PSYCHOLOGY AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - THE STUDY OF COGNITION IN ORGANIZATIONS

This paper reviews a range of psychological research into the development and use of information technology (IT) at work. The overall purpose is to use this field of inquiry to argue the need to study cognition in organizations. The paper includes reviews of the literatures on human-computer interaction, the wider organizational aspects of IT, metaphors in use within organizational psychology, empirical studies of the development and use of IT, and some emerging work on situated action and distributed cognition. The paper ends with an outline of some topics that should be included in the study of cognition in organizations, describing some ideas on the interdependencies between organizational and cognitive issues, a worldview to guide this research, and a framework based on the division of cognitive labour.