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tant role of human agency in enacting technologies and innovation processes
is a recurrent theme throughout this book and will be revisited, in particular,
in Chapter 9.

>> INSTITUTIONAL PRESSURES AND THE MATERIAL
PROPERTIES OF TECHNOLOGY

It is important to realize that the social construction of technology does not
occur in a vacuum (Bijker et al., 1987). Rather, this process will be influenced
by the institutional context. Institutional research considers the ways in which
social and historical forces shape the actions of organizations (DiMaggio and
Powell, 1983). Organizations are embedded in ‘a web of values, norms, rules,
beliefs, and taken-for-granted assumptions’ (Barley and Tolbert, 1997, p. 93).
These institutional influences both enable and constrain action. Institutional
perspectives, then, alert us to the ways in which technologies are embedded
in complex social, economic and political networks. Thus, political, economic,
cultural and societal institutions exist in any given context and influence
behaviour by ‘constituting rules, defining key players, and framing situations’
(Scott, 1995, p. 137).
This approach directs attention to the ways in which institutional influences
shape the design and adoption of technologies. Institutional theorists alert us
to the fact that the adoption, or uptake, of technologies is driven by social pres-
sures for legitimacy and not simply by their efficiency in solving problems. Once
a particular technology becomes very popular, for example, it is hard for an
organization (or an individual) to resist using it without appearing to be ‘out-of-
touch’. An example here is enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which
are IT systems that support business processes across an enterprise, working
from a single database so that data theoretically flows across work processes
without unnecessary duplication. So, customer information collected by a sales
person will be available for those in marketing or service, without each func-
tion having to input their own customer data (ERP systems are discussed more
fully in Chapter 7). ERP systems are very common today in all kinds of business
environments to the extent that it can be hard for an organization to maintain
legitimacy as an efficient organization if it fails to adopt such a system – just
as turning up to a job interview for a high-profile city-bank job in jeans and a
sweat-shirt would undermine the legitimacy of a job applicant; or not having a
mobile phone or not being on facebook when all one’s friends are makes some-
one ‘not cool!’.
Some institutional accounts can be rather deterministic, ignoring how
individual actors have flexibility in responding to and indeed shaping their
environment. So, while there may be strong pressures about what you wear to
your city job interview, you still could turn up in jeans and a sweat-shirt and
there is even a tiny chance that you get a job (please note, however, that we are
not advocating this!). Thus, while institutional accounts alert us to very real
constraints of wider societal pressures on the action of individuals, groups and

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