Regulation of Information Technology-Based Practices: The Case of a Trading Floor Incident in an Investment Bank

Abstract

Despite the pervasive presence and richness of contemporary IT-inscribed rules, we see a paucity of studies on IT use as a form of technology-based organizational regulation and associated forms of control. We define IT-based regulation as regulatory processes that create, combine and embed rules within IT artefacts; by doing so they maintain and enforce rules that, by constraining or enabling social behaviours, govern both the organizational use of IT artefacts and their expected organizational effects. On the one hand, organizational studies on regulation have remained faithful to the idea of pure social regulation and have largely ignored its material and technological elements — in particular, the growing presence of IT (Latour, 1994, 2005; Orlikowski and Scott, 2008). The bulk of recent management and organization studies, indeed, view regulation primarily through a social lens (Latour, 1994, 2005; Denis, 2007) including Jackson and Adam’s (1979) investigation of rule lifecycles, Jabs’s (2005) study of communicative rules coordinating the launch of Challenger and Oberfield’s (2010) analysis of rule-following in a government organization. On the other hand, a handful of recent studies has focused on the technological dimension of regulation but engaged mainly with ‘pure’ material elements of control, including walls or asylums (Hook, 2001; Latour, 2005). Recent interest in the material foundations of the social (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007; Leonardi, 2011) — often labelled sociomateriality — has recognized the presence of rules with the idea of scripting — entangling rules in IT artefacts (Orlikowski, 2005).