Dominant technological discourses in action: Paradigmatic shifts in sense making in the implementation of an ERP system

Abstract

In an implementation of an ERP system in a large Danish production company, the ways in which the participants made sense of the project changed appreciably during the course of the project. At the start of the project, the predominant mode of thinking was classical, with many actors thinking of the implementation as a standard IT project. Later in the project, this way of thinking had changed: the majority viewed the implementation as an organizational change program. Clearly the experience of the project had changed the sense making of the participants to some extent. We used three theoretical frameworks to investigate and explain this change. Technological frames (Orlikowski and Gash 1994) helped us distinguish the different styles of sense making, but bound particular social groups to particular frames in a way that was not consistent with the empirical situation. Alvesson and Willmott's (1996) levels of discourse provided a richer picture of interlinking and evolving styles of sense making, and of actors' fluency in moving between one and another, but provided no explanation ofhow or why one discourse should take over from another. In order to explain this change, it was necessary to add actions and outcomes to the picture, and for this a later theoretical contribution of Orlikowski (2000) was useful. In the practice lens, Orlikowski extends her work on structuration theory and technology. Here sense making (structure) and action are dependent upon each other in an emergent process. Since none of these theoretical perspectives offered a convincing explanation of the change in sense making at Omega, it was necessary to construct a new theoretical model in the light of our analysis. Now it was possible to understand how actions (taken in the light of the dominant technological discourse about the ERP implementation) produced outcomes perceived as unfavorable, and how an alternative discourse providing more tolerable and convenient sense making took over. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.