Evasive Maneuvers and Guerilla Tactics: A Scandinavian Institutional Perspective on Chief Information Officer's Strategies for Legitimization

Abstract

Scandinavian institutional theory studies the travel of managerial ideas in time and space. This paper reports results from a study conducted during the summer of 2006. The study was initiated through a joint collaboration between a large management consultancy firm and the academia, and consisted of in-depth interviews with 27 chief information officers (CIOs) from large, Swedish organizations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strive for legitimacy as displayed by CIOs faced with norm divergence. This is done through interviews where norm divergence is induced through the use of paradoxes. As the results show, the CIOs employed a number of different strategies for legitimizing his or her organizations' particular norm divergence, ranging from evasive maneuvers to expressions of guerilla tactics. These results are discussed in relation to the implications for future studies of IT Governance practice and research design, as well as in relation to the implications for individual managers living between evasive maneuvers and guerilla tactics.