Global business and cross-cultural information systems: Technical and institutional dimensions of diffusion

Global business, global systems Global economic integration is growing rapidly, although the precise implications of this growth are subject to debate. The acceleration of this integration has been facilitated in part by information and communication technologies which support the creation of organizations that span national and regional cultures. In such organizations the cultural differences that underpin business practices must be addressed as intra-organizational differences. This paper draws on a range of research into the problems of accommodating technical change in complex organizations to highlight the issue of cultural inter-operability between systems developed in western and non-western contexts. The history of information technology has ensured that established models of technical development are drawn on a Western technocratic framework, with an essentially positivistic, linear view of both technical and social development. More recently identification of institutional constraints on technical action has led to the evaluation of qualitive and participative methods of entry into organizational activity. The successful development and diffusion of complex systems requires at least some reconciliation of the very different dynamics operating at institutional levels and at the levels at which detailed technical design decisions must be made. If technical considerations dominate this process, a technocratic rationality is likely to hold sway, if institutional concerns dominate, then the technical limitations of complex systems are likely to be ignored. These apparently contradictory rationalities are accommodated by organizational actors on a daily basis so that even organizations demonstrating a highly developed formal approach to technical development may contain bodies of myth and anecdote which function to supplement or subvert the positivist content of their formal systems.