Resisting technology-enabled change within healthcare organization

• Main Authors: YEOW, Yong Kwang Adrian, LIM, Wee Kiat
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: Organizational resistance; technology-enabled change; institutional politics; Health Information Technology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cmp_research/8; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=cmp_research
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Instead of the predominant view of resistance as one that occurs between the management and those lower in the hierarchy, we consider how acts of resisting would unfold between peer actors within a technology-enabled change project for a large university hosptial. Drawing on institutional politics, we highlight the importance of understanding organizational resistance as a set of interrelated skillful acts, where the actions of resisters are not only co-constitutive with actions of agents of change but also interrelated across resisters at different levels of the organization. This case also illustrates how resisting actions could play out across an entire change process. Furthermore, our study highlights that resisting actions are not only discursive acts but are embodied and intertwined with artifacts in the form of objects of resistance and boundary markers objects. More importantly, our study shows that in institutional battles involving peer actors, resisters are more assertive and may enact more adversarial and confrontational resisting actions to counter institutional agency actions. Our case study shows how such confrontations could ultimately lead to a forceful end to a project that was by all account well staffed and well run.