Enterprise Information Systems as Objects and Carriers of Institutional Forces: The New Iron Cage?

TLDR

Enterprise information systems are simultaneously shaped by institutional forces that set rationality rules and embody institutional commitments that constrain human actions, yet their complexity and organizational inattentiveness often lead to unquestioned, naturalized choices. The study proposes that enterprise information systems create a duality—being both objects of institutional forces and carriers of institutional logics—and develops propositions for their roles across chartering, project, shakeout, and onward phases. The authors examine this duality by proposing propositions for how information systems function as objects of institutional forces during chartering and project phases, resolve misalignments when new systems are introduced, and act as carriers of institutional logics during shakeout and onward & upward phases.

Abstract

This paper draws upon the institutional theory lens to examine enterprise information systems. We propose that these information systems engender a duality. On one hand, these systems are subject to institutional forces and institutional processes that set the rules of rationality. On the other hand, they are an important embodiment of institutional commitments and serve to preserve these rules by constraining the actions of human agents. The complexity inherent to enterprise technologies renders them an equivoque. This, when combined with the propensity toward lack of mindfulness in organizations, is likely to lead to acquiescence to institutional pressures. Enterprise information systems bind organizations to fundamental choices about how their activities should be organized; unquestioned choices that tend to appear natural. We suggest implications of this view and develop propositions examining: (1) enterprise information systems as objects of institutional forces in the "chartering" and "project" phases, (2) the resolution of institutional misalignments caused by the introduction of new systems, and (3) enterprise information systems as carriers of institutional logics in the "shakeout" and "onward & upward" phases.