Towards a Principle of Socio-technical Interactions – Embracing Cultural Issues of Enterprise Culture Through a Concept of Enterprise Activities

Abstract

Due to the increasing importance of Information Technology, the execution of actions in the context of enterprises requires more than in the last decades, the alignment between concerned actors and additionally the cooperation between them, in particular human and mechanical agents. However, through the progressing automation and autonomisation of information technology, the cooperation with mechanical agents is still necessary. To embrace specific consequences of such developments, a theory of action in enterprise environments will be developed on the basis of Max Weber’s theory of social action, which explains enterprise actions of agents in an enterprise. Enterprise actions are not only oriented towards the interaction with other agents in the social system, but consider additionally the requirements that were formulated for the agent by the enterprise management. Despite these requirements, agents are able to contribute to the enterprise culture by varying and adapting their actions. In this way, every agent contributes not only to the economic, but also to the social and cultural capital. By introducing IT systems as autonomously acting agents, the balance between economic, social and cultural capital is endangered. Any kind of creativity will be prohibited by unambiguous instructions and the execution of fully automated actions is completely oriented towards to enterprise strategy, without considering important social and cultural factors. Thereby, this paper introduces and discusses a general conception of socio-technological interactions within enterprises. Specifically, the concept of such enterprise actions will be used to illustrate how enterprise culture evolves and how it is threatened by strict and standardised socio-technological interactions.