REVIEW

How Packaged Software Conquers the

Organization
Sampsa Hyysalo

Neil Pollock and Robin Williams, Software and Organizations: The

Biography of the Packaged Enterprise System or How SAP Conquered the
World (London: Routledge, 2008), 348 pp., £65.00/e87.99/$135.00.
ISBN 978-0-415-40397-9 (hbk); ISBN 978-0-203-89194-0 (ebk).

Critical technology studies have been in the front ranks in demonstrating

how packaged software should not travel. Because of their wide reach within
the organization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been
shown to require extensive customization to meet historically formed local
organizational practices. In contrast to the supply side view of ERP systems
as carriers of ‘best practice’ and ‘universal logic’, the thrust of science and
technology studies (S&TS) research on these systems has emphasized that
their spread, if they should be able to spread at all, happens at the expense
of the adopting organizations (e.g. Soh et al., 2000; Scott & Wagner, 2003).
Indeed, Pollock and Williams condense the message from critical studies in
their Software and Organizations as follows (p. 8): ‘How could the same or
similar (or even slightly adapted) organizational IT system be applied across
many different types of organizations with all the diversity and heterogeneity
found there?’ But, as the authors note, the case is much like that of the fly-
ing bumblebee, which theoretical physics has sentenced to stay aground.
Regardless of whether or not the modern enterprise-wide information sys-
tem should be able to travel, it has spread across many kinds of organiza-
tions, sectors and countries, around the globe, and its form is increasingly
that of a package.
This condition spurs the authors to undertake an intertwined theoretical
and empirical quest to shift the social study of technology to what they argue
could be its next level. The earliest and still dominant research has taken
developer descriptions of systems largely for granted and concentrated on
measuring the ‘impact’ of the system on the organization, typically surveyed
from a managerial perspective. The second-generation studies, many S&TS
originated, emerged as a critical response and focused in more depth on the

Social Studies of Science 39/4 (August 2009) 635–642

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ISSN 0306-3127 DOI: 10.1177/0306312709335847
636 Social Studies of Science 39/4

adopter organization to show the problems and flaws in the instrumentalist

and managerial discourse. Pollock and Williams argue, however, that in their
emphasis on grasping the situational specifics, these technology studies have
relied on snapshot inquiries limited to a relatively short-lived moment some-
where in the project, product and industry lifecycles. This leads to ‘leaving
too early and arriving too late’, sins for which both Pollock and Williams
regard themselves as having been equally ‘guilty of doing previously’.
They propose a new ‘biographies of artefacts’ framework in which the
‘biography of things’ is adapted from Kopytoff (1986) and refined with the
help of a social shaping of technology approach to link inquiries on design,
procurement, implementation and post-implementation episodes. While
Kopytoff’s original concept has been criticized for being little more than a
thought experiment in how goods move in and out of having a commodity
character and become differentiated depending on the cultural context
(Engeström & Blackler, 2005), Pollock and Williams truly follow changes
in generic product offerings, changes within industry, as well as the careers
of particular artefacts. To do so they combine their recent ethnographies
with earlier work of theirs from the early 1990s.
Methodologically, they adopt from cultural psychology and distributed
cognition the idea that a given situation is simultaneously a part of the ongo-
ing action/task, while constituting a moment in development of the practi-
tioners and contributing to the production and reproduction of the means,
skills and social organization of the practice at hand (Scribner, 1985;
Hutchins, 1995; Miettinen et al., 2003). That is, situations can and ought to
be analysed on multiple time-scales, as if having a ‘zoom lens’ that allows the
gaze to rest on a particular depth and range of focus at a given time, bringing
features with a certain granularity into closer focus yet without excluding
other foci from the analysis (Boeke, 1957; Eames & Eames, 1977). The
choice of interesting granularities and focal centres has been a key issue in all
the studies that draw on this line of methodological development (for exam-
ple, Cole, 1996; Miettinen et al., 2003). Pollock and Williams label their
own solution as a ‘varying research geometry’, owing to a combination of
theoretically informed critical sampling and luck in negotiating access – a
notoriously difficult task when it comes to doing ethnography of powerful
multinational supplier and intermediary organizations.
On the broadest time scale, Software and Organizations traces what the
authors describe as a complex trajectory of organizational software packages
across decades. They show how the origins of organizational packages reach
back to 1960s stock and inventory control systems in the aerospace and
automobile sector. These were extended into materials requirements plan-
ning (MRP) by including production scheduling, then capacity scheduling
and yet further extensions leading to manufacturing resource planning
(MRP II), computer-aided production management (CAPM) and ERP
systems by the mid 1990s. All these were built on the premise of integrating
multifunctional and modular designs so that updating data in one module
would result in all systems being updated. Important discontinuities mix
Book Review 637

with these striking continuities. The shift from mainframes to client–server

architectures in the 1990s and to presently ongoing web-based additions
have been accompanied, for instance, by changing business prescriptions
such as just-in-time in the 1980s and the presently ongoing value-network
and supply-chain management emphases.
The next timeframe in Software and Organizations looks at changes in
ERP packages during the past decade. Waning sales in the manufacturing
industries drove package producers to new markets and beyond ‘best-
practice’ rhetoric into one of high adaptability, witnessed by 28 industry-
specific modules that were on offer from market leader SAP in the mid
2000s. Just as much adaptation is done upon implementation, usually by
outside consultants and adopting organisations. Typical actions include
configuring the package (within its built-in parameters), customizing the
package (by rewriting code), the partial selective appropriation of the pack-
age, add-ons, additional modules and combinations of multi-vendor sys-
tems. A recent development has been that many of these adjustments are
done by independent businesses – and come in the form of packages in
themselves – and sold to several customers, which radically expands the
spectrum of choice customers have, both with regard to adjusting the pack-
age to their organizations as well as in terms of how the package is to
behave through upgrades (pp. 45–47).
The main thrust of the book is in exploring just how such adaptability
is achieved. First, Chapters 4 and 5 provide detailed ethnographies of how
a new module is being built for higher education by the largest of the pack-
age producers, pseudonymed ‘SoftCo’. We first encounter the UK univer-
sity ‘BigCivic’ piloting the first ‘university wide system’. In this phase,
which Pollock and Williams term the accumulation of functionality phase,
BigCivic and other early pilots were made to act as ‘proxies’ for the entire
higher education sector. Contrary to BigCivic’s expectations, however,
SoftCo attempted to build its new student handling module by re-using a
number of existing systems, such as the Training and Events Management
module and the Real Estate module. It did so in order to retain cost effi-
ciency and compatibility though finding ‘similar classes’ of organization
and setting within and across sectors. Students were registered as ‘special
employees’ in housing and course management, yet, in the end, not enough
similarities could be established. A code-writing effort began, but the next
problem was that of finding ‘no organization’. In the authors’ words:

the various schools and departments had grown up, over a century at least,
doing things in their own fairly idiosyncratic ways. … there were none, or
at least very few, of the common enterprise-wide processes that the sup-
plier had expected (hoped) to find. This delayed the project somewhat,
but did not dampen SoftCo’s enthusiasm or that of the internal team. If
these enterprise-wide processes did not yet exist then they were going to
create them – and this is exactly what they set about doing. (p. 143)

This building of a ‘model university’ took the form of seeking to define

processes across different universities through questionnaires, queries and
638 Social Studies of Science 39/4

testing sessions accompanied by pilots sites, in turn, trying to invent ‘new

institutional-wide rules and procedures that could be embedded within
Campus’ as SoftCo would not design the module around something it
considered to be ‘idiosyncratic’. Internal to BigCivic this was a source of
frustration in trying to correct SoftCo’s conceptions of what they did, while
trying to work out for themselves what they did, as well as trying to align
their processes with the emerging view of the new module before feeding it
back to the supplier. This bootstrapping soon became intertwined with
negotiations with other pilot site representatives over which functionalities
were to be included, and how, in the sector-wide package.
Chapter 5 reviews such strategies in what Pollock and Williams call the
generification phase. They compare how two companies handle the chal-
lenge that arises from the accumulation of particularizing features, which
makes their product baroque, hard to use and loaded with features that
some users cannot accept. There were different strategies for ‘smoothing’
(Ravetz, 1972) over shortcomings and problems. ‘Management by com-
munity’ fosters an active user group by having them witness the difficulty of
finding a mutually acceptable solution, and then having them fight to force
a consensus. ‘Management through content’ accompanied this strategy
when SoftCo analysts prompted users to construct similarities across sites,
always aiming for as generic a model as possible – ‘the US model’,
‘European model’, and so on. In effect, this taught the users to be active in
the alignment work in order for any of their particular issues to be recog-
nized as generic – and not just postponed as a site specific feature to be met
(at their expense) in customizing the package at their own site.
However, as the development progressed, community meetings became
fewer and were deemed unproductive by SoftCo, and users found their
requests increasingly treated as particulars. The users, though frustrated,
had to establish issues across multiple sites among themselves to have them
recognized at all. Having now educated its own army of able generifiers, the
supplier rewarded some of them. They segmented the client base into stra-
tegic, consultative and transactional customers, depending partly on how
far the customers were willing to ‘run ahead’ and generify their organiza-
tion to match the future prospected by the package. When universities simply
could not be mapped into one generic package, the result was ‘poly-generic’
facets such as having ‘US/Europe’ models and numerous templates with
which to customize the package at a given particular installation … in addi-
tion to all the ‘non-recommended’ ways to customize it further. The end
result was a generic, travelling solution, but instead of a black box, it was
rather a ‘black blob’ where generic, poly-generic, generic particular and
particular features co-existed within fuzzy and changing boundaries. Within
the blob, a particular could begin to become generic if it matched a new
market and vice versa. The release of upgrades, new modules and new ver-
sions of the software package geared towards particular market segments
constituted a process of ongoing incremental innovation. What was sup-
plied and in use was not a single product, but a bundle of capabilities,
which evolved in parallel, but around a relatively stable core.
Book Review 639

The final empirical chapter deepens this view by examining customer

support. SoftCo had transformed both user and customer help into ‘user-
in-the-portal’ and ‘support-in-the-portal’, creating an elaborate set of
boundary work arrangements. SoftCo would take responsibility only for
their software, not being responsible for any user alterations or additions. It
would require users to use their own computing expertise to establish that
a problem was indeed SoftCo’s (by running parallel systems, and so on)
and, if so, to then state the urgency of the problem, which would spur dif-
ferent responses from SoftCo. This also placed different responsibilities on
the user (such as having around-the-clock phone line expertise available for
weeks). So rendered, the problem, not the site (cf. Orr, 1996), could start
to travel around the globe from one service centre to another in search of
the expertise to solve it. This global 24/7 support system with various trials,
procedures and instruments could effectively soothe, manage and keep
users and their problems ‘in the portal’ and ‘pass the user’ to another serv-
ice centre until a solution was found. These arrangements were proficient
also in detecting rising user frustration and assigning more assistance
before the client was likely to ‘escalate’ the problem out of the portal. The
black blob was thus policed and incrementally developed through such
maintenance procedures.
What, then, we may ask, restricts suppliers from exploiting users out-
right through these clever strategies. The usual explanations are that loom-
ing implementation and the prospect of customer dissatisfaction restrain
suppliers. Pollock and Williams aim for a more nuanced explanation, and
focus on the orchestration, construction and bending of community knowl-
edge that may also govern the producers. They first examine procurement by
a British local authority to show how different packages are compared.
While this team could compare many issues, they had to resort to reference
sites and industry analysts, such as the Gartner Group, to assess candidate
suppliers’ likely fate and commitment, among other issues. Such appraisals,
in turn, loop back to implementations, generification exercises, and so on.
Indeed, while some of Gartner’s instruments are based on relatively little
empirical backing and resemble ‘folk theories’, Pollock and Williams show
that some, like Gartner’s sector specific supplier rating charts ‘magic quad-
rants‘, appear to reflect not the Gartner Group’s views, but those of its
reporting satellites. Yet, a complex mesh of performatives also emerges into
view. An example is drawn from the BigCivic implementation. The project
leader in BigCivic estimates that, should their go-live date be postponed, it
would lower SoftCo’s rating in the magic quadrant and reduce the future
investments that it is willing to make in the higher education market.
Maintaining the rating motivates both parties to undertake hasty and risky
implementation, and in so doing it contributes to its subsequent failure. Yet,
the project manager conceals the disaster from Gartner in order to avoid
affecting SoftCo’s rating, not least because he regards it as typical of these
systems – hence anticipating the skew, and purposefully playing it!
The brilliant empirical chapters joined with in-depth engagement with
the literature leave little to disagree with in Software and Organizations.
640 Social Studies of Science 39/4

However, on two counts the book’s aims reach further than its elaboration.
The first shortcoming concerns the balance of the biography the book writes
about the packaged software. Both Pollock and Williams have published
earlier studies of ERP implementations, but it is striking that we see not
one end-user of these systems in a study that promises to give a robust and
rounded view on packaged software. The authors violate their own maxim.
And quite in accordance with their own theoretical critique, this choice of
sites seems to have repercussions for analyses and interpretations of find-
ings. For instance, the negotiations surrounding the packages predomi-
nantly take place among information systems (IS) professionals in universities
and among the suppliers, also accompanied by IS professional consultants.
In addition to ‘management by community, content and social authority’,
‘management by professional divisions’ appears important. The client rep-
resentatives involved in negotiating and agreeing about changes in the
packages seem at least one step removed from the daily realities and diffi-
culties in using these packages. These removal mechanisms would have
merited more attention, not least because there tend to be revolving doors
between supplier, consultant and client organizations for employing infor-
mation systems professionals.
The lack of discussion of end-users also produces an interesting side
effect. Software and Organizations can now be read as an exposé of industry
structures and practices capable of grinding organizations ‘through the sau-
sage machine’ to suit the software packages. This, in turn, seems to add a
further nuance to the STS critique in the book and its ‘sibling’, Social
Learning In Technological Innovation (SLTI) (Williams et al., 2005). Both
volumes stress how explaining the problems in technology use by reference
to designer’s (wrong) values or the way designers ‘configure the user’ tends
to over-emphasize the impact and immutability of prior design and portrays
designers as omnipotent manipulators of users. Conversely, it portrays ordi-
nary user alterations to technology as heroic feats of resistance or creativity.
This point is well taken. However, leaving end-users out of Software and
Organizations leaves one wondering if this was done just to show how potent
the large package suppliers can be in their manipulations of users? Indeed,
explanations by reference to values or any particular act of ‘configuring the
user’ appear rather meek in the face of suppliers’ arduous labour of com-
parison, education, alignment, pricing, partial customization, and so on,
which happens throughout multiple product lifecycles and across organiza-
tions. Re-configuring technology in use may significantly alter designers
pre-configuration of the technology, but users may still become aligned with
supplier interests through such co-configuring arrangements.
The second set of limits concerns theoretical articulation. Software and
Organizations does an admirable job of exemplifying how multiple granu-
larities of analysis can portray the interwoven mesh of industry, product
and artefact evolution. It provides an excellent literature review and builds
a very strong case against snapshot modes of inquiry in technology studies.
Yet, the use of time-scales is now presented ambivalently as, on the one
hand, an original contribution to the S&TS field and, on the other, as
Book Review 641

merely duplicating the scales and principles identified by earlier research.

Neither holds true. The methodological ideas have been well elaborated
previously, but the ‘varying research geometry’ in Software and Organizations
is clearly a novel interpretation of it, which would have deserved reflection
and further conceptualization. Likewise, more work remains to be done in
articulating the differences between the biography approach and other
S&TS approaches to the construction of technological artefacts and sys-
tems (Bijker, 1995; Latour, 1996), technological trajectories (Star, 1989;
Bowker & Star, 1999; Clarke, 2005) and how to understand and handle
‘context’ (Braudel, 1995; Cole, 1996; Clarke, 2005).
We are also left with wanting more direct answers to the set of ‘big ques-
tions’, such as what comprises a technology in the biographies of artefacts
view. Clearly, the answer is not only ‘assemblages’, and certainly not ‘arte-
facts’, as half of the book is devoted to establishing just how Organizational
Packages are not comprised of a singular, relatively clearly bounded, ‘craft-
produce’. Indeed, the ‘biography of artefacts approach’ appears to be an
oxymoron here! The dynamic stability that organizational software packages
feature in their truly mind-boggling range of spatial, material, functional and
temporal variety, is addressed through epithets such as the ‘black-blob’,
‘bumblebee’ and ‘evolving bundle of capabilities’, which point to the need
to understand technologies, expectations and practices in spatially as well as
temporally more nuanced ways.
Overall, this book provides a significantly richer view of the design, pro-
curement and evolution of software packages than has been available to date.
Indeed, one is tempted to say that it may well show the way to the next wave of
technology studies. Yet, if this is the way, it is not an easy path. Rendering vis-
ible the flight of the bumblebee was based on building up another flight path.
The book draws on almost 20 years’ engagement with a particular technology,
involving several teams of researchers. Such research designs have not tradition-
ally flown too well in the social sciences, but, as the authors argue, the next wave
of technology studies may well require this new type of team-effort in the face
of immensely complex technologies and development-use relations.

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Sampsa Hyysalo is a Fellow in Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies,

University of Helsinki and a professor in work informatics at the University
of Turku, Finland. He is presently writing a book entitled Health Technology
Development and Use, which focuses on biographies and imaginaries of
new technology.

Address: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, PO box 4, FIN-00014

University of Helsinki, Finland. Tel: +358 9 191 23460; email: sampsa.
hyysalo@helsinki.fi