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Power, Politics, and Pecking Order: Technological Innovation as a Site of Collaboration, Resistance, and Accommodation
Author(s) -
DAVIS JAMES N.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00272.x
Subject(s) - resistance (ecology) , promotion (chess) , politics , sociology , subversion , empowerment , public relations , order (exchange) , power (physics) , citizen journalism , foreign language , comparative case , political science , pedagogy , business , ecology , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , law , biology , linguistics , philosophy
The author summarizes and interprets data collected while he was a visiting scholar in a foreign language (FL) department at a large U.S. public research university. This qualitative case study focuses on: (a) the process of developing widely acclaimed Web‐based beginning FL teaching software, and (b) the political implications of the development team's success within their host department. As the team forged strategic alliances across the campus and received substantial funding through their university's technology initiatives, certain traditional intradepartmental power relationships (especially between language‐ and literature‐teaching faculty) were destabilized. The most striking outcomes of the events described here were the subversion of longstanding rules and procedures for granting tenure and promotion and the empowerment of the beginning program coordinator and his associates. The findings of the present research are framed in terms of theoretical constructs proposed by Jordan (1999) and Bourdieu (1988). The conclusion includes suggestions for consumers and creators of large‐scale technology projects.