Routines, artefacts and technological change: investigating the transformation of criminal justice in England and Wales

Organisational routines embed and are increasingly embedded within IT artefacts. In this paper, I challenge the conventional notion that warrants the primacy of human activities in the study of routines and bring artefacts in general and IT artefacts in particular to the very centre of my theorising. Through an in-depth case study of crown prosecutors’ work, I endeavour to explain the way legislative and IT artefacts are implicated in the transformation of police-prosecutor routines. I show that legislative artefacts play a constitutive role that generates a new role position and a new system of social practices while IT artefacts serve a regulative function that enforces a newly-programmed sequence of steps onto pre-existing practices. I argue for the benefits of foregrounding legislative and IT artefacts to develop a nuanced account of organisational routines that responds to recent calls for research that contextualises the IT artefact outside single settings. I draw on the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA) to unpack the causal linkages between legislative and IT artefacts. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.