Unveiling Power: A Performative Perspective to Investigate Intelligent Technologies Ongoing Productions

Abstract

Purpose Intelligent technologies require special attention due to their increasing presence and performative influence both in everyday and organisational life. This thesis aims at developing greater insights into how power relations shape the development and use of intelligent technologies. Further, it employs a critical, process oriented, and performative (material-discursive) view of power to unveil both the positive and negative aspects of power. Method This research adopted a qualitative single case study approach in a large tertiary hospital and research centre. Data collection utilized three sources of evidence: observations, interviews, and documents. Using primary and secondary documents as a supplement to interviews, observations and field notes was deemed necessary to further understand the history of the phenomena under investigation and allowed the research to achieve triangulation. Findings This thesis shows how technological change initiatives are shaped through complex dynamics, where discourses constrain as much as enable what actors can say and do. It highlights the push-pull dynamics which lie in iterative and recursive acts of power and resistance involving a range of actors who collectively, albeit sometimes inadvertently, change the meanings technological change outcomes perform. Finally, it shows that technological initiatives that might initially seem to fail can ‘take off’ through persistent and positive power effects. Originality and Contributions: Findings from this study shed new light on the interplay between the performative process of producing intelligent technologies’ analytical features and shifts in power dynamics shift. Essentially, the research highlights the complexity of technological change initiatives in terms of power dynamics and their performative effects. This offers comprehensive insights regarding what technologies actually do at an analytical and ontological level in terms of object and subject positions. It shows that technology, practices and actors are constantly produced through the entanglement of heterogenous practices. This, I argue, places a special emphasise on the relational, situated and embedded enactment of technological change practices among and between different occupational groups of users and developers. Lastly, it highlights that power is dynamic, contingent and transient and that power effects can be, simultaneously, both productive and negative.