One of the key aspects of the economic competitiveness of a nation's industry is its organization of production work, particulary in the face of industry-wide changes in technology. How do organizations actually make decisions about developing or acquiring and then deploying new technology? How do differences in organizational structure, organizational politics and change processes affect the utilization of new technology? What effects on the acceptance and benefits of new technology does the timely involvement of shopfloor management, workers, and different layers of middle and upper management have? This research will pursue these and related questions. The proposals offers a preliminary theory of the politics of organizational decision-making around new technology and proposes to test the propositions of this theory in a detailed examination of twelve cases of technological change in four major U.S. - based manufacturing firms (one each from the aerospace, automotive, electronics and steel industries). The individual cases will be compared to official company policy and with one another to generate a profile of each company's practice. These profiles will then be compared against briefer profiles obtained from other companies in the same industry and across industries to learn how generalizable to a wider segment of American industry are the conclusions from these case studies. This study of organizational decision making should contribute to a social scientific understanding of the processes which shape the organization of work, to ongoing efforts to transform labor-management relations and to policy deliberations surrounding the impacts of technological change. Access to the firms involved grows out of an extraordinary larger joint program betgween participating companies and the Schools of Management and Engineering at MIT ("Leaders in Manufacturing" program).
