Legitimating technologies: Ambiguity as a premise for negotiation in a networked institution

Discusses some issues related to the networking of an institution and presents the results of a field study. Institutions are bound not only to profit‐making but also to values and norms which shape their everyday lives; the introduction of computer technologies into institutional environments requires legitimization, not only in terms of time and money spared but also in terms of the perceived appropriateness of the new technological tools with respect to institutional goals. However, computer networks are not fixed objects, impermeable to the characteristics of the organizations in which they are introduced and used. On the contrary, they are configured by their users, to be adapted to their social environments. The field study, observed how members of an institution struggled to make sense of the introduction of a new computer network, and found that the final move in the process of legitimization was made by the institution itself, through a “committee for information technology”, which produced a normative artifact defining the official policy of the institution negotiating the new computer infrastructure.