The coevolution of organizational routines and IT systems in IT-enabled organizational transformation: a social constructivist perspective

The phenomenon of IT-enabled Organizational Transformation (OT) has long been of significant importance to both academics and practitioners. Scholars have been struggling for decades to understand how IT systems impact the shape of and transform organizations. Those scholars who study IT-enabled OT from social constructivist perspectives generally hold that organizational transformation emerges from an ongoing stream of social actions in which actors respond to an IT system’s affordances and constraints. The five social constructivist perspectives, perception, interpretation, appropriation, enactment and alignment perspectives, provide a robust approach to study how an organization and an IT system interact with each other in creating a new social reality in the organization. However, only a few studies have combined different social constructivist perspectives, while none has applied all five perspectives collectively to understand the phenomenon of IT-enabled OT in a holistic and an integrated manner. The present research has developed a conceptual framework to theorize IT-enabled OT as a coevolution process of organizational routines and an IT system. The objective of the conceptual framework is to understand how change unfolds in an organization during the implementation of an IT system, including what the existing literature calls its adoption, use and adaptation phases. The framework is grounded in the social constructivist perspectives and enables the investigation of how a new IT system shapes organizational routines and, reciprocally, how the evolution of routines shapes the features and functions of the new IT system. The framework provides a holistic approach to studying IT-enabled OT by investigating how actors perceive, interpret, appropriate and enact the new IT system and the organizational routines in their work, as well as how they align the new system and these routines with the social order and structures of the organization. A qualitative interpretive case study, with ‘mini embedded’ cases of three organizational units in an academic institution, is conducted to investigate the coevolution of routines and a new IT system during IT-enabled organizational transformation. Data collection involved participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and collection of secondary documentation and artifacts in textual form. A pluralist methodological approach was adopted to apply the conceptual framework and analyse collected data using all five social constructivist perspectives. The analysis resulted in six multi-perspectival accounts for six organizational routines in the case organization. Each multi-perspectival account presents a coevolution story, of how an organizational routine and the new IT system coevolved during the implementation. The research has both theoretical and practical contributions. Firstly, the research applies all five social constructivist perspectives for a holistic understanding of how organizational routines and an IT system coevolve during the implementation of an IT system. Existing literature is based on a phase model for understanding of IT implementation, suggesting that the perception perspective focuses on the adoption phase, the interpretation, appropriation and enactment perspectives focus on the use phase, and the alignment perspective focuses on the adaptation phase of a new IT system. This research challenges this distinction of five perspectives with focuses on certain phases, empirically demonstrating that all five social constructivist perspectives are in play during all phases of IT implementation. As all five perspectives are relevant during the entire implementation of an IT system, although with different weightings and emphases, this also questions the understanding of IT implementation as a phased process. Secondly, the research extends routine theory. The concept of reciprocal interactions between the ostensive and the performative aspects of an organizational routine on the one hand as well as between these two aspects and an IT system on the other hand, is extended with the application of the five social constructivist perspectives. Thirdly, the research contributes a unique pluralist methodology in enabling the application of the five social constructivist perspectives for understanding the coevolution of routines and an IT system in an organization. As a result of these contributions, ultimately a consolidated framework of IT-enabled OT as a coevolution process that incorporates these new insights in the initially proposed framework is put forward. Fourthly, the findings of the study are also helpful for practitioners, as they can use the framework as a guide to understanding the social construction of a new IT system. This will also be helpful to understand and manage the coevolution process of organizational routines and a newly implemented IT system in an effective manner during the implementation process.