Decision Support Systems: Structural, conversational and emotional adjustments: Breaking and taking of organisational care

Abstract

Computer and communication technology has been used extensively in organisations to enhance the management process. Experts and users report dissatisfaction with the design process and the support provided by technological systems. Increasing their effectiveness is not a question of more or better technology but one of re-interpretation of action and the manager's activity. According to developments in cognitive biology, human beings do not act based on a representation of the world. This contradicts the current foundation of the concern for providing information as accurate representation of relevant reality. The understanding of the human being as an observer in language opens a new perspective of management. Language as the recursive flow of consensual coordinations of behaviour that constitutes a manner of loving together, allows for the generation of the complexities that managers must cope with to take care of the viability of the Human Activity Systems under their responsibility. The continuous crisscrossing of consensual coordinations of behaviour follows the changing complexities of living together in a changing world. Learning and acquiring new and more powerful languages to observe and coordinate in the domains of action that characterize the identity of the Human Activity System is a practice concerning viability. Emotions are changed in language changing the disposition for action. Computer & Communication Technology can be reinterpreted as a conversational device enhancing the languaging and emotioning of the community sharing the concerns of the manager.