Abstract

The ability of firms to gather, analyze, and codify knowledge is key to performance and organizational life more broadly. Such practices are increasingly specialized, underpinned by computer-based digital technologies. Prior literature has focused predominantly on periods of adoption and implementation, assuming that patterns of technology use stabilize after the dust of implementation has settled. Drawing on observational, interview, and archival data from an ethnographic study of knowledge workers within an investment bank, I explain unexpected shifts in patterns of technology use long after spreadsheet technology arrived. My analysis revealed that “autographic affiliations,” defined as the association of technologies with specific individuals, subjected their use to the informal social relations of group members. Surprisingly, these autographic affiliations resulted in group members using a technology they struggled to understand and perceived to be worse for prolonged periods of time; suppressed feedback for improvements; and resulted in episodic and covert use of a preferred technology. Further, shifts in autographic affiliations led to drastic changes in patterns of technology use – even as the materiality of technologies remained stable. These patterns of use held consequences for how knowledge workers gathered, analyzed, and codified data.