Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006

Learning with Laptops:

Information Technology and the Transformation of an MBA Program

Abhijit Gopal, Deborah Compeau, Teresa Marcon, Fernando Olivera

Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario
agopal@ivey.ca, dcompeau@ivey.ca, tmarcon@ivey.ca, folivera@ivey.ca

Laptop computers and wireless networks are becoming
part of the landscape of many MBA programs, finding
their way into the innermost sanctum of academia: the
classroom. The consequences of introducing information
technologies in the educational environment, however,
are far from clear. Through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory
of practice, we explore how a mandatory laptop program
was woven into the institutional fabric of an MBA
program and the means by which information
technologies altered student practices. We attend to how
IT was implicated in a struggle between the students and
the faculty for control of classroom use of laptops and
networks. In revealing the variety of interests at stake and
the different logic deployed by students and faculty in this
confrontation, we hope to open a space for the mutual
recognition of opposing viewpoints and for the possibility
of joint ownership of the problem.
The university campus has seen momentous
developments in computing over the last half century
(Weiser, 1998). Students who once waited patiently for a
little CPU time have given way to those who see access to
IT as a basic facet of university infrastructure.
Universities, increasingly reinventing their mandates in
the context of a market logic (Noble, 1998; Taylor, 2000),
see promise in the ‘laptop program’ as a differentiator, a
means to bolster or create an image (The Laptop College,
1999). Business schools in particular gravitate toward this
logic, and as students pay increasing premiums to obtain
business degrees, several schools have taken the plunge in
an effort to set themselves apart. They see themselves,
through these programs, as helping students develop
technological savvy, obtain instant access to business
information, and prepare for the knowledge economy
(The Laptop College, 1999; Rola, 2002).
Technology in education has been examined by a
number of researchers in information systems (e.g., Alavi
1994; Piccoli et al 2001). Such research addresses
opportunities for specific technologies to support
education in new and different ways and challenges the
use of technology mediated communication to replace
other forms of communication in a learning environment.
Our research focuses on a somewhat different
application of technology in education – one in which a
general-purpose technology (laptops) is introduced to
support rather than mediate a traditional learning
environment (i.e., one based primarily on face-to-face
classroom interaction). This domain has received
relatively little empirical attention, though a number of
popular articles have been written on the subject,
including reports of the state of use of laptops in
universities (The Laptop College 1999; The Mobile
Campus Matures 2000).
Reports on the application of general-purpose
technologies in education convey a cautious view of the
role and value of technologies on campus. Concerns about
the use of laptops in education stem in part from
ideological considerations (e.g., Griere & Bryant, 1998)
related to elitism and over-commercialization. Others
question whether laptops achieve their fiscal goals of
shifting the costs of technology infrastructure to the
student body (Biros, 1998). One particularly contentious
aspect of laptops on campus is its impact on the classroom
and the learning process. The appearance of the laptop,
coupled with connectivity, in the inner sanctum of
university education, the classroom, has led to strong
reactions from at least some faculty members to its
distractive potential and the concomitant degradation of
the classroom experience (Schwartz, 2003).
The experience at our own university with respect to
this last issue led to the research reported in this paper.
Requiring incoming students to arrive in possession of
laptops appeared in tune with the times and was readily
accepted by students. But there was also growing disquiet
amongst our colleagues about the less than salubrious
impact of the laptops in the classroom. Other educational
units faced similar issues (Bhave, 2002; Schwartz, 2003)
while still others contemplated the plunge into mandatory
laptop programs (DeLoughry, 1995; Olsen 2001). And at
least one group of stakeholders – students – would carry
the effects of our actions some way into the future.
Our research sought to examine the experiences of
our institution in order to learn about the impact and
implications of the laptop program in the environment of
the MBA program. Given our beliefs in the importance of
a holistic perspective (focusing on the program as a whole
and the weaving of technology into that program, rather
than focusing narrowly on the technology) and a dynamic
accounting of the situation, we undertook a qualitative,
multi-stakeholder approach. This paper presents the
results of our first phase of study. We focused first on

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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
understanding the student1 perspective, recognizing that
we could only make sense of this perspective in the
context of numerous other perspectives. To do this, we
adopted a theoretical lens that helped us consider the
variety of interests at stake as well as understand the
nuanced ways in which laptops had entered the practices
of university life: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice
(Bourdieu, 1977; 1990; 1998). The next section reviews
key concepts from Bourdieu’s theory. We then turn to a
description of the laptop program at our institution and to
our analysis of our qualitative data from the Bourdieun
perspective.
BOURDIEU: THEORIZING PRACTICE
We chose a Bourdieun perspective for several
reasons. First, we wanted an approach that would reflect a
holistic view of the phenomenon, and would reflect the
constructed nature of institutions such as the MBA
program. Additionally, it became evident through the
interview process and subsequent discussions that we
needed an approach that would allow us to account for
both the practices that constitute the day-to-day activities
of our students and the power struggles among various
stakeholders that were generated by the introduction of
laptops into the program. The centrality of practice and
power in Bourdieu’s theorizing was thus an important
focus for our research. Finally, Bourdieu’s interest in the
educational field provided a useful starting point for
understanding the circumstances of our laptop program.
Figure 1: Economic and cultural capital
(adapted from Bourdieu 1998)
Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977; 1990; 1998) is
concerned with the symbolic ‘marketplace’, a social space
or field within which individuals and groups have
dispositions (habitus) that are socially acquired but
1 competence, the academic degree gives the recipient,
In what follows, our reference to ‘students’ is a reference to the
respondents. We do not intend to imply a generalizability to all the MBA
students but do not shy away from it either: our random sample of
students was, after all, implicitly intended to be representative. It is left
to the reader to assess whether a case might exist to generalize any of
what we discuss to our student body or to any other group.
nonetheless durable. These dispositions incline them to
take up particular positional identities and to pursue
individual and group interests in a struggle to acquire and
hold on to different forms of capital (economic, cultural,
institutional, etc.; (see Figure 1)).
Habitus is “a kind of practical sense for what is to be
done in a given situation – what is called in sport a “feel”
for the game” (p. 25). The “generative” or basic habitus
(p. 8) is acquired in childhood and beyond and is the
source of individual dispositions towards action in
particular social contexts and forms the basis for the
utilization and reproduction of social structures. The
unquestioned acceptance and incorporation into the
habitus of social conventions give rise to the common
sense world or doxa (Bourdieu, 1977: 166). This
understanding of what is normal and natural forms the
grounds for the enactment of symbolic violence, an “act of
cognition and misrecognition” (Everett 2002: 66) through
which less successful participants in the game are
complicit in the maintenance of the conditions that
legitimate and perpetuate inequalities. That is to say,
those things deemed normal and natural by those who
hold greater volumes of capital act as standards against
which the actions of those in the field, especially those
who hold lower volumes of capital, are judged and
constrained.
A field is understood as a field of production (e.g.,
the economic, artistic, or educational) and can be
characterized as restricted (specialized) or widespread
(generalized). In a field of restricted production, the
primary form of capital is cultural and consumers are
other producers of cultural goods within the field (e.g.,
academics who write for and are judged by other
academics). Widespread fields of production, on the other
hand, “are organized with a view to the production of
cultural goods destined for non-producers” (Everett 2002:
61) or the “public at large” (Bourdieu 1985, cited in
Everett 2002). These fields of production are rarely
completely independent: in education, a restricted field of
production, economic capital is de-emphasized in favor of
other forms of cultural or symbolic capital (e.g.
qualifications, repute) which are nevertheless tied to
economic value. Symbolic capital, which is a combination
of other types of capital, is “a transformed and thereby
disguised” (Bourdieu 1977: 183) form of capital that
gains its efficacy precisely through the misrecognition of
its material bases. Educational qualifications are among
the most commonly misrecognized and easily converted
forms of capital. Acquired through economic means and
the demonstration of a particular kind of social
through an “act of ordination” (Bourdieu, 1998: 21), a
guarantee of technical competence that can be converted
into economic capital in other spheres of social life.
In the following sections, we elaborate on the
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fundamental elements of the Bourdieun framework as
applied to our research context. After briefly outlining the
background against which our study unfolded, we discuss
the restricted field of the MBA program and its
relationship to the widespread economic field. We then
turn to a description of students’ habitus and their
technology-related practices with respect to
communication, file sharing, and classroom use. We then
return to the level of the field, by discussing the views of
the students as understood within this context.
BACKGROUND
Our institution was established in the 1920s at a
mid-sized public university. The MBA program began in
1948 and had since its inception used a case-based
method of learning. Graduating approximately 280 MBA
students per year, the school was highly placed in
international rankings. Classroom discussions were
central to the case learning process; 25-35% of a student’s
final grade was based on his or her contribution to the
class discussion. Attendance at class was a necessary but
not sufficient condition for performance in this aspect of
the program. As a result, absenteeism without cause was
rare. The program valued integration of material across
courses; hence there was a fairly significant program,
rather than course, orientation. Incoming students were
assigned to a section (a group of 65-75 students) with
which they took all their first year classes. Each section
used its own classroom, and stayed in that room for the
three class periods of the day. Assignments were given to
the students for two weeks at a time, thus allowing the
schedule to float as needed to accommodate guest
speakers, changes to the material, and also faculty
scheduling conflicts. Faculty met regularly to discuss the
performance of the students in their section across courses
and to address issues relating to the section generally. The
first year of the MBA program was considered “core” and
no opportunities for students to challenge out of courses
was provided. In the second year, students enrolled in
electives of their choosing. The second year schedule was
more traditional, with fixed class times for each course
and different groupings of students in each class.
Students were assigned to learning teams in the first
year. The purpose of the learning teams was to provide a
small-group setting for initial discussion of students’ case
analyses, and to provide a forum for occasional project
work. The learning team had been an established part of
the school’s culture for many years. In the first two weeks
of school, students met with their learning teams on
campus and under the supervision of teaching faculty.
After this period, the organization of learning team
meetings was left to the students.
On-campus recruiting took place for both summer
jobs and full-time employment. Given the high costs of
the program and the values of the students, the recruiting
process was emphasized in both first and second years.
Attendance at job interviews was one of the few reasons
to miss class. However, in the tighter job market of the
recent past, missing class for job interviews had become
an increasing problem.
The “Laptop Program”
Beginning in September 1998, new MBA students
were required to arrive in possession of a laptop
computer. There was no overt objection to the increase
this represented in the already high price tag for the
program; students could purchase whichever machine
suited their fancy and budget. The school subsequently
put in place a wireless network, in spite of its bandwidth
limitations in relation to wired environments, upon
consideration of its financial and logistical advantages.
According to the then head of IT support, “We
didn’t introduce laptops to revitalize our teaching because
it didn’t need to be revitalized. Our case-study method is
time-tested … and we’re very, very happy with it… The
laptops … are for the 95% of a student's time that is spent
outside the classroom” (quoted in The Laptop College,
1999: 17). Interestingly, this statement suggests both a
recognition of the possibility of classroom use and the
sentiment that the faculty were not anticipating any real
change in the classroom dynamic.
As it happened, both laptops and wireless
connectivity found their way into the classroom. Within
two years of the program’s initiation, faculty members
found themselves discussing means to control classroom
use. The primary argument centered on the distractive
potential of the technology in a case classroom that relied
on student involvement.
Chat, Email, Campus No
Access to → printer, external Internet access*
file Internet sites
Access type↓ sharing sites
Open x x x n/a
Open Class x x n/a
Limited Class x n/a
Restricted Class x
* Specific websites available, if faculty requires it.
Table 1: Proposed access
By the summer of 2002, the IT support group had
devised a means of controlling network access during
classes. Four access levels were defined (Table 1). “Open
access” was intended for out-of-class use by students.
While IT support assumed that the default level for in-
class use would be “Limited class access” allowing access
to the intranet, faculty members decided to set
“Restricted” or “No access” as the default. This setting
had been designed for examinations, to ensure that
students worked individually, but given recent frustration
with laptop use in the classroom, the faculty appeared to
prefer a more restrictive approach. Individual faculty
members could override the default but there appeared to
be broad recognition that such variation could fracture the
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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
solidarity faculty would need to enforce the controls.
In September 2002, the network controls were put in
place for all MBA students. A protest, emanating
primarily from second-year students, ensued.
Simultaneously, the network controls failed to operate
correctly, causing fairly serious accessibility problems
(e.g., students could not access the add-drop system and
missed recruiting announcements). These problems
appeared to feed the groundswell of protest, which began
to spread to the first-year cohort. Several meetings were
hastily convened and program management admitted that
the implementation had been flawed. The controls were
temporarily withdrawn and reintroduced after further
testing, this time only for the first-year class – those in the
second year had successfully lobbied to be exempt.
Further technical problems arose, as did fresh protest. The
controls were eventually dropped for the academic year.
Program management and IT staff apologized for the poor
implementation and the resulting disruption.
RESEARCH APPROACH
Our project started in October 2002 with interviews
of first-year students (Figure 2 provides a timeline of the
laptop program and our research). We intended to
interview a wide range of stakeholders but the initial task
was to follow a single cohort through their two years at
the school. In view of the ethical conundrum posed by us
conducting interviews within the program in which we
taught, a doctoral student conducted all the interviews
with students not being taught by the authors. Twenty-
three randomly selected students were interviewed twice
in the first year and once in their second year. We also
interviewed nine randomly selected second-year students
so as to be able to compare first- and second-year
perspectives during the first year of the project. Another
first-year student volunteered to be interviewed after the
second set of first-year interviews had been completed
and was interviewed once. We interviewed 10 additional
first-year students in the second year of our study to
provide further comparison between cohorts. All
interviews were semi-structured, with guidelines provided
for the kind of information sought but flexibility to move
in the direction desired by the interviewee. To help
corroborate what we learned through the interviews,
observation of three classes within one first-year MBA
section was also conducted by two doctoral students
following a semi-structured protocol designed to capture
students’ use of their laptops during class discussions.
The entire research team conducted the data analysis.
Using theme-identification techniques from grounded
theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and informed by the
vocabulary of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, each
individual searched a subset of the transcripts for themes.
As we began to develop a sense of what was going on,
each individual examined a further set of transcripts,
using the refined theme-identification scheme developed
by the entire group. Given our goal of understanding the
experiences of the students from their perspectives and
given the emergent nature of the coding, inter-rater
reliability in the coding was not deemed an essential
concern (Alvesson 2003). Nonetheless, we met regularly
to discuss our interpretations of the data and ensure a
commonality in our understanding of the interviews.
1997: laptops made compulsory
1998: wireless network introduced
1999-2000: faculty concern about
classroom use
2000: 'cards out' policy in class
Sep 2002 : network controls introduced
Research commences
Oct 2002 : network controls removed
Sep 2003 : network controls reintroduced
for first year, less restrictive for second y r
st st
Oct 02: 1 interviews with 1 yr (2004) students plus
nd
interviews with 2 yr (2003) students
nd
Jan 03: 2 interviews with 2004 students
Mar 03: Classroom observation
rd
Oct 03: 3 interviews with 2004 students
Figure 2: Time line related to study
RESULTS
While our aim is to examine the interweaving of this
general purpose technology into the MBA program, it is
first necessary to examine the nature of that program – a
restricted field in Bourdieu’s terms – as a basis for
grounding the discussion. Our approach is consistent with
the perspective that technologies cannot be examined in
isolation, disengaged from their contexts (Orlikowski &
Iacono, 2001); they need to be understood in relation to
the context in which they are embedded and the multiple
ways in which people put them to work to support their
aims, goals, and desires. However, in what follows, we
attempt also to place the restricted field in the context of
the widespread field and move between the two levels to
make sense of what occurred.
The Restricted Field and the Widespread Field – The
MBA in Context
The field of business education reveals a struggle of
logics that emanates both from the restricted academic
field and the widespread economic field. In positing that
laptops are crucial to business education because they
prepare students for the ‘real world’, the logic of the
widespread field infiltrates a restricted field otherwise
concerned with justifying innovation through a logic
particular to education: how does it improve the learning
experience and should it replace time-tested teaching
techniques? Both positive and negative outcomes emerge
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from this ‘colonization’ (Bourdieu 1977) of the restricted
field by the widespread field. On the one hand, it
introduces accountability (itself a category perfected
within the economic field) to the educational domain. On
the other, the diffuse logic of, “Because this is how things
are done in the real world,” escapes unexamined.
Habitus
Coming into the program, there was the expected
variation in habitus amongst students. Many arrived with
a strong sense of the primacy of the educational field as
they had encountered it in previous educational
experience: the learning process and the power position of
the professoriate were givens in the system; the learning
from the professors was a crucial means to accumulate the
necessary embodied capital, the knowledgeable persona
they sought. Others appeared preoccupied not as much
with being knowledgeable as with obtaining a degree;
there was not as marked a concern with the content of
what was obtained along the way.
Commenting on the appropriateness of surfing the
Internet during classes, for example, some students placed
responsibility on the professoriate. As one student noted,
“while some people might surf the Internet during class,
… most of us are paying attention to class. And I think it
is really an issue for the professors that most of the
classroom is not paying attention… it just like reflects on
the ability of the professor to… keep the class…
concentrating on the topic... … if it is not interesting, if
the professor is not able to maintain that level of attention,
then people are going to start surfing the Net.” Such
opinions were commonplace though not uniformly shared
by all, as evident in the following statement offered by a
different student: “I don’t think the professor is up there
to be entertaining. You know, he’s there to help stimulate
discussion. He obviously adds something to the
discussion and stuff but he’s not up there to battle with
other mediums, and I think that really students should
respect professors and pay attention. I think … somebody
made a comment …that … if the students aren’t engaged
with what [the professor is] saying then that reflects on
[his/her] teaching whereas I don’t know that that’s a fair
evaluation because the professor could be saying
something really fascinating but because you’re distracted
… by whatever else is going on, everybody is MSNing,
you’re not going to hear that, and so I think… I’m there to
hear the professor and I think the students aren’t gaining
anything at all.” Similarly, students’ expectations about
what they hoped to gain from the professors were
heterogeneous, with some taking a pragmatic view of the
value of the program in the context of their ultimate aim
to obtain suitable employment. As one student noted, “a
lot of people, you know, did four hours worth of
homework on a case when 45 minutes between you and I
would probably be sufficient because as long as you have
an understanding of it and can… intelligently answer a
question that comes your way about it – whether or not
you’ve done so much work – that…would impress a
prospective employer. You’re not going to get that far in
the classroom discussion.”
In light of these differences, it is interesting to note
that the students’ habitus became more homogenous with
respect to the technology, as dispositions around the
technological ensemble evolved during the study (the
laptop technology was, for the respondents, invisible as
technology and seamless with an entire ensemble of
technologies that we, as academics, analytically separate:
wireless networks, the Internet, cellular telephones, etc.;
we refer to this ensemble in this paper as ‘technology’,
consistent with student parlance). In early interviews,
there was a sense of agreement around the importance of
technology but not a strong sense of dependence on it.
Later interviews with first- and second-year students saw
stronger sentiments expressed about technology
dependence. Laptops appeared to weave themselves very
quickly into the fabric of students’ lives, with many
noting that their computers were “always on”. The
technology helped alter modes of practice: one first-year
student observed that, “having a laptop has definitely
become something normal, which I think a lot of people
would find odd, just because I don’t think it is normal for
students to have laptops with them all the time, but I think
it’s a really good indication of what it’s going to be like
when you’re in business and you have to have
information with you all the time.” It is interesting to
note, however, that the meanings of terms such as
“always on” varied across individuals. While this
translated for some students into checking e-mail thrice a
day, others used it to convey far more frequent use. Thus,
while the individuals’ sensemaking about the role of the
technology was similar, their overt behaviors remained
somewhat more differentiated.
Technology Practices
The technology was so entrenched in the habitus by
the second semester (for first-year students) that it had
become intrinsic to communication on a very wide scale.
As one international student noted, “We use the laptop
computer during class … and I use e-mail to contact my
friends and family around the world.” It was also seen as
crucial to the summer or more general job search with
which most students were preoccupied. With competition
for positions more intense than during other years,
students appeared to appreciate the ability to respond
instantly to messages: “We are looking for jobs, so we
need to instantly reply to people.”
Three areas related to work were seen as facilitated
by the technology: case preparation, work in learning
teams, and information sharing. One respondent saw the
laptop as an important link between case preparation
outside class and case discussion in the classroom: “I
bring my computer with me because I have done my
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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
preparation in my laptop, I have the important case facts,
the issues, details in my Excel file, so I bring it up, I just
open it and we discuss the case, and if anyone says
something I consider important, I write it down.” Exam
writing was also raised as an important and beneficial use
of the technology. Only a handful of students wrote
exams on paper; one student stated that he would buy a
laptop just for the privilege of writing exams using it –
even if the school did not require this of students.
The following sections describe in more detail
practices related to communication in teams and file
sharing. We then discuss the technology practices that
evolved in the classroom and proved to be sources of
contention between students and faculty.
Communication in Teams
Electronic mail and instant messaging were widely
used , whether for work or otherwise: “Like if I’m having
a party, I would probably put an announcement out over
e-mail, and then mention it to them in person.” Many
respondents appeared also to have become immersed in a
culture of instant messaging, such as one respondent
(among many) who kept both applications ready for use:
“They’re always open and minimized so if someone is
trying to get a hold on me on instant messenger … they
can. … [And] if my computer is on during the day and I
actually go out somewhere I just say that I’m away. But e-
mail’s always open as well, I’m always constantly
monitoring it because we get emails instead of hard mail
from school, from other people.”
The second semester saw a decline in face-to-face
interaction in learning teams. There was admittedly a
simultaneous decline in learning team activity in general,
but those who did utilize them as well as those who
formed informal groups relied increasingly on
technology-mediated communication. One respondent got
together face-to-face with his informal team only “fifty
percent of the time. Because that’s not always the most
efficient way to do things, right? … If we don’t need to
[meet], we can get on MSN or one of the messenger
services and just say, ‘What do you think? What do you
think? What do you think? Great. That’s what I thought.
Perfect. See you tomorrow.’” Another noted its
efficiency: “You don’t have to meet all the time. You
don’t have to waste time traveling somewhere and meet,
unloading your bag …We can do a four-way instant
message. Message for 15 minutes, get all the key points
done – it saves everyone 45 minutes.” Efficiency was
cited as especially important both for its currency in the
business world and the severe time crunch the
respondents said they faced in relation to the program
workload. There was a strong sense that the technology
increased individual efficiency. It is interesting to note
here that this sense might well have been a misrecognition
(Bourdieu, 1998), that the amount of time spent online
actually compromised overall efficiency, but its
constitution as efficient certainly helped respondents
promote the usefulness of the technology.
File Sharing
A case learning environment calls for extensive
daily preparation and there is a temptation for students to
access class notes from peers. The ease of information
sharing gave rise to an entire culture around the
phenomenon, and, despite the ethical issues raised by
such sharing, failure to share was often viewed negatively
by peers. As one respondent observed, “I don’t know
anyone who doesn’t participate in the note sharing. So to
say, you know, I did this case and I worked really hard on
it, don’t share it with anyone else, I think is very petty and
is hypocritical.” The same respondent acknowledged the
ethical dimension: “I understand it’s something not quite
ethical, really. I think there’s something unethical about
doing it. It’s kind of saying, you know, there’s someone
who’s always getting a free ride. Often it’s me, you know,
so I’m just as guilty as everyone else.”
Another respondent pointed to information sharing
with respect to exams: “The structure basically isn’t
subjective; we have to have certain structure. And you
learn that from second year [students]. They tell you this
is the structure for this exam. A lot of people have pre-
written exams where they just change bits and pieces of it
here and there. They have pre-done worksheets, they just
plug in numbers.”
This is not to say, however, that ethics were cast
aside entirely. There was a distinct ethos that evolved
among the students in this regard, a shared understanding
of what was considered acceptable (cf. Callahan, 2004).
On the one hand, there was the matter of taking credit
inappropriately: “We had a girl in our group who by all
appearances had done a fantastic job on the case – it was a
decision tree for management science and everything was
beautifully laid out and I was stunned at how good it was.
And so I kept saying to her … ‘I can’t believe what a
fantastic job you did on that.’ And she took full credit for
it. And then in class the next day I saw that there were
one, two, three, four people who had exactly the same
thing. Exactly the same thing and I thought, ‘I don’t know
about that.’ I’m not so sure I’m happy about that.
Especially since she accepted [the credit].” On the other
hand, there was the matter of the extent to which the
sharing was systematized. According to the same
respondent, “I think at a point where it becomes
systematic – where everyone posts their notes – I think at
that point you have really crossed the line in terms of
what’s ethical and what’s not.”
Classroom Usage
While the impact of the technology cannot be
segmented into that which is inside and outside the
classroom – there is a real seamlessness between these
spaces we have constructed, with the outside, if anything,
encompassing what goes on inside the classroom – we
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have, for two reasons, made use of this segmentation.
First, as noted above, a strong position was put forward
by school administration that the laptops were not
intended for classroom use. This separation isolates the
classroom as a specific site to examine. Second, the
crucial issue of classroom use and its negative
consequences needs consideration in its own right
Observation in the first-year classroom showed that
most students actively engaged in class discussion, using
their laptops to take notes and occasionally check email or
other applications. A few students appeared to disengage
frequently from class discussion and engage
simultaneously with applications on their laptops. Open
applications were email, instant messaging, Internet
browsers, and Microsoft Word or Excel. Given the
interactive nature of the case classroom, students vied for
attention in order to contribute to the discussion. It
appeared on occasion that students unable to get into the
discussion in spite of raising their hands turned their
attention in some frustration to their laptops and browsers.
These patterns of use and behavior were consistent
with students’ interview responses though perhaps we
observed less ‘illegitimate’ use in the classroom than we
might have expected based on students’ accounts
(students may have curtailed ‘illegitimate’ use of the
technology in response to our presence in the classroom).
The ‘legitimate’ uses that respondents mentioned were
note-taking, locating information on the Web, spreadsheet
calculations, and downloading files from the intranet. In
addition, many respondents noted their use of email and
messaging applications. For one respondent, occasional e-
mail use was without harm: “A lot of times you’re in class
– and not that you’re not paying attention, but something
comes up and you’re not focused – and, ‘I forgot to do
this, I forgot to send this e-mail to somebody to follow up
on something.’ With, I guess, … recruiting. Like you can
do that in class without having to step down and … then
come back in and interrupt and all that stuff.” Others
justified e-mail use in the context of the job hunt. The
school’s career placement service posted jobs for which
students could apply, but given the short supply of
available summer positions for first-year students,
competition was keen and the ‘first-mover advantage’
was seen as crucial, making the ‘always on’ condition for
e-mail important.
Instant messaging was not similarly justified but its
reported use was widespread – partly by those who
engaged in the practice and partly by those who watched
others engage in it. Interestingly, there were those who
had it switched on but found it distracting if someone
attempted to contact them: “If someone comes up during
class I just tell them I’m in class, because it distracts you
from the case discussions.” Similarly for another
respondent, “It depends on the situation. In a class,
usually – well, sometimes – I close down my MSN
Messenger … If I’m really interested in this class, in this
course, I’ll just close it and work on [the class].” Another
respondent was more active: “In class, … Messenger use
is huge. I am almost always logged in to Messenger.
Again, you know, I’m perhaps not the most academically
inclined person … it’s a way to stay awake while not
really participating in the class.” Contact for this person
was “almost exclusively with people in class.” A fourth
respondent spoke of transgressing the boundaries of the
classroom: “I just happened to be joking around with a
friend in another section in class the other day, during
class time, … he was complaining that he had to start
participating more. And we were both doing the same
case … and they must have been about 10 minutes
behind. So I was, like, ‘Put your hand up and say this,’
and so he did. And he went perfect.” Clearly, the
respondent had been listening sufficiently to have picked
up the point that was subsequently passed on to help
someone else garner symbolic capital in class.
Several respondents noted that they did not use their
laptops in class for online connectivity – it should be
noted, however, that this response was most prevalent
amongst first-year students participating in their first
interview. One second year international student,
however, was categorical in denouncing online access in
class and the popular claim that these people were able to
‘multitask’: “People who think they can do three things at
the same time maybe do things worse. I think they are
being stopped from doing some things.” Several second
year students also noted that the quality of the class
discussion was better when the network restrictions were
on. They also noted, however, that if people wanted to
disengage they would find ways to do so, irrespective of
network restrictions (for example, by downloading entire
newspapers beforehand, playing solitaire, etc.).
Accessing the Internet in class was justified in many
ways. Other than the range of what were posed as
legitimate uses (accessing facts relevant to class
discussion, etc.), boredom was frequently cited, placing
the responsibility in some manner on the course or the
professor. Interruptions in class were raised by one
respondent as a signal to go online: “We’re business
students, we should know what the market’s doing these
days, we should know what the headlines are, and you
know there’s always two or three minutes when the
teacher’s fumbling around for notes or whatever, you can
always see ‘how’s the Dow doing today’.”
ANALYSIS
We have so far described the students’ habitus and
technology-related practices, focusing in particular on
communication within teams, file sharing, and classroom
use. We now turn to a critical interpretation of these
practices within the theoretical framework of Bourdieu’s
theory of practice. We focus on the taken-for-granted
nature of laptops in the business program, as well as on
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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
the contested role of laptops in the classroom.
Unquestioned Nature of Laptops
Laptops and networks take on doxic significance
(fuelled in part by commercial and other agendas),
something that is beyond questioning. Even the questions
raised in the literature about the wisdom of laptop
programs – can all students afford them? what merits
consideration when putting these in place? – bypass the
central question about the use to which they will be put.
Two particular consequences arise from the
unquestioned introduction of technology in the MBA
program. First, the technology arrives in a general
purpose guise with no particular plans for its deployment
(Carolina Uses Wireless, 2001) except to improve the
student experience at the broadest level. Second, students
accept the increase in an already high price tag with little
objection. One second year international student stated: “I
think to the students it is absolutely necessary to have
access to a laptop computer because we have to know
what’s going on in the world, you know, in the business
world,” revealing the doxa of the IT imperative, an
intrinsic component of the habitus of the players in the
field. Comments like this were frequent in the interviews.
The sense of absolute necessity, not just helpfulness, is
reflected in many student statements about the laptops.
Yet no explanation of how their use of the laptop would
ensure they “know what’s going on in the real world” is
given. It seems to go beyond keeping up with the business
news – there is a sense that everyone in the business
world uses their computers all the time (including in
meetings). But the logic is simply not articulated.
The Contest over Laptops in Class
In view of the less than universal use of laptops to
go online during class and the active disapproval by some
of such activity in class, we might expect a significant
number of respondents to have supported the institution of
network controls. Such was indeed the case – but largely
among first-year students in their first interviews.
Reactions to the controls at this time ranged from mild
disapproval to mild approval with several people neutral.
During subsequent interviews, there was far greater
agreement that the controls were inappropriate, even
among those who claimed not to use the Internet in class.
This response can be understood from within the
Bourdieun frame as reflecting the logics of argumentation
amongst the different classes of stakeholders. As we saw
in the student interviews, the most frequently encountered
reasoning was that the students were responsible adults
and paying customers: “Frankly I wouldn’t use it in class,
the Internet … Whether I think not having access is right
or wrong, I think it’s wrong. I think we should have
access, and the reason being is that … we’re paying a lot
of money here and if we decide not to use our time
effectively in class and surf the net, then, well, we’re
adults, and if that’s what we feel like doing, then go
ahead.” Another student expressed this position even
more strongly. “You need to treat us as young
professionals and not as students and people you push
around. Professors and faculty of the school. Because we
are young professionals, that’s what we’re going to be,
we’re going to be tomorrow’s business leaders, right?”
Another respondent added an evaluation of
professorial responsibility: “The only time it gets abused
really is in the class [where] you know a professor’s not
doing his or her job that well and letting everyone put
their two cents in … you know, I didn’t pay to listen to
everyone give me their opinion on a certain thing. … I
know that in 15 minutes I’m going to not really be that
interested because of the way the class pattern goes.
They’ll have someone present their materials for 25
minutes when two would have done … They take the case
method too far. So in those instances I feel like I can
police myself.” In this instance, the rules of the game are
applied to both sides and the sense that if the professor
has the right (the symbolic capital) to evaluate what is
right or wrong, then so does the student.
The logic of the economic field is invoked in these
two examples in a seamless way: it is seen as natural that
paying customers have the right to decide what is
appropriate and what is not. It is perhaps an unintended
consequence of the advantage business schools have
taken of the rise in demand for business education by
increasing fees; by deploying the logic of the economic
field in doing this, they appear to have compromised their
ability to enforce rules in the classroom that are premised
on the long-standing logic of the educational field. Worth
noting too is the rights issue that is implicitly invoked.
The logic of the educational field, which gave the
professoriate the privilege to enforce controls, was now
seen as symbolic violence, recognizable through the lens
of the widespread field as a violation of rights.
The parrying of responsibility also involved a
critique in terms of unmet expectations. A second-year
respondent noted how she was initially impressed with the
idea of the wireless network, “But once I got here I started
to use it and then I also talked to other classmates about
how they feel about the system, and they give me
impressions like the capacity to use technology in the
class is a lot more than what we are using right now.”
Another second-year student related the technology
opportunity to the lack of currency in the class material:
“I think that one way to enhance education is to leverage
today’s platform to add to the students’ learning
experience and talk about things that are relevant.” These
observations point back to the manner in which the laptop
program was introduced as a general-purpose technology,
a concession to the technological imperative that allows
for the logic that the technology needed to be introduced
even if no specific uses had been contemplated.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
For faculty, the logic that the laptops were taking
away from the classroom experience was drawn from a
long-standing tradition. The classroom method was time-
tested and was inviolable within the educational field. But
they had already set in motion, as in many business
schools, the colonization of that field by the logic of the
widespread economic field. That is the logic the students
often chose to invoke in challenging the control the
faculty sought to exercise. We might conclude from this
that the rules of the game are changing; our own choices
as faculty are taking away options we once had without
question; the sanctity of the classroom is being shown up
as merely another social construction (cf. Berger &
Luckmann, 1966). But let us press on first.
We also see that this struggle over logic occurs
against the backdrop of a student habitus that has evolved
as it accommodates the technological ensemble that we
have put in place. Given its initial lack of specificity and
the consequent freedom of appropriation (DeSanctis &
Poole, 1994), the technology rapidly became an
inextricable part of students’ lives in ways unanticipated
by faculty. Classroom use, even if unplanned, flowed
seamlessly from its use in everyday life and became the
norm. Controlling such use in the manner attempted, we
might surmise, might have been doomed from the start.
Our technology lens also reveals the power relations
that undergird business education. While students arrived
with dispositions that ‘honored’ the traditions of the
educational field, as they had known it earlier, and might
have been quite happy to accept limits on classroom use,
they chose instead to staunchly defend such use as a right.
Its violation seemed to them a diminution of their
symbolic capital and their eventual ‘victory’, helped along
by the network problems, further bolstered their capital at
the expense of that of the school and its faculty. Such
struggles have surely always existed but have not been
theoretically recognized as such. Of particular interest to
us as researchers in this instance might be the manner in
which technology was used in this struggle over capital.
There are no real prescriptions that arise from our
analysis. We take the position advanced by Doolin and
Lowe (2002) that “to reveal is to critique”. We see, rather,
a few opportunities. For one, given that students
acknowledge the disruptive potential of the technology in
the classroom, even if they choose to defend the right to
use it, an opening exists. While there will always be
struggles within the business school as currently
constituted, the opportunity exists to take joint ownership
of the problem. Such a move might be facilitated by
theoretical vocabularies such as the one we have used
which allow for the recognition of power relations and
political interests. There is also the opportunity for the
researcher to extend this thinking to other areas of IT use
and to the occasionally peremptory manner in which
technology is implemented and subsequently reinvented –
even rejected – by those who must use it. To be sure, each
situation will differ markedly, but vocabularies such as
the one we use might allow us to look a little more deeply
at the implementation process and even reflexively signal
an honest attempt to incorporate the voice of the ‘other’.
There are certainly limitations to our work to date,
or points of disconnection between what we would like to
say we know now and the credibility of the bases we have
to make these statements. On the theoretical level, we
acknowledge that every theory obscures even as it
reveals. While Bourdieu’s theory of practice helps us
assemble our explanations in terms of classes and fields,
we have perhaps missed the opportunity to undertake a
more fine-grained analysis of, for example, the alliances
that are effected in the mobilization of positions as well as
the wider networks that are implicated. On the level of
method, our qualitative approach precludes our
accounting for a larger number of voices through larger
sample sizes. And at the practical level, we realize that we
asked respondents to create accounts for us from a
position of power which undoubtedly shaped what they
told us. In all these cases, though, we recognized the
issues and attempted to account for them. We leave it to
readers to incorporate these issues into their evolving
understanding of the situation we have sought to analyze.
These limitations notwithstanding, we believe that
understanding the laptop program from a Bourdieun
perspective demands that we understand that different
stakeholders represent different classes; that is there are
differences between professor and student that predictably
lead to different reactions (Bourdieu, 1998, p.5). This is a
difference, at least in part, in the balance of economic
versus cultural capital, and can explain some of the
conflicts observed (e.g., importance of recruiting for the
students versus class for the faculty).
Moreover, we would argue that the problem of the
laptops has been understood in one way by the institution
(loosely, that students are not paying attention because
they are distracted by this tool) but the student perspective
suggests that it is something else. Our research suggests
that the results one observes, when examining the
introduction of laptops into the MBA program, can be
considered as a reflection of the conflict between the
desires (conscious or not) of the institution to maintain a
particular social order (the roles of individuals in the
classroom, the value and legitimacy of certain activities,
and the primacy of the classroom over other activities
such as career management) and the expectations of the
students. These expectations are formed by (i) their
habitus and their translation of this habitus into the
environment of the business school, (ii) the translation of
the field of business into the educational field, which is
promoted by the newer marketing orientation of business
schools, including the increases in tuition fees, and (iii)
the language of progress that is implied by the move to
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 Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
push forward a technological agenda such as a laptop
program. These broad forces create a particular view of
the phenomenon for the students that is quite different
from how it is viewed by some other stakeholders.
To resolve “the problem” of the laptops requires a
willingness to confront the pervasive changes that this
struggle reflects. We cannot move forward without
addressing the deeper conflicts or tensions that exist.
From a faculty viewpoint, we hear things like “students
have always found ways to disengage” or “we've been
doing this successfully for umpteen years”, both of which
suggest that there is nothing new in the environment that
would require a more fundamental change; that there is an
unquestionable logical or natural ordering to how we do
everything at the school. Thus, while students talk about
the importance of technology to their lives and the
importance of their recruiting activities, faculty often
dismiss these statements as “missing the point”, given our
view of the current social order as “natural”.
The solutions put forward thus far ignore the fact
that different groups are, in fact, promoting different
social structures based on different values. Until we
confront the deeper tensions, recognize that students, the
faculty and the environment have changed, and that
technology itself represents a force for changing the social
order, we may continue to replay this struggle, perhaps
even to the detriment of education.
Studies like The Mobile Campus Matures (2000) and
others (e.g. Campbell and Pargas, 2003) imply that as we
learn more about the effects of information technologies,
all we need to do is make appropriate adjustments –
faculty training, classroom regulation, better organization,
etc. – in order to achieve the desired end state of
ubiquitous computing on campus. History, however,
suggests that such end states are elusive, that
technological development is built on emergent agendas
and interests, the very reason why predictions concerning
technology have been less than perfect (Hughes, 2001).
Moreover, dynamism rather than stasis characterizes
institutions, technologies, and social practices; rather than
attend to how we might achieve certain technological
ends, we might instead pay more attention to the
dynamics that characterize our socio-technical settings.
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