Erica L. Wagner, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
School of Hotel Administration
Cornell University
340 Statler Hall
Ithaca, New  York, 14853-6902

Research Interests:  Primarily I focus on the ways in software is 'made to work' within different organizational contexts.  I pay particular attention to narrative articulations of action and how these texts show negotiation, compromise and temporal practices.  As a qualitative field researcher I follow organizational stakeholders in their daily activities and ask to hear stories about their work.   Typically this occurs before, during, and after large scale software projects in an effort to understand IT-enabled change from the perspectives of those experiencing it.  I then analyze these documents as narratives to highlight content-based themes and temporal patterns of action that help to theorize change and order.  The implications of this focus are a nuanced understanding of how technology can become accepted within organizations - even when it is problematic. 

My post-doctoral research agenda centers around the following issues:

• An exploratory study of self service technologies (SST) comparing hospitality companies with other industries. 

• Software projects as liminal spaces - theories about how to change the software development life cycle.

• An exploratory study of ethics and customer data within the hospitality industry.

• Critical examination of the 'best practice' concept as it relates to software sales. 

• How software can help change the entry level hospitality work force

• Information systems 'in the world' - the ways in which contemporary society shape, and are shaped by ICTs particularly in terms of design, implementation and use of standard software packages

Theoretical and methodological interests:

• Social constructions of time for understanding the interconnectivity of multiple perspectives 

• Science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT)

• Narrative, meaning formation within communities, postmodern philosophy

Teaching interests:  My teaching style is informed by the notion of systems thinking which encourages an holistic understanding of the information resource by understanding how the parts interact. Therefore, my courses are designed to encourage students to develop their critical thinking skills in order to analyze IT from a systemic perspective.  Rather than adopting a reductionist perspective that assumes for example ‘more information technology (IT) will solve the business problem’, systems thinking extends the boundary of a particular application to include not only the hardware and software components of the technology but also the users, the customers, designated business goals, the external business environment and considers the interactions between them. Disciplined investigation into a phenomenon from this perspective may result in new insights about how a business works, what its problems are, and how changes made to one such system may impact others. 

I enjoy working with different teaching models in order to facilitate learning.  This is further articulated in my teaching philosophy.