Public E - Procurement Implementation : Insights from the Structuration Theory

Today most e-government and e-procurement research and discussion are done in a quite utilitarian and technical way. This follows the worldwide positivist and utilitarian approach to research that neglects the social, organizational, cultural, and political aspects of social life. Therefore, most research initiatives are based on a market-driven and utilitarian approach in which technology is treated as a mere tool. So, under the use of a traditional top-down model or the “tool-approach,” information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been implemented in developing countries detached from their social and political context, as an instrumental, static, elitist, and uncritical utilitarian approach, neglecting a deep investigation of how social, economic, and political factors are embedded in technology. In addition, most of the literature on e-procurement has been studied primarily from a business-to-business (B2B) perspective, and the field of public sector procurement has been neglected. Although public eprocurement has similarities with the private sector, it also has some special characteristics that make it different. Therefore, it is not clear to what extent recent decisions on public e-procurement have been optimal. In the broad competing views of information technology (IT), interpretative or constructivist approaches see the use of IT as the result of conflicts, negotiations, and interpretations of various interests that make it socially constructed. These competing views of technology help the formulation of an appropriate debate on e-procurement that holds enormous potential for cost savings, efficiency and DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-768-5.ch014