on here?"), they are not usually constructed de novo and they are not unconstrained. Constraints arise from how activity is embedded in and arises from a context. Once we classify some goings-on, we generally know how to act precisely because we treat it as a typical case of some social scene. Goffman argued that frames are layered contexts that confi gure the lines of action that participants can take in a particular type of encounter. Importantly, these layers include the "physical framework," by which Goffman meant artifacts and natural phenomena, and the "social framework," by which he meant the other actors who are present as well as the institutional setting (such as a theater, a church, a lecture) that provides specifi c rules for acting (Goffman, 1974: 21-25). People cannot ignore the physical framework any more than they can ignore the social. As Pinch (2010) recently pointed out, Goffman understood that people take into account a setting's material artifacts as they enact encounters. In fact, technologies assist people in defi ning a situation and in playing their roles accordingly. Once a situation is defi ned, people engage in "guided doings" (Goffman, 1974: 23); they construct a line of action within the confi nes of the possibilities set by physical and social frameworks. It is doubtful, for example, that one would skateboard down the aisle of a church, especially while a priest is delivering a sermon. The frame, "attending church," largely precludes such activity. One could conceivably skateboard down a sidewalk while listening to the same sermon on an iPod. Re-groundings involve changes in frame. Like other dramaturgical sociologists (Messinger, Sampson, & Towne, 1962; Turner & Edgley, 1976; Wilshire, 1982) , Goffman argued that encounters, interaction rituals, and other "guided doings," once 1 Although some scholars claim that Goffman was primarily interested in the construction of selves and identities and the negotiation and maintenance of face, his agenda was ultimately to explain the social structure of everyday life (Collins 1988 (Collins , 2004 Giddens 1987) . I draw on Goffman's structural agenda in this essay. 2 One should not confuse Goffman's use of "frame" with its use by contemporary institutional theorists who often use the term as a synonym for a logic. Among institutionalists, frame has the connotation of a rhetoric, concept or ideology. In Goffman's terminology, frames defi ne classes of situations which exist at a much more situated level of analysis. Goffman used frame in the sense of a picture frame, a set of cues or parameters that differentiates the situation from its surroundings and that defi nes acceptable lines of action within the context. framed, can be usefully viewed as theatrical performances. 3 The dramaturgical eye draws the analyst's attention to specifi c elements of the encounter and its setting that support and structure the unfolding line of action. Scripts are the pivotal element of any dramaturgical account. A script organizes and typifi es interaction by defi ning how parties to an encounter should play their roles. The vast majority of encounters have scripts even if they are as minimal as the two-turn exchange of greetings among strangers acknowledging each other's presence on a sidewalk. One can think of a script as the plot of a recurrent activity that defi nes the essentials of the parts that participants must play. Consider going to a restaurant (Schank & Abelson, 1977) . When we go to a restaurant, the stream of action unfolds in a relatively predictable order: the maître d' greets us; we ask for a table; the maître d' seats us; the waiter greets us at the table and hands us a menu; the waiter asks if we'd like something to drink; and so on through dessert and paying the bill. As Garfi nkel (1967) demonstrated, when scripts are breachedas would occur if the waiter immediately asked if we would like dessert-we become disoriented, even anxious or angry. Scripts are both cognitive and behavioral phenomena. Cognitively, scripts are expectations about how things ought to go, given a defi nition of the situation. When our expectations are fulfi lled we have the sense that "nothing-out-of-the-ordinary-isgoing-on-here," although we are not likely to be aware that we are experiencing a sense of the usual. Behaviorally, as the dramaturgists emphasize, scripts are loosely prescribed sequences of behaviors and interactions associated with types of encounters. People enact or play their respective roles by making key moves at appropriate points in an interaction 's unfolding (see Pentland, 1992). A script's enactment is supported by, and may often require, a specifi c stage (a restaurant in the evening), a set of props (tables, plates, candles, a corkscrew), supporting actors (bartenders, bus boys) and sometimes an audience (other diners). When an encounter's dramaturgical elements change, scripts may change and when scripts change, by defi nition, the interaction order has changed. For example, asking customers to pay before they eat food that was cooked before they ordered it and then asking them to seat themselves and bus their own tables, turns a fi ne restaurant into a fast food establishment. Scripts unfold through moves, the actions that a second party takes in response to a fi rst party's actions, that in turn serve as clues and cues for the next actions the fi rst party should take (see Collins, 2004) . Moves are strategic in intent; through them actors hope to achieve objectives. Encounters also vary by their footing, the stance that actors assume toward each other as they make their moves. Footing sets the tone of the encounter. When you hand an immigration offi cial your passport, you engage in roughly the same behavior as when you purchase a movie ticket: in both cases you hand a legal document to someone in a glass booth who then offers admission beyond. In the case of immigration, however, you present yourself as a supplicant for admission which the offi cial can question and deny. In the case of going to a movie, you present yourself as a customer and you do not expect to be denied admission unless the show is sold out. To appreciate the difference in footing one need only consider the relative propriety and the consequences of expressing irritation at the ticket taker versus an immigration offi cial. As mentioned above, other dramaturgical elements of an encounter support and shape the scripted line of action and the moves by which actors play their parts. Like plays, encounters always occur on some stage often in front of some audience, which might be present or imagined. The stage is bounded in time and space, demarking the region within which an encounter of a particular type can and should occur. Usually, settings have front stages that are available to the audience and back stages that are not. Moreover, stages usually contain props that buttress the line of action and the actors' performance of their roles. Stages and props are the material artifacts (some of which may be considered technologies) that actors employ as they play out encounters of different types. One of Goffman's key points is that actors cannot sustain an encounter of a given type without the right stage and the right props. If you change the props or the stage, you risk changing the defi nition of the situation. For instance, one cannot play chess without a chessboard and chess pieces, however contrived or even imaginary they might be. Similarly, to dine in a restaurant requires the presence of tables, chairs, plates, forks, knives, and spoons. In restaurants people do not stand or eat with their hands. At picnics they may. The point is that technologies and other artifacts structure our defi nition of the situation, the scripts that guide the encounter, and the way we play our roles. 3 To argue that encounters are rituals or theatrical performances is not to say that actors are somehow disingenuous or that their actions and interactions are contrived, although the scripted aspects of encounters do make possible the kind of dissembling that drew Goffman's attention to confi dence artists. Academy of Management Discoveries It is important to note that scripts, roles, moves, props, stages, and footing implicate each other. They operate jointly to defi ne the situation and, hence, the line of action that the situation warrants. To see how this works, consider again encounters with immigration offi cers and people who sell tickets at movies. Even if you assume the footing of a supplicant, if you make the mistake of handing the immigration offi cer offi cial documents known as money, you may fi nd that there are worse possibilities than being denied admission to the offi cer's homeland. Of course, in some countries, presenting the offi cer with money might speed entry, as long as you make the move properly. In contrast, handing a ticket seller your passport is likely to invoke little more than puzzlement and under no circumstance would it land you a better seat in the theater. In sum, a dramaturgical analysis of technological change differs from other approaches to studying technology. Rather than make the technology the center of attention it shifts attention to the system of actors, actions, and interactions in which the technology is embedded. We are no longer simply interested in how a technology changes the way we do some task, a pattern of communication, how people conceptualize the technology, or even the practices that emerge around a technology's use. Instead, dramaturgical analysis attends to the entire milieu that fl ows from and sustains a defi nition of the situation and plausible lines of action. If anything, it is the script rather than the technology that lies at the core of the analysis. The analyst's job is to determine whether the presence of a technology has somehow reconfi gured the scripts, the stage, the props, the moves that actors make, and the encounter's footing in ways that sustain a different line of action. Because scripts, by defi nition, encode role relations, dramaturgical analysis therefore brings the playing of roles to center stage. Furthermore, from this perspective internet technologies are analytically no different than any other technology; to have social consequences, using the internet must reconfi gure some combination of the scripts, moves, actors, footing, props, and stage that structure an interaction ritual to transform the way a type of encounter unfolds. To appreciate how a dramaturgical approach might assist us in studying how technologies alter role relations and the work systems they inscribe, let us explore how the internet is reshaping the way Americans buy and sell cars, and more specifi cally, the structure and tenor of encounters between car salesmen and customers. After briefl y describing the status of car salesmen in American culture and how the internet occasioned an alternative way of buying and selling, the narrative turns to the research that produced the data on which the analysis rests before moving on to compare how sales encounters unfold when customers purchase a vehicle over the internet instead of in person.
Barley explains the increasing role of technology in the carbuying process REF .
Why the Internet Makes Buying a Car Less Loathsome: How Technologies Change Role Relations
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