IT-Enabled Change: A Contextual Evaluation Of An Improvisational Perspective

This dissertation presents a review of change management literature and the findings of an empirical study into a hierarchical organization’s experience with the adoption and use of non-adaptive information technology. The findings are grounded in the theory from Orlikowski and Hofman’s (1997) study which provides a generalized improvisational perspective of the change process. This perspective is extended by this research with insights from a review of the existing formal theory and with interpretations from a contextual case study. Using a grounded theory research approach, the study examines an organization’s experiences in terms of any anticipated, opportunity-based or emergent changes to their processes, structure and culture that were enabled by the introduction of non-adaptive technology. The findings build upon Orlikowski and Hofman’s (1997) Improvisational Change Model by evaluating the model in a different organizational and technological context to that of the original study. The findings reveal that ongoing improvisational changes can occur in hierarchical organizations and that improvisations and adaptations can occur in organizations which adopt non-adaptive IT provided that ongoing support for change management is forthcoming. The findings also suggest that there is a correlation between the level of customer dissatisfaction and the emergence of any local improvisations regardless of the organization type. The research concludes that an improvisational perspective may be useful for hierarchical organizations which introduce new technology as the local improvisations which can occur may be leveraged for advantage.