Making sense of new technology during organisational change

• Author: Noelia‐Sarah Reynolds
• Date: 01 July 2015
• Published date: 01 July 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12045

Making sense of new technology during

organisational change

Noelia-Sarah Reynolds

This article examines how employees interpret the use of

various social media and web 2.0 technologies by managers of

an organisation during a merger process. The article explores

the way in which managers use technology to give sense to the

merger process, the corresponding sensemaking of employees

and also how employees make sense of the use of technology

itself. The findings show that new media enables the sharing of

emotional sense about organisational processes between man-

agers and employees and places employees with different levels

of involvement with the process and at different points in the

organisational hierarchy on equal footing. In spite of this,

employees view the use of technology negatively and feel mas-

tered by the technology itself. In discussing these unintended

consequences of the use of this technology, the article further

discusses the paradoxes that emerge from using new technology

to give sense during organisational change.

Keywords: new technology, social media, organisational

change, mergers and acquisitions, sensemaking, sensegiving.

Introduction

The ability to interact over the Internet, the so-called web 2.0, with the accompanying

advances in Internet video streaming, blogging platforms and social media, has

slowly made its way into organisational practices (Trimi and Galanxhi-Janaqi, 2008).

A growing body of literature addresses the use of such technology in management

communication (Evans etal., 2008; Panagiotopoulos, 2012), marketing and branding

(Singh et al., 2008;Onishi and Manchanda, 2012), and corporate reputation (Lee et al.,

2006; Cox et al., 2008). Further to this, attention has started to be paid to the role new

technology can play in organisational change processes and innovation (Tidd and

Bessant, 2013). As Orlikowski (2010: 128) observes, technology has historically been

studied by management researchers in terms of the concrete ‘impacts [it makes] on

organisational life’ or, conversely, viewed as resulting from human actions and inter-

actions, as ‘socially defined’. Although more nuanced perspectives on technology,

such as viewing technology in the context of Actor Network Theory, have emerged,

there is significant scope to develop understanding of the role technology plays in

the experience of organisational life and change. For example, little is known about

what consequences the deployment of new technology has for employees’ interpre-

tations of organisational processes, in particular large-scale change. Therefore, the

aim of this article is to explore the impacts of managers’ use of new technology to

Noelia-Sarah Reynolds (nschnurr@essex.ac.uk) is a lecturer in Strategic Management, Essex Business

School at University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK.

New Technology, Work and Employment 30:2

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Making sense of new technology 145