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ICIS
1997

Empowerment in business process reengineering: an ethnographic study of implementation discourses

13 years 5 months ago
Empowerment in business process reengineering: an ethnographic study of implementation discourses
Business process reengineering (BPR) is a methodology for organizational transformation that promises employee empowerment through the adoption of IT as leverage for change. This paper argues that BPR is naive in its interpretation of the management of power relations in organizational change, particularly in regard to middle management. An ethnography of a BPR implementation using cc:Mail as IT leverage is presented to demonstrate how power relations can deny BPR through the manipulation of discourses. The paper uses Foucault’s concepts of the Panopticon and the gaze to investigate the limitations of BPR as a technology of power.
Kylie Sayer, Linda Harvey
Added 01 Nov 2010
Updated 01 Nov 2010
Type Conference
Year 1997
Where ICIS
Authors Kylie Sayer, Linda Harvey
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