Cultural analysis of the organizational consequences of information technology

Abstract

For over 30 years, the literature on organizations has carried accounts of the potential for information technology to transform organizational structures and processes. Despite this enduring interest in the relationship between information technology and organizations, the variety of actual consequences for organizations has not been satisfactorily explained. In this paper, we propose the use of cultural analysis to understand the organizational consequences of information technology. Analyses that use the construct of culture meet two important requisites for understanding and resolving the contradictory empirical findings. First, cultural analysis emphasizes the importance of socially constructed meanings and their relationship to information technology's material properties. From this perspective, technology's social consequences are largely indeterminate because of the variety of meanings that technology can assume. Cultural analysis thus removes the temptation to consider information technology as an autonomous determinant of organizational form and process. Second, cultural analysis can address information technology's role in both the persistence and the transformation of organizations. Information technology can help preserve institutionalized practices in an organization, and it can operate as a catalyst for change. Because cultural analysis encompasses these opposing organizational processes, it helps to explain the diversity of outcomes experienced after information technology is implemented.