Although intranets are well-established organisational information environments, many companies experiencernthat their intranets are left under-utilised by the organisational members. Consulting the standard managementrnliterature, it seems the strategy typically advocated is tighter management control. In this study, we examinernthe use of and the attitudes towards an international company’s intranet. Although the respondents’ testimoniesrnseem to be in line with existing literature, advocating centrality and control, we argue this is only a superficialrnpattern. When the informants’ statements are not accepted as facts but instead critically questioned to revealrnthe underlying beliefs and attitudes, an alternative view emerges. Applying the notion of formative context tornthe intranet, we uncover the institutionalised cognitive frames governing the actors reasoning and explain whyrnthe intranets tend to drift out of control. In compliance with previous studies of information infrastructure, wernconclude that intranet management too is centred on control as the supreme management objective.rnConsequently, this deceptive image of the intranet as a hierarchical information environment must be replacedrnwith a more de-centralised vision that allows intranets to harness the open-ended purpose for which the webrnwas originally designed.
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