Synopsis
Excerpt from Implementation Politics: Top Management Support and User Involvement
An alternative explanation, which addresses all of these objections, explains resistance to information systems as a lack of consonance between the distribution of power implied by an information system and the distribution of power existing in the organization.
Thus, the origins of resistance. Here, power is defined as the ability to get one's way over objections. Thus, the origins of resistance are found, not in the presence or absense of any particular tactic for introducing change, but in the interaction of the substance of the change with its organizational context. Clearly, the power distribution of an organization is not the only substantive dimension which could be changed by the introduction of a system with certain design features. Other dimensions include the task variety, importance and autonomy of middle managers' jobs and social interaction patterns or job-related communication channels. But organizational power structures influence a great deal of the behavior of individuals, groups, and subunits contained in them. Therefore, power structure changes introduced by computer-based systems comprise an efficient and fruitful starting point for identifying the organizational impacts of systems and, hence, the causes of resistance to them.
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