Conflicts And Integration: A Study On The Performing Mechanism Of Information Technology Embedding Into Government Departments

With the rapid and large scale application of information technology in some most modern nations since 1980s, scholars in the academic field of organizational study have increasingly begun to focus on one important research issue which is how the information technology can influence modern organization and its performance.The initial studies on this question were greatly influenced by the research tradition of "technology and organization" to some extent. Under the impact of "technological determinism", "the social constructivism of technology" and the theory of "mutual constructing", researchers intended to set up one kind of linear mutual relationship between new information technology and organization and then to make an understanding on the influence on the performance of organization which is imposed by information technology.Newly researches began to pay much more attention to the flexibility of information system and organizational arrangement on the aspect of design and application. These studies have challenged to those viewpoints of determinism. Some scholars further made a series of reflections on the existed researches, they believed that it is not enough for simply discussing "whom would be influenced" and "what is the change", they claimed that it is necessary to deepen the studies, that is to say, from the perspective of interaction mechanism between information technology and organization to describe "how do these changes take place" is fairly more important.In this paper, we will tact an approach of interaction mechanism between information technology and organizational structure. On this basis, we intend to make a more deeply analysis on the methods and routines of base public administrative sectors' innovation which is promoted by information technology in the process of Chinese governmental reform. In this paper, some important and interesting theoretical questions would be discussed: how information technology can change or optimize the performance of governmental organizations? What concrete starting point is? What the complex interaction relation is between information technology and the initial organizational structure? In this study, we developed Barley and Jane.Fountain's analysis frame about the interaction mechanism between new information technology and organization and built a "technology-structure" time sequent interaction analysis model. By using this model, we made a study on the complex application process of information technology on which one-stop E-government service center at LF administrative street community of Shanghai as an example.This paper came to a conclusion that it is a multistage compound process for information embedding into and influencing organization. At different stages, the interaction of technology and organizational structure has different contexts and deals with different core issues. In other words, at different stages, the mutual shaping approaches, routines and core topics of technology and organizational structure's interaction are also different. At the stage of "technology solidarity", the relation between information technology and organizational structure shows more that structure selects, understands and resets the technology; at the stage of "technology rooting", information technology faces to a core problem of reconstruction of the virtual structure which is realized in an virtual space with a method of isomorphism and then obtain more legitimacy supports; however, when it is developed into the stage of "technology maturity", information technology could realize the goal of "integrating into" organization and it becomes one important part of the organization, it could define and restrict other organizational acts, at this time, the rigidity of information system is presented increasingly.