Car Crashes Without Cars: Lessons about Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design

Paul M. Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Car Crashes without Cars (MIT Press).

A novel theory of organizational and technological change, illustrated by an account of the development and implementation of a computer-based simulation technology.

"In Car Crashes without Cars, Paul Leonardi offers a rich and engaging account of the everyday choices, intentions, decisions, affordances, and appropriations that are involved in developing, implementing, and using novel technology. This account is especially valuable not only for the ethnographic details it generates about computer-based simulation technology in practice, but also for the insights it offers about the complex and interdependent ways in which organizations and technology shape each other over time." --Wanda Orlikowski, Eaton-Peabody Professor of Communication Sciences, MIT "This deeply thoughtful treatment of the challenges and opportunities posed by new technologies in complex organizations provides an important contribution to knowledge on learning, innovation, and cross-functional collaboration. Paul Leonardi's prose is meticulous and unerring, with countless detailed anecdotes to support his ideas about how organizations slowly but inexorably change to cope with new technological landscapes. Car Crashes without Cars is a classic scholarly work." --Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School; author, Teaming: How organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy " Car Crashes Without Cars offers a fascinating examination of how the materiality of technologies articulates with the social systems in which technologies are enacted. This exclusive behind-the-scenes look at high tech crash engineering shows how interpretive processes become routinized to the point where technology 'seems' to have caused organizational change, but, au contraire! As Paul Leonardi manoeuvers you through the intellectual terrain of imbrication that grounds his research, he weaves together outstanding theoretical review, rock-solid ethnography, and sophisticated network analyses to arrive at conclusions that are at once thought-provoking, engaging, and ultimately path-breaking. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!"--Janet Fulk, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California "Readers of this book will think differently when they get behind the wheel of a new car. With deftness and insight, Paul Leonardi illuminates how automotive technology embodies both the choices of programmers and the routines of managers. These contrasting commitments are reconciled, more or less, in the cars we drive. This is an inspired contribution to the study of work and technology."--Walter W. Powell, Stanford University