Plus ça change: defensive translations and resistance to IT-enabled change in local government

Although the potential of IT to bring about radical organisational change has been much heralded, many such re-engineering efforts are overtly or covertly resisted and result in failure. Here we adopt Lewin’s well-known change framework supplemented by concepts from Actor Network Theory in order to explore the dynamics of resistance to change. The implementation of “electronic government” in a local government organisation is used as a vehicle to explore these ideas. Interviews with senior managers indicated that little “unfreezing” had occurred; in ANT terms, that the innovation has been deflected and marginalized at the alignment stage. These results suggest that the realisation of egovernment, and the broader modernisation agenda in which it is embedded, is likely to be meet serious resistance and dilution. The findings prompt further theorising on the factors that favour successful change. A model is tentatively developed arguing that the juxtaposition of three predisposing factors is critical: the presence of a genuine organisational crisis, the degree of recognition of this crisis and the perceived readiness of the organisation to carry through the required change effort. Methodological implications for organisational innovation are briefly explored