For me, your statement “I think the ’social’ thing is such an issue because it is one that very few technologists are able to get to grips with.” is the crux of your excellent post.

I am a systems thinker and conceptually have never been able to separate the technical and social dimensions of work, and am increasingly aware of the importance of the spatial dimension. I wrote a blog post recently about the pervasiveness of Taylorist thinking within the IT, HR and FM functions.

A key feature of Taylorism is specialiastion, breaking down and repeating tasks to gain ‘efficiency’. Thinking about it a bit more, the pervasiveness of Taylorist thinking has been most pernicious in influencing how organisations are structured in the first place, with specialist functions resulting in destructive, stunted silo thinking and functional turf wars.

I think social technologies are so significant because they have the potential to eliminate separation – separation of funtions and separation of people from the technologies they use. Those of us who use social tools find that they are an extension of who we are, what we want to do and with whom.

Social has become associated, burdened as you say, with detrimental connotations ( time-wasting, subversive behaviour, dissent). Use of the word is therefore criticised and derided. But organisations by their very nature are social – networks of people working together to make or prevent things from happening – and that is just the way it is. The fact that social is so overwhelmingly negatively perceived says more about the mental models of the perceivers than social dynamics, which of course are equally creative given the right operating environment.

And so to culture and ‘cult-ure’. The multiple cultures that exist within an organisation are influenced by local and meta environments – physical, information and management. The topic is obviously vast and mult-dimensional. For another post!

I do think that culture of a company is primarily influenced by the size of the company (in employees/active co-workers) and the proximity those employees have to one another. Secondarily the culture is influenced by the types of communications tools it uses, not just technology or application but also context. Any tools, especially those that initiate or transform communications, must take this into account prior to forming any strategy (let alone any tactics or aligning the company any specific tools).

I would have to say though that you could take this a step further and offer a solution to your paradox based upon McLuhan’s principles….

Medium——>Message—–>Culture——>Result

On another note: When reading through my commentary that your most “Related Post” is about Dunbar (size of companies);-)

Pre IT (Immersive Technology – a concept distinction I am working with at the moment), the culture of a business was largely determined by the Leader of that business or, at least, of that business unit. Even down to the dress code (IBM white shirt blue suit)

Post IT, culture is partially and increasingly influenced by technology. I hear this all the time around the email culture, concall culture, and increasingly – the social media culture of the business.

I KNOW that technology is not neutral – it does directly impact the overall culture of a business to a greater or lesser extent. I suspect that the more Immersive that technology is, the greater will be its impact on the culture.
Thanks for the opportunity to think about this here.

Throwing a wiki into a business is going to be no more effective than throwing a change program into a “cult-ure” – but I’d like to find a middle ground between where I often find myself today: “every business is different” and the “here is a template” crowd.

Of course, other things may be relevant too – management, leadership, HR, OD etc. As I said at the SMiB conference, social media may be first violin buy it’s not the whole orchestra.