Computer-based technology and the constitution of work: a study on the cognitive foundations of work

Abstract

The article assumes work cognitivization to be a crucial feature of contemporary organizations and develops a cognitive–linguistic framework for dealing with it. The cognitive orientation of work represents a long historical process, which involves the development and utilization of various symbol systems for representing, recording, indexing and processing information. This process has lately accelerated, due to the deepening embeddedness of computer-based technology in organizations. The cognitive transformation of organizational relations renders the semantic comprehension of codified schemes, underlying software packages, and the attribution of the relationships these schemes bear to the object-world crucial organizational tasks. These theoretical ideas are further elaborated in the empirical context of the computerized control stations of a plant. The empirical observations suggest that semantic comprehensibility and referential attribution describe crucial aspects of current work, though the cognitive complexity of software packages tends to render the issue of semantic comprehension much more insidious than that of reference. They also suggest that reference may be substituted for sense, under ambiguous conditions, producing a skew understanding of the encountered situations.