| How then do you explain the sometime massively enthusiastic adoption of disruptive consumer software? My understanding is that people seem to resist change in corporate environments because it is a high stakes environment where, for example, the ability to hold onto work "flow" achieved over a long period can make the difference between thriving and failing. Thus software becomes more of a political tool, not necessarily in the sense of office politics, but in the sense of being part of a strategic toolbox by which people grapple with the networks of power they participate in at work. So corporate users are not necessarily resistant to change; they are just strategic about whether and what changes are to their advantage; if the introduction of new software can strengthen their work-related strategies, they can become its champions. I have seen this myself when I used to work for big multinational corporations. To model software adoption in the corporate space, therefore, one might need to employ a theory of power such as Actor-Network theory (in which terms one might think of software as an actor that can be "enrolled" for various ends) A theory of work and instrumentality, such as Activity Theory, is what most people (sometime without knowing it as such) apply to analyze work environments; but paradoxically it is usually the wrong approach to analysis. I see this failure of analysis all the time. In a nutshell, the more instrumental and work-oriented software is, the more necessary it is to analyze it through a power-relations lens. |