Abstract:
Research on the organizational implementation of information technology (IT) and social power has favoured explanations based on issues of resource power and process power at the expense of matters of meaning power. As a result, although the existence and importance of meaning power is acknowledged, its distinctive practices and enacted outcomes remain relatively under-theorized and under-explored by IT researchers. This paper focused on unpacking the practices and outcomes associated with the exercise of meaning power within the IT implementation process. Our aim was to analyze the practices employed to construct meaning and enact a collective 'definition of the situation'. We focused on framing and utilizing the signature matrix technique to represent and analyze the exercise of meaning power in practice. The paper developed and illustrated this conceptual framework using a case study of a conflictual IT implementation in a challenging public sector environment. We concluded by pointing out the situated nature of meaning power practices and the enacted outcomes. Our research extends the literature on IT and social power by offering an analytical framework distinctly suited to the analysis and deeper understanding of the meaning power properties. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.