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Oscar Ugarteche. The False Dilemma—Globalization: Opportunity or Threat. London: Zed Books, 2000. xvi + 240 pp. ISBN 1-85649-689-9, $65.00 (cloth); 1-85649-690-2, $22.50 (paper)

The conclusion that even in the midst of dramatic technological upheaval, organizational change is slow (or even nonexistent), incremental, and underdetermined by any specific technology is particularly evident in the third section, where ethnographical methodologies inform analyses of workplace practices. These chapters include Brian Pentland’s study of laptop computers used at the Internal Revenue Service; Peter Manning’s case study of status and cellular telephony in a police department; Wanda Orlikowski’s essay on the improvisation of work practices among an IT support staff; Daniel Robey and Sundeep Sahay’s analysis of the use of electronic cartographic technologies; and Susan Star and Karen Ruhleder’s article on the failure of a research-oriented computer network. These case studies hold many lessons, even for those scholars who are not directly engaged in the ethnography of work practices. Further, the themes brought up in this last section apply very well to the historical case studies presented elsewhere. The messy, improvised nature of organizational change that Orlikowski explores is an underlying theme of much of this book; the issue of entrenched culture (raised explicitly in Peter Manning’s chapter) is clearly a factor in nearly all these situations; and the point that social and cultural factors are important or even paramount in understanding the history of business technologies, discussed most fully in section three, reinforces quite emphatically the more subtle themes of the carefully researched and thoughtful essays in the first two sections. The successful integration of such varied methodologies in this volume is largely attributable to the editors’ outstanding transitional essays, with the overall result being a truly exceptional example of interdisciplinary work. A fascinating and challenging set of essays, this book will be of use to anyone interested in the ongoing development of organizations as they adopt new electronic technologies.