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Institutions and Technology

Frameworks for Understanding Organizational Change—The Case of a Major ICT Outsourcing Contract

Hugh Willmott

University of Cambridge

The paper offers a fresh approach to the analysis of technology in organization through a critique of Orlikowski and Barley's assessment that institutional theory has the potential to bridge the social and material facets of organizational change when greater emphasis is placed on the materiality of technology. Through analysis of a major information and communication technologies outsourcing contract between UK Inland Revenue and Electronic Data Services, the authors follow institutional theory in problematizing studies in which technology is treated as a material cause or independent variable. But the approach commended by Orlikowski and Barley, they argue, is flawed by its unproblematized assumption of a separation between the physical and social aspects of technology. Drawing on the thinking of Laclau and Mouffe, the authors advocate an alternative framework that unsettles the commonsense, naturalized differentiation of the materiality of technology and the discursive field through which it is articulated and given meaning.

Key Words: institutional theory • organizational change • ICTs • discourse theory • outsourcing • actor-network theory

The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 42, No. 1, 110-126 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0021886305284990


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