Aligning Decisions with Mission: Using Socio-Technical Integration for Workers in Industrial Organizations

ABSTRACT Despite a recognized need for corporations to take greater social responsibility, such responsibility is often lacking in the decisions of corporate America. This lack of attention to social responsibility has numerous implications, not least for the US workforce. Additionally, the workforce itself has a potential role to play in implementing social responsibility. Workers are partly responsible for actions causing negative effects; however, organizations tend to avoid addressing the negative effects as a form of organized irresponsibility. This dissertation examines decisions and actions related to the worker, their work roles, and within their organization. It aims to understand to what extent workers can function as change agents in aligning their organizations with social responsibility as it relates to organizational missions. The methodological approach used to gather data for this dissertation is Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR), and the framework used to analyze the data is Midstream Modulation. The dissertation advances the STIR methodology in several respects as a result of studying technology startups with a focus towards organizational effects. These advances include measuring how modulations within individual workers’ decisions have outcomes at the organizational level or across multiple departments. Examples of such “organizational modulations” can be seen in two of the three studies at the core of this dissertation. Additionally, I demonstrate that multiple reflexive modulations can be involved in modulation sequences and that modulation sequences can be nested in relation to one another. Furthermore, I present the Collaborative Change Agent Model, which may possibly be utilized to further discuss decisions and embed concepts such as social responsibility and Responsible Innovation in an individual worker’s decision-making process.