Excerpt from The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations

Through the regular action of knowledgeable and reflexive actors, patterns of interactions become established as standardized practices in organizations, e.g., ways of manufacturing a product, coordinating a meeting, or evaluating an employee. Over time, habitual use Of such practices eventually become institutionalized, forming the structural properties of organizations. These structural or institutionalized properties (structure) are drawn on by humans in their ongoing interactions (agency), even as such use, in turn, reinforces the institutionalized properties. In this formulation-known as the duality of structure-giddens overcomes the dualism between Objective, structural features of organizations and subjective, knowledgeable action of human agents.

When humans act in organizations, they create and recreate three fundamental elements Of social interaction [giddens meaning, power, and norms. While these elements are highly interdependent and not separable in practice, for analytical purposes we can treat them as distinct, examining each from the perspective Of human agency and institutionalized properties.

From an agency point Of view, human interaction involves the constitution and communication Of meaning. This is achieved via interpretive schemes or stocks of knowledge that humans draw on in their ongoing interaction with the world, which form the core Of mutual knowledge whereby an accountable universe of meaning is sustained through and in processes of interaction [giddens 1979z83]. The interpretive schemes, however, do more than merely enable shared meanings and hence mediate communication. From the perspective of institutionalized properties, interpretive schemes represent organizational structures of signification, which represent the organizational rules that inform and define interaction. Interpretive schemes are also reinforced or changed through social interaction, as the organizational rules are reaffirmed or challenged through their use by human agents. Thus, in any interaction, shared knowledge is not merely part of the background, but is an integral part Of the social encounter, in part organizing it, and in part being shaped by the interaction itself.

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