When Big Brother Is Benevolent: How Technology Developers Navigate Power Dynamics among Users to Elevate Worker Interests.

Existing research on technologies-in-use has overlooked how contemporary technology developers interact with users to shape the effects of workplace technologies, and what role power plays in these interactions. In this qualitative study of a digital manufacturing monitoring technology, I examine how third-party developers pursued ongoing acceptance from high-powered manufacturing managers while attempting to incorporate the interests of low-powered manufacturing workers across their client base. I develop a two-stage model that depicts the underlying sources of divergent user preferences and the practices that developers used to navigate these differences. First, in response to cross-occupational differences between managers and workers within client firms, developers used alignment moves to pursue interest alignment while encoding workers' preferences into design prototypes. Next, when facing cross-firm differences due to pushback by managers in some contexts, developers used buffering moves to limit the influence of these managers and release the new features. As a complement to examining local variation in use, I suggest that future research on workplace technologies should focus on developers' capacity to disrupt managerial control across different clients and user groups. Because they enact jurisdiction over ongoing design and development, developers are an important professional group to consider in contemporary technology ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]