I have been waiting for the coming of the 6th chapter, Enacting Technology: an institutional perspective. After a long depiction of theoretical background, the author has sketched the analytical frame.  What theory will be chosen? what new theory will be formulated?  What is the relationship between the information technology, organizations, embeddedness, and institutions  from an institutional perspective? I can not wait for more a minute.

At first, the author summarize a few shadow theories that misinform decisionmaking and clarity of discussion of technology and structure, including technological determinism,  rational-actor perspectives, incrementalism, systems analysis, and individual and group perspectives. Technology determinism always neglects the interplay between technology, embeddedness, and  behavior and believes that technology acts autonomously upon individuals, social arrangement, and institutions. Rational-actors theories, including functionalism, natural selection and other frameworks, assume that organizations will choose the "best" technological offerings and learn to use IT in better and better ways while ignoring the role of institutions. Incrementalism is often invoked as a means of avoiding error in the policy process, but it doesn’t prevent government actors from moving incrementally in the wrong direction because of path dependence. Criticism on systems perspective is a challenge. The author thinks that this perspective ignores these and other social structural processes while it says “institutional lag”. The author use the example of the high failure rate of business process engineering as a example to explain the need to attend to social and political structures, organizations, and networks. Because of the enormous scale of government organizations, the integration of new IT is exceedingly difficult. Research results from other individual-level perspective are sometimes weak because they are inconclusive and contradictory. Then contingency theories are analyzed, such as Barley’s model which focuses on roles and role relationships but left the examination of organizational mechanisms, such as performance programs and operating procedures, and ignores the political or strategic behavior of actors in the context of new technologies. Technology enactment theory contributes partial answers to some of these unanswered questions. I said at the first edition of the article, enactment is an attractive concept.

I have to say, I am obsessed by the theoretical framework of the book. I know something of those theories criticized by the author, but I didn’t pay attention to their confines. The author does. On the basis of the theory review, the author puts forward, technology enactment will be an analytical framework. This is the core of the book. “Technology enactment is the result of cognitive, cultural, structural, and political embeddedness. Enactment is similar to ‘the definition of the situation’, or the subjective representation of a problem that reflects an actor’s perception and boundedly rational reasoning rather than the situation itself.” And then, an analytical frame is given.

“The analytical framework details the ways that individuals in institutions tend to enact new information systems to reproduce existing rules, routines, norms, and power relations if institutional rules are clear and no salient alternative uses are visible in the environment.” The author explains, “this conceptual framework illuminates the critical role played by sociostructural mechanisms in organizational and institutional arrangements as public managers struggle to make sense of, design, and use new IT”. “Individuals often enact existing performance routines and network relationships in the way they design and use web-based information and communication system.” ..”Knowledgeable actors try to pursue their interests in enacting technology. However, their interests are influenced by their organizational tasks, incentive structure, and ongoing social (network) relations.”

I have to write down, institutional arrangements mean cognitive, cultural, sociostructural, legal and formal arrangements.

“Selznick distinguished “organizations” from “institutions”, noting the propensity of some organizations to take on a particular character or competence over time. He defined the process of institutionalization as “the emergence of orderly, stable, socially integrating patterns out of unstable, loosely organized, or narrowly technical activities.”…..”At the micro level, procedures, habits, and cognitive patterns are institutional instruments when they are widely shared and largely taken for granted.”…”So, the behavior of bureaucratic decisionmakers is embedded in four ways, through cognition, culture, social structure, and formal government systems.”  “During periods of stability, institutions are taken for granted. But when environmental shifts occur, institutions are less resistant to change.”

“More recently, institutions and structure have been conceptualized as enablers of, as well as constraints on, behavior. In this sense, institutions can be defined simply as “reproduced practices” that are both flexible and remarkably stable.” “even the most enduring of habits, or the most unshakable of social norms, involves continual and detailed reflexive attention.” “Routinization is of elemental importance in social life; but all routines, all the time, are contingent and potentially fragile accomplishments. “

“A routine may be said to be institutionalized only when ‘departures from the patterns are counteracted in a regulated fashion, by repetitively activated, socially constructed, controls-----that is, by some set of rewards and sanctions…Institutions are those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating social processes.”

“Insights including selective attention and search; limitations of perception; the centrality of scripts, schemas, routines, and performance programs; and the variety of unanticipated consequences of rule-based behavior explain departures from rationality and ironically, departures from institutional constraints as well”. “The important insights of the Carnegie school that stem from viewing organizations as interdependent and partially consistent production systems complement negotiated order theory’s view of the fluidity of structure and the processual nature of scripted behaviors.”

“Formal norms operate explicitly through rules and are reinforced through the monitoring and enforcement efforts of, for example, individual organizations and the state. Informal norms, the rules adopted and adhered to by a group, may be explicit but are often implicit. They are enforced through social mechanisms, including approval, acceptance, disapproval, avoidance, and shunning.” “Organizational, network, and institutional arrangements----and the embeddedness of behavior in them----play key roles in technology enactment.”

“Enacted technology is the perception, design, and use of objective technologies”. …”The institutions influence and are influenced by enacted IT and predominant organizational forms. Institutions enter the technology enactment framework in the form of cognitive, cultural, sociostructural, and formal embeddedness. The outcomes of technology enactment are therefore multiply, unpredictable, and indeterminate. Outcomes result from technological, rational, social, and political logics.”

Virtual state is a result of the concrete application of the technology enactment framework. “The virtual state denotes a government in which information and communication flow increasingly over the web rather than through bureaucratic and other formal channels. The restructuring of agency services and information in portals sometimes makes it difficult for citizens to know which agency they are dealing with.”

The organizational and institutional perspective is an interesting challenge for me. The methodology and structure also make me interested. The author teaches me a method to put forward a new concept or theory. That’s valuable. The left parts are practice. The author said, ”My first objective is to illustrate technology enactment at work. At a more ambitious level, the cases presented in this and the following three chapters are meant to test whether the framework is supported.”

“Enacted technology is a product of design, negotiation, politics, understanding, social construction, entrepreneurship, and leadership. The Internet is used often to reinforce old institutional structures rather than to pen communications. Channel development occurs selectively and is controlled by public managers.”

( The end)