The trojan door: Organizations,work, and the “open black box”

The paper summarizes recent work on organizations, artificial intelligence systems, human-computer interaction, etc., which emphasizes thesituated, distributed, andfluid nature of social systems. This contrasts with the traditional way of writing and thinking about social systems which sees them as disembodied, ideal, formal notions of thought. The implications of this new view of systems for social actors, information, knowledge, and technology are discussed. The literature reviewed offers a new way of talking about systems and their practices.