In north India, unregulated medicalpractice is considered by many to be a sign of the failure of institutional rationality and "backward" quality of rural life. However, the work of self-made doctors can also be seen to engage key elements of institutional rationality as it is interwoven with the structure and ethos of development. This article explores what these practitioners and their work s...

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 mo...

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 mo...

Two empirically unresolved areas of study of Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) self-control theory are personality and gender. The theory states that personality is unrelated to self-control and crime, and prior studies have found that self-control operates differently for males and females. Using data from confi ned delinquents in the California Youth Authority (n = 791) and measures derived fr...

Although studies have described work processes among employed African American women, few have examined the influence of these processes on job outcomes. This study examined relationships between African American women's exposure to a range of occupational stressors, including two types of racial bias--institutional discrimination and interpersonal prejudice--and their evaluations of job qualit...

The analysis of IS implementation and lifecycle management theories concludes that, ERP systems or for that matter any information system is a socio-technical system; and the social, cultural, organisational and competitive context of their implementation cannot be ignored. Various institutional pressures are exerted on ERP initiation, adoption, and routinization by organisations to achieve com...

Although it has been only ten years in operations, Yantian International Container Terminals Limited (YICT) has evolved as a world-class container terminal and become the first Chinese port to receive the Best Global Container Port of the Year award for 2005–2006, as well as being designated China’s best container terminal in terms of operational efficiency for 2008. A success factor of YICT is...

How do we characterize and explain the behavioral patterns of the Chinese bureaucracy amid China’s great transformation over the past three decades? The prevailing “tournament competition” model presented in the literature emphasizes the role of incentive design to explain bureaucratic behaviors. We develop an alternative model of “muddling through”—characterized by a reactive response to multi...