Information Technology Embedding And The Reconstructing Of Organization Structure

Since the middle or later period of 1990s, Chinese government started to introduce information technology into public departments. Up to now, the application of information technology has been fairly more popular. Quite a lot of relative studies or researches have presented us the influence which is caused by the introduction of new information technology. However, those studies indeed paid less deeply understanding to the context mechanism of this effect or influence. This paper will focus on the following question: when new information technology which is characterized of flatting or de-bureaucratizing encounters the traditional Chinese government structure which is featured as bureaucratization and strictly-power-distribution in a shot time, what complex and compound interactive mechanism would be produced, and what is the main character of this interactive mechanism? As what is concerned in this study, only if we could have done much deeply reflection on this question, it would be possible for researchers to make a relative accurate estimation on the future tendency and the development direction of the innovation in public departments which is promoted by the application of information technology.The existent classical studies have analyzed this question from the view of "Technological Determinism" and "Social Constructivism", and some recent researches attempted to synthesize these two kinds of academic approach, they argued that there exists a relationship of inter-constructing between information technology and organization structure. On the basis of the existent academic knowledge, this study would like to bring in the approach of institutional analysis and emphasize that information technology which points to the managing and harmonizing of human behaviors is never the one of pure laboratory logic, it is always embedded into or attached with certain institution arrangement or special purpose, thus, the process of applying information technology to public departments also means the collision and amalgamation between two different institutions. Under the directing of this research perception, this study will develop a new analysis framework which is called "technology embedding and structure reconstructing", and apply it to surveying and analyzing the mechanism process of information technology embedding. In this study, we will take the "one-stop" E-government center at A administrative street which is located in the rapid developing area of Shanghai as a case.