Exploring the Role that SDMs can play in Influencing the Business Client - Systems Developer Relationship: an Institutional Theory Perspective

This paper reports on research into how two stakeholder groups systems developers and the business client enact a systems development methodology (SDM). Our focus is on understanding how enactment is constrained by everyday social and organisational structures. The study develops a conceptual framework informed by institutional theory that integrates elements of Lamb and Kling’s social actor model, and Scott’s 3-pillars framework, concentrating on the relationships among systems developers, the business client, the SDM, and the context surrounding its use. The framework demonstrates that institutional structures such as authority, norms, symbolic values, and routines embedded within the methodology are active forces in the systems development process. In terms of theoretical contribution, the user as social actor model enables us to draw out the power concepts, and institutional theory explains how the SDM acts as a carrier of power, but not why developers are compliant with an unequal power arrangement.