COMPETENCIAS, HABILIDADES Y CONOCIMIENTOS

IT encountering begins with attending to cues. Incoming cues require interpretation by the receiving actor so as to render a certain IT product or service as a more or less viable, desirable or required response to the situation at hand. The three theoretical perspectives have different but somewhat complementary views about what interpreting cues entails. The conventional Carnegie School’s view portrays individuals as regularly monitoring their performance against their aspiration levels and trying to draw neat inferences as to whether they are performing within the range of their aspiration levels or below them (i.e., succeeding or failing) (Cyert and March 1963; Levitt and March 1988). Even though interpretation of experience is plagued with imperfections resulting from individual biases (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) and organizational politics (March 1962), the interpretation process will nonetheless try to disambiguate cues so as to produce a relatively neat outcome labelled as success or failure (Levitt and March 1988). Responses are based on the interpreted outcome, regardless of its quality, hence successes and failures will lead to different responses, which I will discuss in the following sub- section.

Within the selected literatures, the stream on organizing and sensemaking (Weick 1979; Weick 1995) is the one that provides the most detail about how interpretation happens. Indeed, its proponents argue that interpretation is the core phenomenon of interest in this

perspective (Weick et al. 2005). Interpretation runs through the entire organizing process under the further-reaching label of sensemaking. This literature suggests that all too often extracted cues lend themselves to many interpretations (i.e., cues are equivocal) (Weick 1979; Weick 1995), a tenet that challenges the proposition of discrete, binary encoding of experiences as successes or failures. During the organizing process meanings break down, are reconstructed and stored in ongoing cycles. Faced with disturbing and

equivocal ecological changes, individuals engage in efforts at sensemaking whereby they bracket a portion of the stream of experience for further attention, retrieve knowledge stored in pre-existing cause maps to produce workable meanings with which to address the situation at hand, and act upon it. New meanings that are useful for reducing

equivocality and hence cope with environmental change are selected for use. It is in this way that organizing is adaptive. Cause maps are cumulatively built upon experience and they simplify the situation so that meaningful aspects of it can be retained – i.e., stored and retrievable for future use–. Storage and retrieval are knowingly incomplete and fallible processes. As such, cause maps are far from perfect; consequently, interpretation both as a process and an outcome is driven by plausibility and not accuracy (Weick 1979; Weick 1995).

This emerging picture of interpretation of cues can be enriched by adding insights from works which have particularly looked at the role that mindfulness can play in the

diffusion of management and IT innovations (Fiol and O'Connor 2003; Swanson and Ramiller 2004). Individuals in a mindful state might be able to partly overcome the cognitive and contextual difficulties embedded in interpretation, by adding richness to held schemata, thereby improving their capabilities to interpret incoming cues (Weick et

al. 1999). Mindfulness, as a state that induces rich awareness of discriminatory detail, enables potential adopters to interpret environmental information about the innovation in a way that is attentive to the uniqueness of their own circumstances (Fiol and O'Connor 2003; Swanson and Ramiller 2004), to carefully consider messages coming from the environment (Baskerville and Myers 2009), and to be skeptical about the “local validity” of broad and overly simplifying claims about the innovation made by institutional actors (e.g., appeals to best practice) (Swanson and Ramiller 2004). Further, mindful actors, being characterized by commitment to resilience (Weick et al. 1999) will be more open to engage in experimentation “on the fringes of current operations”, which in turn allows them to augment the span of plausible actions and gain insights into potential outcomes (Fiol and O'Connor 2003); from a sensemaking perspective experimentation is concrete action and should broaden up and refine cause maps, thereby contributing to richer interpretative processes (Weick et al. 2005). Similarly, mindful actors, eager to gather diverse interpretations, will reach out to their social network for assistance with

interpretation (Swanson and Ramiller 2004). Thus, interpretation can be a social activity in which community ties may play a salient role.

By contrast, mindlessness is a state that offloads cognitive effort to the environment. In the context of this discussion, there are at least two ways in which a mindless state can harm interpretation. First, actors in a mindless state will tend not to read too much into subtle or ambiguous cues signaling a need for change (e.g., new IT), and thus fail to develop adaptive responses to them (Weick et al. 2005). Second, the interpretation made by an actor in a mindless state will tend to be less sensitive to organization specifics (Fiol and O'Connor 2003; Swanson and Ramiller 2004), and not likely to surpass or challenge

the general statements contained in organizing visions available at the institutional level (Swanson and Ramiller 1997). In other words, a mindless state will not enable the actor to go beyond “familiar and known behaviors based on what others are doing” (Fiol and O'Connor 2003, p. 59) and might lead to adoption even under circumstances when doing so may not be the most sensible response for the business.

Against that background, interpretation of cues in small businesses will primarily rely on the owner’s cause maps, and secondarily on cause maps held by members of staff who interact with the owner. By definition these maps are inaccurate, incomplete and overly simplifying. However, it is reasonable to expect that prior IT-related education and experiences will add complexity and nuance to cause maps held by business owners, if no accuracy. Interpretation will render a certain IT product or service as a viable, desirable, required, or maybe just the opposite. Cues related to situations where the company is deemed to be underperforming will likely be interpreted as failures, and trigger

responses. Anything viewed as less problematic – i.e., non-failing– might be noticed but dismissed. Evidently, a risk is that the encoding of experiences as a failures / non-failures in a small business context will most likely depend on extremely sketchy cause maps, thereby being prone to miss or misrepresent important details that, if added, would possibly change the failure / non-failure verdict.

Moreover, cues will often be equivocal and will require further work. Knowledge

constraints can aggravate equivocality, and time constraints can limit the amount of work done to disambiguate incoming cues. However, business owners may undertake such work if they believe that their stakes in the situation are high, because making changes to IT is seen as a risky endeavour, or because bearing the outcome of inaction is perceived

as overly costly. It is important to remember that the person’s financial viability is intrinsically tied to the business ability to survive and succeed. Thus, changes which are thought to affect the business resources or its likelihood of survival are bound to be mindfully construed. As far as interpretation is concerned, this means that business owners will try to go beyond interpretations of IT available at the environmental level, and will consider their own circumstances. Importantly, they will factor in limited

resources and personal consequences. Thus, small business owners are likely to display a vigilant, cautious attitude in relation to why, when and how resources are consumed. To assist in interpretation, business owners might experiment and they might engage in boundary spanning activities. For example, they might use software trials, to envision how a new piece of IT might improve performance in an area of the business that is underperforming, and they might reach out to people in their social network to gather interpretations of the technology being considered. New meanings connecting IT to the business will emerge from these actions, and those that seem to work (i.e., principle of plausibility) will be used to rationalize and stabilize the course of action being tried out, and will be retained in a simplified version for later use.

Conversely, if stakes are not perceived as high, small business owners might be less cognitively engaged with the situation, put less effort into interpretation, perhaps taking environmental claims regarding IT innovation at face value, or failing to distil the value of certain opportunities knocking on their doors.