Exploring the structuration of technology within human service organizations

This article seeks to improve our understandings of the process and daily operations of human service organizations. Building on past research that characterizes the core technology of such organizations as inherently indeterminate, this article explores how frontline staff engage in a social process that actually structures their actions. Ethnographic data gathered using multiple methods in three welfare-to-work organizations are examined. Structuration theory is used to analyze these data and probe both the similarities and difference found among these three human service organizations. Implications for future research about human service organizations are discussed.