Unity in Multiplicity: Towards Working Enterprise Systems

Enterprise systems are attractive exactly as they promise a stronger unity – integration, collaboration and standardization – across distinct and different organisational units of a business. However, empirical research on enterprise systems has documented convincingly how situated workarounds undermine the unity of enterprise systems through local thus different practices and adoptions. This produces an apparently paradoxical character of enterprise systems: unity in the face of multiplicity. Our contribution is (i) to outline a theoretical middle-position effectively resolving the paradox and (ii) identify and analyse empirical strategies for how the paradox gets resolved in practice. The empirical basis for our study is a longitudinal (2007-2009) case study of a global oil and gas company with 30.000 employees operating in 40 countries across 4 continents.