Institutionalisation of technology in contemporary business organizations

In contemporary business paradigm, organizations compete for political power, institutional legitimacy, and social and economic fitness. Business organizations are shaped by the interactions of the environment that they operate in, rules and norms imposed on them, behaviours of their internal systems, and cognitive patterns of their stockholders. An organization as an institution, thus, evolves through the mutual interactions of various organizational sub-institutions. Technology works as the binding factor that shapes organizations and gives them their existing form and legitimacy by integrating together these sub-institutions. The form and legitimacy define how organizations evolve their structures, culture, and systems. Implementation of technology, therefore, is not one off endorsement of technology or/ and isolated incident of technology implementation; instead it should engage in the process of technology institutionalisation to maintain its legitimacy, power, and social and economic fitness on an ongoing basis. This paper reviews literature on how technology institutionalisation occurs in organizations, and more precisely how institutional logics relating to technology implementation are diffused within organizations through three isomorphic processes i.e., coercive, mimetic and normative. The paper concludes that technology lifecycle management is characterized and shaped by continuous interfacing of technology with organizational, social, cultural, environmental, political, and other institutional factors. The degree of interaction between these factors defines technology implementation, institutionalisation, deinstitutionalisation and re-institutionalisation in the organization.