How Packaged Software Conquers the Organization

摘要

Critical technology studies have been in the front ranks in demonstrating how packaged software should not travel. Because of their wide reach within the organization, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been shown to require extensive customization to meet historically formed local organizational practices. In contrast to the supply side view of ERP systems as carriers of 'best practice' and 'universal logic', the thrust of science and technology studies (S&TS) research on these systems has emphasized that their spread, if they should be able to spread at all, happens at the expense of the adopting organizations (e.g. Soh et al., 2000; Scott & Wagner, 2003). Indeed, Pollock and Williams condense the message from critical studies in their Software and Organizations as follows (p. 8): 'How could the same or similar (or even slightly adapted) organizational IT system be applied across many different types of organizations with all the diversity and heterogeneity found there?' But, as the authors note, the case is much like that of the flying bumblebee, which theoretical physics has sentenced to stay aground. Regardless of whether or not the modern enterprise-wide information system should be able to travel, it has spread across many kinds of organizations, sectors and countries, around the globe, and its form is increasingly that of a package.