Learning from Screens: Does Ideology Prevail over Lived Experience? The Example of ERP Systems

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the impacts of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) visual interfaces on organizational learning processes. Inspired by the work of the phenomenologist Michel Henry, it suggests that the visual design of ERP outputs (graphs, figures, and images) are abstract representations constitutive of an ideology that make users privilege virtual management over subjective experience to guide their actions and gain knowledge from situations. A video, available online between 200 and 2007 on the SAP website, illustrates how the clarity, simplicity, aesthetic, and formal coherence of ERPs screens make the long known managerial myth of “being in control at a distance” look closer at hand than ever. The video exemplifies ideal notations of learning, managing, and organizing “with a click,” urging users to follow instructions of the instrument and rely on indirect communications channels to go on with the work at hand to the detriment of learning and innovation. However, empirical evidence from a case study illustrate that not all managers are not permanently lured by ERP’s prescriptions. Efforts to confront and combine lived experience with abstract representations contribute, for example, to unexpected and innovational operational developments and new knowledge.

“For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!” …

“That would be grand, certainly,” said Alice thoughtfully; “but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.”

“Not at first, perhaps,” said the Hatter: “but you could keep it to half past one as long as you liked.”

“Is that the way you manage?” Alice asked.

(Carroll, 1865/2006, p. 71)