Information Systems and Global Diversity
Information Systems and Global Diversity
Chrisanthi AvgerouOxford University Press2002267 + viii pp.ISBN: 0-19-924077-9Price $60.00
The trouble with chemistry is that it is too difficult for chemists(attributed to Albert Einstein).
As scholars who study information and communication technologies (ICT), we are sometimes uncomfortably like Einstein’s chemists and perhaps should worry whether our subject-matter is too difficult for us, as well. More optimistically, we might suppose that our subject-matter is perhaps not intrinsically difficult, but has simply proven intractable because of our manner of approaching it.
Whatever the cause, we have, to date, come up short in developing a truly informative account of the widespread and continuing failure of so many organizations to deploy and use ICT successfully. There have been especially noteworthy difficulties, in this regard, relative to ICT projects in the “developing”countries. However, failure is by no means limited to such contexts, this fact being testified to by the very large, and very visible, systems calamities that have taken place among some of the best-known companies in the industrially-advanced world.
We have also fallen short in giving a satisfactory account of the variation that can be observed in the manner in which ICTs are exploited across different contexts. Being largely consumed with a technical-rational view of organizations and focused on “managerialist” values (e.g. maximization of shareholder value), we have rendered ourselves insensitive to processes and outcomes that reflect actions taken against a background of heterogeneous interests and goals, diverse perceptions, and varying capabilities. Indeed, in terms of the diverse values that ICT can be made to serve, we have arguably failed in our efforts to come to grips with “ICT success” itself.
Chrisanthi Avgerou, in her recently published Information Systems and Global Diversity, plays physicist to our field’s chemists. Through a combination of critique, theoretical synthesis, and illustrative cases, Avgerou points the way toward a more expansive approach to inquiry into ICTs, one that offers promise for addressing some of the larger and more compelling questions on which we, as a community, have so far had too little to say.
Critique
A discourse, as the author trenchantly defines it (p. 88), is “a space of thought and action within which only certain things can be said, done, or imagined”. When we consider the discourses through which we have mainly developed our own practice of inquiry, Avgerou argues, we find our thinking excessively circumscribed. She identifies the lacunae that have resulted, among them:
We lack theory to account adequately for the observed variation in ICT innovation across international contexts.
The predominant theory, which focuses on efficiency and the pursuit of competitive advantage, tends to produced distorted and narrowed interpretations by fostering various kinds of exclusions. These exclusions include, notably, the marginalization of diverse interests.
There is a relative lack of diversity in our empirical investigations,including poor coverage of organizations beyond the sphere of classically competitive, “free-market” businesses (e.g. small businesses,governments, and voluntary organizations).
Our inquiries lack a sophisticated consideration of the differences between developed countries and developing countries.
The net effect of such shortcomings in our collective scholarship has been to neglect much of what is interesting and important, when it comes to understanding why real organizational stories of ICT innovation unfold as they do.
Theoretical synthesis
Avgerou’s effort to broaden our community’s limited discourse focuses on the discourse’s chronically under-socialized character. In developing a more fully socialized view of ICT innovation, she draws on a variety of classical and contemporary sources in social and organizational theory. Her review of the pertinent literatures thus ranges ambitiously across institutional theory and the sociology of organizations (Chapter 1) and socio-technical studies of ICT (Chapter 2). Her survey of the latter embraces works in sociotechnical design, structuration theory, the social construction of technology, and actor-network theory.
To help us further break through the boundaries imposed by the ideological dominance of economic and technical-rational logic, Avgerou argues for paying attention to the multiple rationalities that guide ICT innovation in practice(Chapter 3). We are thus introduced to Weberian, critical, structurational,postmodern, and Foucaultian perspectives on the heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, values and interests that ICT can serve. We are also confronted with the situated character of “rationality”, that is, with its necessary dependence on the institutional contexts in which it is defined and exercised.
Against the background of these broader theoretical foundations, the book for the most part settles into a perspective that joins actor-network theory to a larger institutional framing. The former provides “a vivid way to describe the interplay of the social and the technical” (p. 66), as the innovation process unfolds and the innovation itself both shapes, and is shaped by, its implementation context. Institutional theory, then, is drawn on in marshalling a multi-institutional perspective that can account for the larger-scale “socio-technical dynamics” (p. 64) that help to determine the pattern of action in innovation. Of particular concern, relative to the larger contextual forces at work, is the play of power in determining the dominance of certain interests in ICT-related outcomes and the prevalence of certain rationalities over others.
The qualification “for the most part”, above, is chosen carefully. Avgerou draws nimbly on the intellectual resources at her disposal. The following summary statement, drawn from the text (p. 94), provides an example of the overall, integrative strategy. I have added, in square brackets, labels to suggest the primary sources which Avgerou previously taps in the discussion that culminates in this summary:
Information systems innovation processes can be seen as translations[actor network theory] that involve the enactments [Weick] of multiple actors within organizing regimes shaped through power relation histories [Foucault] and under the influence of multiple social institutions [institutional theory]… The translation process may strengthen or challenge the institutionalized conditions of power/knowledge … [Foucault, but also Giddens].
Granting that multiple institutions frame the context for understanding the course of ICT innovation in any particular instance, this begs the question of what the relevant institutions are. In fact, these vary in a situated manner from one innovative initiative to the next – a point amply illustrated in the case studies (see below). Nevertheless, in Chapter 4 Avgerou generalizes in a helpful way about the overall categories that require our attention.
The chapter’s title, “The global, the local, and the disembedded”,foreshadows the basic argument. We are offered a critical, institutionally informed look at the phenomenon of globalization that transcends the simplifying gloss that marks much of its discussion in the popular and academic literatures. Appreciation is indeed shown for the importance of global economic forces, as witnessed in the internationalization of trade and capital flows, supply chains,labor, and expertise; acknowledgement also is made of the supra-national political and cultural forces at work. Nevertheless, Avgerou draws our attention, also, to the crucial role of national institutions and culture in the complex process through which international influences are appropriated,adapted, and hybridized. Further variation is located along regional (e.g. the European Union) and sub-national lines (e.g. ethnically). To these “local”institutional forces, the author adds such geographically disembedded institutions as the culture of management and ICT practice itself.
Overall, this complex “interplay of institutions in multiple social spaces” (p. 115) predicts an outcome far different from the homogeneity and universality commonly assumed to be the ultimate effect of globalization. To the contrary, what we expect from such a multi-layered, economic, political, and cultural context is what, indeed, we witness – a landscape of innovation rich in diversity. Moreover, when it comes to analyzing any particular ICT initiative, the theoretical perspective that Avgerou develops points toward the need to engage intimately with a complex mélange of sometimes complementary, sometimes orthogonal, and sometimes conflicting forces and effects.
Illustrative cases
Avgerou offers a compelling set of stories (chapters 5 to 8) grounded in the conceptual foundations outlined in the book’s earlier chapters. Taken together, these cases illustrate the situated and emergent development of ICTs in complex contexts in which multiple institutions, competing rationalities, and political processes distort or deflect putatively “rational” goals in modernization, efficiency, and competitive improvement. The cases also point to the importance of taking history seriously in our efforts to grasp what causes the outcomes of interest. Moreover, the cases highlight the need for researchers undertaking situated analyses to eschew generalized and formulaic strategies for interpretation. (“There can be no a priori framework to determine the institutional fields that matter in a particular incident of information systems innovation” (p. 117).)
The first case considers the history of computerization at Pemex, the Mexican oil corporation, in light of fundamental conflicts between alternative rationalities. The first of these rationalities revolves around a historical mission to serve national and social development, while the second hews to the goals of business management and international market competition. The second case explores a succession of projects at IKA, the largest social security organization in Greece. The story exposes the assimilation of these information systems initiatives to the interests of the established bureaucracy, despite overt intentions that these systems serve as means of reform. The third case investigates an attempt to transfer the flexible specialization model from the Emilia Romagna industrial district in Italy to the furniture-manufacturing sector in Cyprus. The collapse of this effort is traced, in part, to the failure of the interested actors to bring ICT into action as an intermediary, despite its prescribed role in the overall vision and plan. Finally, the fourth case explores the institutionally contingent nature of information systems developed for the tracking of drug utilization. It examines the resulting systems diversity across the USA, the UK, and Europe, based on systematic differences in the crucial institutions of national government, management, and professional medical practice.
I close this review with a summary evaluation and some advice for readers. Overall, the book represents a compelling and important work. The theoretical perspective it offers to the academic field of information systems is a refreshing challenge in a literature that has been too heavily populated by unambitious analyses of small problems using narrow frameworks. While the text is aggressive in scope – as indeed it must be, considering the problems it entertains – it is not diffuse. The ideas in it are drawn tightly together by a strong and consistent logical thread.
By the same token, the reader is cautioned that this book does not constitute light reading. It is likely to be especially challenging for readers lacking substantial background in the social and organizational theories on which it draws. And while the book provides a secondary service in pointing readers to some of those literatures and outlining their relevance for technological innovation, reading the book will not substitute for proper introductions to those areas of inquiry. Also – and this too is a warning to readers –the book is not for those with short attention spans! The burden is on the reader to keep his/her eyes on the issue of technology, which has a tendency to disappear during the extended discussions of theory.
While the text generally reads smoothly, there are, nevertheless, occasional linguistic thickets through which it is difficult to make one’s way and which can leave the author’s meaning unclear. There are also some points where assertions are made to serve an unfolding rhetorical stream that seem debatable, or at least deserving of fuller justification. These small difficulties, however, are not typical of the text overall.
Borrowing a page from Avgerou’s book (so to speak), we might ask how the book is likely to be received and appropriated in the complex institutional environment that constitutes our international information systems community. Ideally, it should be read widely within the field, particularly for its deployment of institutional theory and the concept of multiple rationalities. The irony, of course, is that the information systems field, fragmented among diverse communities of practice, is itself governed by multiple rationalities,many of which may not readily entertain the idea of, well, multiple rationalities.
More realistically, the book should certainly grace the shelves of all researchers with genuine interests in information technology innovation and organizational transformation. This is true, whether or not global variation is within the scope of their active concerns. Significant diversity persists in the immediate and local as well, although we may need a bit of help to see it.
After all, every chemist can use a little physics, sometimes.
Neil C. RamillerSchool of Business Administration, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA
