Framing Change: A Comparative Case Study of IT-enabled Organizational Change

This paper examines how two organizations used information technologies (IT) to introduce the same type of IT-enabled organizational change with radically different outcomes. Building on a grounded theory comparative analysis of the two cases, the paper develops a process model of IT-enabled organizational change centered on the interaction of two factors: 1) the templates (i.e. cognitive frames) used by the organizational change‟s key players to interpret the strategy, implementation, and nature of the change; 2) the environmental and organizational context in which the change occurs. The organizational context and the relative number of issues contained in a cognitive frame (i.e. frame breadth) are found to jointly influence the evolution of actors‟ cognitive frames during the process of change, thereby shaping change outcomes. Narrow frames are found to hinder change in highly formalized organizations, whereas broad frames facilitate change in less formalized organizations.