Paper Type
full
Description
In times when employees increasingly use private IS in their workplaces, organizations need to bring into balance use of authorized with non-authorized systems. We entered the field with the aim to understand how this is possible but ended up seeing a paradox: Doctors in a French hospital continued to use WhatsApp and other technologies to share sensitive patient data and management let them proceed despite the fact that this practice violated the law and numerous organizational policies. Using grounded theory methodology, we increasingly understood that the underlying problem was one where over-arching institutional logics informed agency of different groups within the organization whose pragmatic decisions to go about their work let the paradox that we saw persist. We thus build theory around why paradoxes persist in organizations and contribute to research on paradoxes and institutional logics, respectively.
Recommended Citation
Ologeanu-Taddei, Roxana; Wessel, Lauri; and Bourdon, Isabelle, "Persistent Paradoxes in Pluralistic Organizations: A Case Study of Continued Use of Shadow-IT in a French Hospital" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 16.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/is_development/is_development/16
Persistent Paradoxes in Pluralistic Organizations: A Case Study of Continued Use of Shadow-IT in a French Hospital
In times when employees increasingly use private IS in their workplaces, organizations need to bring into balance use of authorized with non-authorized systems. We entered the field with the aim to understand how this is possible but ended up seeing a paradox: Doctors in a French hospital continued to use WhatsApp and other technologies to share sensitive patient data and management let them proceed despite the fact that this practice violated the law and numerous organizational policies. Using grounded theory methodology, we increasingly understood that the underlying problem was one where over-arching institutional logics informed agency of different groups within the organization whose pragmatic decisions to go about their work let the paradox that we saw persist. We thus build theory around why paradoxes persist in organizations and contribute to research on paradoxes and institutional logics, respectively.