Enterprise resource planning: Information technology as a steamroller for management politics?

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies can, despite their apparent flexibility, act as a rather obdurate tool for management’s political programmes. To understand this, a combined organisational politics and sociology of technology approach is adopted, viewing technology as a political programme for change. A total of 30 manufacturing case studies grouped around three ERP vendors and systems, show that using technology is not only an issue controlled by an enterprise’s actors. IT suppliers and management consultants and others form communities, which promote certain political programmes. These cases demonstrate that enterprise configurations of ERP do share commonalities, whereas two longitudinal case studies are used to discuss unique enterprise politics. While some features of the systems/political programmes were frozen, others were fluid, and could be configured in micro political processes. Thus hardness is contextual. The political role of technology is not just a case of flexibility or hardness, but a complicated pattern of negotiability, resources, social and geographical distance.