Humanistic Redesign and Technological Politics in Organizations

The political nature of technology design and implementation is explicitly addressed in human centered projects to introduce technologies that support job enrichment, group autonomy and industrial democracy. Yet the political meaning of such projects does not simply manifest itself in pure form from the methods employed or the intentions of the humanistic actors but, rather, from the complex configuration of these and other factors present in the design and implementation context. This paper illustrates this theme in an analysis of a case study human centered project. It argues that an improved understanding of the configurational politics surrounding such projects is not only an important research area but is also of practical significance in improving humanistic and other interventions in innovation processes in modern organizations.