modernisation through icts: towards a network ontology of technological change

Modernisation through ICTs: towards anetwork ontology of technological changeisj_12001 351..370

Isam Faik* & Geoff Walsham†

*University of Southampton, Southampton Management School, Southampton, UK,email: [email protected], and †Judge Business School, University of Cambridge,Cambridge, UK, email: [email protected]

Abstract. This article is concerned with modernisation as a prevalent discourse ofassociation between technological change on the one hand and social, economicand political changes on the other. We discuss modernisation as a concept thatspans several domains of change including national development, organisationalchange and epistemological shift. These domains are often categorised intostacked levels, namely the national, the organisational and the individual, ordivided into a domain of action and an overarching context. We argue in this paperthat an assumption of embeddedness underlies many of these dominantapproaches and we identify three issues with this assumption, namely reduction-ism, unidirectional causality and marginalisation. We draw from the ontologicaland methodological principles of actor-network theory to suggest a shift towards amore fluid view of the dynamics between the different domains of change. Wesupport our discussion by a case study of the modernisation of the justice systemin Morocco, including a national computerisation project of case processing in thecourts.

Keywords: modernisation, actor-network theory, development, justice system,Morocco

INTRODUCTION

Technological change has always been an important driver and outcome of wider social,economic and political changes. Since the industrial revolution, the relationship between thesechanges has been the subject of intensive academic inquiry (Zuboff, 1988; Adas, 1990). Yet,the advent of information and communication technologies (ICTs) imposes new challenges fortheorising this relationship. ICTs brought back to the front of public and academic attention thetransformative capabilities of technological innovation and how they relate to social transfor-mation, organisational change, economic growth and political reform; processes that are oftengrouped under the term ‘development’.

A major concern in theorising this dynamic relationship has been the fact that processes ofchange are rarely bounded in time and space. They tend to unfold simultaneously in different

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domains even when intended for specific ones. Researchers have adopted differentapproaches in order to address this conceptual challenge. One common approach is to dividethe various domains into levels representing different spatial and temporal scales and to thenseek linkages between these levels (Rousseau, 1985; Hitt et al., 2007; Heracleous & Jacobs,2008). In this approach, processes of change are ascribed to one of the common strata usedto categorise social action, such as the individual, group, organisation, national or internationallevels, depending on their perceived scale. This approach has been widely applied to the studyof technological change in its different facets such as adoption (Rai & Patnayakuni, 1996),implementation (Aubert et al., 2008) and usage (Burton-Jones & Gallivan, 2007).

Another approach is to consider one domain as the principle locus of action and otherdomains as constituting a ‘context’ in which the former is embedded (Granovetter, 1985;Pettigrew, 1985). The tendency of many social scientists to treat phenomena in isolation leadothers to emphasise the importance of taking into consideration the explanatory elements thatlie beyond the boundaries of the domain of interest. For example, technological change is adomain of action that many researchers have indicated needs to be considered within itssocial, economic and political context (Avgerou, 2001; Avgerou & Walsham, 2001). Context inthis approach is a term that groups a wide range of domains (Hayes & Westrup, 2011), andembeddedness is a concept that defines the relationship between the actions in the domain ofinterest and the constructed structural unity of the other domains.

These approaches have certainly advanced our understanding of the dynamics betweentechnological change and the variety of developmental changes pursued by different commu-nities around the world. However, we argue in this paper that they maintain a hierarchybetween the various domains of change that tends to inhibit rather than advance the quest fora ‘fuller picture’ or a ‘deeper understanding’ that such approaches aim to attain. We contendthat researchers and practitioners establish this conceptual hierarchy by presuming relation-ships of embededdness or containment between the different domains of action so that, e.g.individual actions are seen as embedded in group processes and technological transforma-tions are seen as contained in social contexts. These presumptions are seen as problematicbecause they lead to reductionist analyses that reduce actions in one domain to instantiationsof processes from domains that are higher up in the assumed hierarchy.

To develop this argument in relation to the dynamic relationship between technologicalchange and development, we base our discussion on a concept that has for long framed thisrelationship, namely ‘modernisation’. Modernisation means different things to different people,but it is possible to distinguish three broad categories of its use. The first is modernisation asa theory of development, the second is modernisation as an approach to organisationalchange and the third is modernisation as a change in modes of knowing. Each of thesemeanings tends to be considered by researchers and practitioners to pertain to a particularlevel of change, respectively, the national, the organisational and the individual, and tends tobe analysed in terms of the domains of policy, practice and knowledge.

Many current conceptualisations of these domains are based on the assumption of embed-dedness between them. For example, different conceptual models suggest that organisationalpractices and their associated processes of change are embedded in national policies and in

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national legal and cultural environments (Watson et al., 1997; van Waarden, 2001). Similarly,various conceptions consider individual knowledge forms and practical epistemologies asembedded in organisational and group practices (Orlikowski, 2002; Duguid, 2005).

Modernisation as a concept that spans the three domains of policy, practice and knowledgeallows the institution of the relationship of embeddedness between these domains and facili-tates the shift of causality from one domain to the other, particularly up the constructedhierarchy of levels – from the individual to the organisational to the national. To avoidunwarranted shifts between the various domains arguably requires alternative ontologies thatcan do without the relationship of embeddedness.

In this paper, we draw from actor-network theory (ANT) to propose such an alternativeontology. In particular, we use ANT’s ontological and methodological principles to argue for aconceptualisation of the various domains of change as intertwined but as not having any apriori scale or configurations that place them in a hierarchy of embeddedness or containment.

We support our arguments based on a case study of a large modernisation project within thejustice system in Morocco. The project, which was 80% financed by the European Union (EU),includes the computerisation of 40 selected courts around the country. The project is consid-ered part of a wider reform of the judicial system, which itself is considered part of the overalldevelopment agenda of the government.

To present the above arguments, we organised this article into six sections. Following thisintroduction is a section that presents the three meanings of modernisation at the national,organisational and individual levels, including a theoretical discussion that draws from ANT toaddress the intertwining between these levels. The third section outlines the empirical settingand the methodology of the research. Then the fourth section presents three accounts of thecase, each relating to one of the modernisation levels. The fifth section is a discussion thatshows how ANT’s alternative ontology can help avoid three issues with the assumption ofembeddedness, namely reductionism, unidirectional causality and marginalisation. The sixthand concluding section then presents a summary of how the proposed alternative approachcan help improve our understanding of the relationship between technological change anddevelopment; a relationship that continues to be widely framed in terms of modernisationprocesses across the individual, the organisational and the national levels.

MODERNISATION AT MULTIPLE LEVELS

Modernisation is an umbrella term for a variety of processes, all of which connote positivechange and progressive transformation. To be modern is usually used to indicate a statecharacterised by rationality, order, control and belief in progress (King, 1995, p. 110). In thispaper, we distinguish between three levels to which the term modernisation is applied. We usethe term ‘level’ here to indicate domains of change without the nested arrangement implied bythe traditional levels approach. At the national level, modernisation often indicates an approachto development that is concerned with economic progress, but equally emphasises the needfor a transition towards more modern forms of social, economic and political ordering (Leys,2006).

Modernisation through ICTs 353


At the organisational level, modernisation implies radical changes in management practices,often involving technological innovations (Scott, 2000). At the individual level, modernisationindicates a change in mentality based on a shift in what is considered acceptable knowledgeand how this knowledge is attained (Taylor, 1989; Ihde, 1997) – this is what we call an‘epistemological shift’. Table 1 outlines the three meanings of modernisation along with theprevalent paradigms that define the current context in which their respective processes unfold,some dominant objectives that the proponents of modernisation initiatives aim to achieve andthe main domains through which the processes are usually studied for each approach.

Modernisation as national development

Development is a quintessentially modern concept (Alvares, 1992). In the post-Second WorldWar era, development was closely linked with modernisation as a way of helping the newlyindependent nations ‘catch up’ with the modern world. This intertwining between developmentand modernisation projected a common image of change and temporality over the differentsocieties of the world (Arce & Long, 2000, p. 5). This image was closely associated with theWestern experience of modernisation as ‘the combined effect of industrialization (morerecently “post-industrialization”), economic growth, the expansion of markets, urbanization,globalization, and the acceleration of scientific and technological development’ (York et al.,2010, p. 77).

National level measures of these characteristics of modernisation are often correlated withdifferent aspects of human well-being such as poverty, literacy, security and health. Thediscourses of development through modernisation further reified these correlations and ren-dered these processes obligatory passage points for any desired betterment of human con-ditions. Alternative theories, such as dependency theory and world systems theory, questionedthese correlations from a Marxist perspective and argued that development cannot be attainedwithin a system of international capitalism (van der Ree, 2007). Nevertheless, Roxborough(1988) argued that these critiques did not touch the core propositions of modernisation theorythat remain manifest in the continued quest for an increased capacity for social transformation(Roxborough, 1988). Other critiques drew from a post-structuralist perspective and formedwhat became known as the post-development paradigm, which not only questioned moderni-sation as a path to development but critiqued the concept of development itself for beingdisconnected from local ontologies (Escobar, 1995). Yet, Sylvester (1999) suggests thatbeyond this relatively small school, modernisation continues to be ‘the rage of all’, in academiaand in practice.

Table 1. Three meanings of modernisation

Approaches to

modernisation

Paradigms defining

current context

Some dominant

objectives

Main domain

of analysis

National development Globalisation/information society Growth; progress Policy

Organisational change Post-industrial/post-bureaucratic Control; integration Practice

Epistemological shift High/liquid/post-modernity Rationality; differentiation Knowledge



Furthermore, ICTs are seen as giving new life to the modernisation approach. In an analysisof the international initiatives aiming to reduce the ‘digital divide’ between North and South,Leye (2007) argues that ‘we can hear the post-second world war modernization paradigmresonating through the ICT4D discourse’. Shade (2003) calls this resurrection of the oldparadigm ‘modernization 2.0’.

Modernisation as organisational change

At the organisational level, modernisation generally indicates radical change to organisationalpractices based on technological rationalisation with the aim of meeting the demands ofcontinuously shifting business environments (Scott, 2000). Modernisation strategies are oftenassociated with an increase in integration and control (Hanseth et al., 2001) and tend to favouran instrumental approach to organisational decision-making and change (Olsen, 1991).

However, more recent literature on modernisation as a process of organisational changefocuses mainly on two areas: organisational reform in the public sector and the transformationof organisational practices in developing countries. In the public sector, modernisation is oftenused to indicate the introduction of business-type managerialism (Clark, 1998) or the creationof new organisational paradigms, such as the ‘learning public administration’ (Sotirakou &Zeppou, 2004). These approaches reflect a general influence of post-bureaucratic modes oforganising even in the prototypical bureaucratic organisation, the government.

The concept of modernisation is also used more generally to address organisationalchange in developing countries. For example, Newman & Zhao (2008) in an analysis ofbusiness process reengineering in Chinese small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) statethat ‘one of the major hurdles for successful ERP implementation is that many Chinese SMEsregard implementing ERP as a means to achieve modernization rather than to replace legacysystems and realize organizational change’. Modernisation in this context is used to imply anincrease in technical efficiency (Kashiwagi et al., 2010), or in a field like agriculture, tohighlight a contrast with traditional modes of production (Carugati et al., 2010; Bellon &Hellin, 2011).

Modernisation as a shift in practical epistemology

The third approach to modernisation concerns the transformation in people’s knowledge andwhat they consider as legitimate and trustworthy sources of knowledge. Indeed, modernisingindividual identity is strongly linked to the adoption of a modern epistemology (Taylor, 1989).Of particular interest to the analysis of this paper is the implicit dimension of this epistemologyor what has been called ‘practical epistemology’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 130). Practical epistemologyis distinguished from theoretical epistemology in that the latter is concerned with knowledge ofprinciples and deduction from these principles, hence conducive to formalisation and sharing,while the former is concerned with knowledge through deliberations and habituation.

An important attribute of modern epistemology is the primacy of ‘instrumental knowledge’,which is knowledge mediated through instrumentation (Ihde, 1997). For example, in technolo-



gies of visualisation, early modernising science, such as Galileo’s, enshrined the supremacy ofinstrument-mediated vision over naked-eye vision, and late technological developments estab-lished a primacy of modern imaging as a source of knowledge of the body over non-instrumental techniques (ibid.). Consequently, modern epistemology developed a bias towardsknowledge that is mediated through instruments. This bias translates into a hegemonic relationbetween the ensuing technical rationality, or what some have called a ‘techno-logic’ (Dechow& Mouritsen, 2005), and other forms of rationality (Avgerou & Street, 2000).

Therefore, modernisation of a social domain often implies a shift towards technical rationalityin the ordering processes. The interactions and frictions with other forms of rationality even-tually result in shifts in the practical epistemology of the individuals acting in that domain.Therefore, in cases where the hegemony of technical rationality is accepted, the processes ofknowing that shape the way people go about their daily lives start to give preference andactively seek knowledge that is mediated through instrumentation.

Amongst the most prevalent instruments in generating the shifts in practical epistemologyare ICTs. When deployed and accepted, they become an important part of how people knowcertain things and ignore others.

Modernisation across domains: an ANT perspective

Modernisation, as shown above, spans the domains of individual knowledge, organisationalpractice and national policies. When the hierarchy between these different domains of actionis accepted and the relationship of embeddedness between them is reified, the causal rela-tionship between changes occurring at different levels of modernisation becomes blurred.Therefore, one promising approach to exploring this relationship through a more expansiveand critical perspective is to reconsider the stratified ontology of stacked levels. In this paper,we undertake this task by drawing from the ‘flat ontology’ of ANT.

ANT is a collection of theoretical and methodological positions that emerged from the fieldof science studies (Law & Hassard, 1999; Latour, 2003). ANT’s core concepts and propositionsare dispersed in a large body of works by Callon (1986), Latour (2005), Law (1999), and others.The theory has been used in many different, and sometimes contradictory, ways and in avariety of disciplines, with Organisation Studies and Information Systems as two major appli-cation areas where the theory continues to receive increasing attention and mounting critique(Walsham, 1997; Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005; Whittle & Spicer, 2008).

ANT proposes a social topography that can be considered ‘flat’ because it rejects any a prioriattribution of size to social actors. Rather it suggests that actors are localised or globalised bythe accounts made of them. According to Latour (2005, p. 204), ‘no place dominates enoughto be global and no place is self-contained enough to be local’. To avoid accounts that concealthe wide range of associations between actors, Latour (2005, p. 176) puts forward an alter-native ontology in which ‘macro no longer describes a wider or a larger site in which the microwould be embedded like some Russian Matroyshka doll, but another equally local, equallymicro place which is connected to many others through some medium transporting specifictypes of traces’.



Harman (2009) suggests that these ontological principles proposed by ANT all relate to acommon principle that he calls ‘absolute concreteness’. Every action and every actor, humanand non-human, are so concrete that their reality cannot lie in a hidden essence or anoverarching context. For example, from this perspective, the motion of bodies cannot beviewed as a pure instance of Newtonian mechanics, religious acts cannot be reduced tomanifestations of social contexts and workers would not be perceived as manifestations of aproduction system. Similarly, from this perspective, organisational practices cannot be reducedto instances of policy application and individual epistemologies would not be seen as instancesof the internalisation of organisational practices.

Instead of the stratified ontological configurations often assumed by researchers and prac-titioners, what links the different actors and the different domains of action according to ANTis translation (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987). Translation is the process through which all actorsact as mediators, transforming meaning and action as they transport them, and not asintermediaries that constitute a passive medium through which meaning and action diffuse(Latour, 1993, p. 79; 1999, p. 307; 2005, p. 39). Intermediaries can be complicated, but theiroutput remains a function of their input. On the other hand, mediators are always complex; theoutcome of their action is never fully determined by its input. Therefore, a researcher’saccount traces a network in the ANT sense only if all the actors in the account are treated asmediators, in other words, if no actor and no action are presumed to be embedded in anygiven domain.

In addition, the principle of no embeddedness in ANT is closely related to another of itsprinciples, generalised symmetry, which rejects the demarcation between domains along theline of the social and the material (Latour, 1996; 2005, p. 63). This demarcation or purification,according to Latour (1993, p. 10), reflects the orders of modernity that modernisation pro-cesses presume and reinforce. It is also characteristic of the modern modes of conceptuali-sation, typified in the modern social sciences, which need to construct such divides in order toallow the ‘framing’ of actions and institutions (Mitchell, 2002, p. 296). Therefore, from an ANTapproach, investigating modernisation processes without accepting any a priori stratification ofthe domains in which they unfold requires an equal problematisation of the divides that allowfor the assumption of embeddedness to be instituted.

CASE STUDY: MODERNISATION IN THE MOROCCAN JUSTICE SYSTEM

Case background

Morocco is a North African country with a population of around 30 million inhabitants. In 2005,55% of the population lived in urban areas, compared with 29% in 1960. Morocco’s ranking inthe United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) in 2010 was 114 out of 169 countries.This relatively low ranking is partly due to low adult literacy rates (58.2%) and high povertylevels (28.5% of population) (UNDP, 2010). Measures such as the HDI do not however takeinto consideration a crucial development domain, which was the focus of this study, namelyjustice and the rule of law.



In Morocco, the justice system has gone through major reforms since the decolonisationfrom France in 1956. What was then considered the ‘modern’ judicial system, in contrast withcoexisting traditional judicial mechanisms, was restructured, standardised and became themain source of judicial services in the country (El Fassi Fihri, 1997). However, the system stillsuffers from a large set of problems, such as corruption, lengthy processes, unequal geo-graphical access, non-enforcement of verdicts and alleged political trials.

These conditions have made the reform of the justice system at the forefront of thedevelopmental objectives of the country. The monarch, who holds much executive power andsets the agenda for the government, detailed the need for reform as follows:

We seek to make justice more trustworthy, credible, effective and equitable, because itserves as a strong shield to protect the rule of law. It is a pillar of judicial security and goodgovernance, and acts as a booster for development. We also want to make sure justicekeeps up with the domestic and international changes underway, and meets the standardsof justice as it should be in the 21st century. [Mohammed VI, 2009]

The government, civil society and international donors, all agree that an effective and fairjudicial system is a necessary condition for the sustainability of most developmental initiatives.

Modernization is a prevalent discourse of reform in this context. Morocco has a dedicatedministry called ‘the Ministry of Modernisation of the Public Sectors’. Also, the Ministry of Justice(MOJ) has one of its six main departments called ‘the Department of Studies and Modernisa-tion’. One of the main modernisation initiatives undertaken by the MOJ is a large project whichwas 80% financed by the MEsures D’Accompagnement (MEDA) programme, which is thefinancial instrument of the EU’s Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The total cost of the projectwas €34 million, of which the remaining 20% was covered by the Moroccan government.

The stated objectives of the MEDA project are the ‘modernisation’ of the justice system andthe ‘enforcement of the organisational capabilities of the Ministry of Justice’ along with itsregional representations. The main component of the project is the development of a new caseprocessing application called SAJ1 and its deployment in 40 selected courts around thecountry.

In the early stages of the project, the EU hired several experts from France to develop a callfor tenders for the SAJ application. The project was awarded to a Moroccan informationtechnology (IT) company, which had become a few years earlier a subsidiary of a Spanishcompany; it was a condition of the EU subsidy that the development be awarded to anEU-based company. The MEDA project was the third computerisation project in the Moroccancourts, after a World Bank–financed project to computerise judicial processes in the commer-cial courts, and a local initiative by a legal practitioner who developed a Microsoft Access–based application for the processing of penal cases in his court, which was then distributed toseveral other courts in different cities. The MEDA project is however the first project with theobjective of scaling up to all the courts in the country.

1French acronym for Judicial Administration System.



Data collection and analysis

The first author conducted several preliminary/exploratory visits to the field between Octoberand December 2008 and was joined in one of them by the second author. The first author thenconducted an in-depth study of the MEDA project and the context of the judicial systembetween mid-April and mid-July 2009. Two follow-up visits were also conducted in May 2010and in January 2011. All these visits allowed the observation of the project at different stages.For example, the first visits were conducted less than 3 months after the deployment of the newapplication in the first pilot court. At the time of the main investigation period, around six courtswere working with the new application and deployment was taking place in several new ones.By the time of the last visit in 2011, more than 30 courts were using the SAJ application. Thisallowed better appreciation of the shifts in perception that took place as the new system wasgetting stabilised and scaled up.

Fieldwork included visits to 10 courts in six different cities around the country as well asseveral visits to the MOJ. Research methods included observations in clerk offices, courtrooms, court halls, IT departments and training sessions. They also included a total of 55semi-structured interviews with 45 interviewees according to the distribution shown inTable 2.

The analysis of all the gathered data was based on seeking a ‘rich familiarity’ (Eisenhardt,1989) with the case through the production of various narratives that satisfy, as much aspossible, the methodological principles of ANT (Latour, 2005). Categorisation techniques wereused to facilitate the processes of drawing from the data to generate accounts or developtheoretical insights. For example, all collected data were ordered both chronologically andaccording to data sources, and short summaries were produced for the main interviews. Inaddition, open coding was used to facilitate the iterative process between data from the fieldand theories and concepts from the literature.

Table 2. List of interviewee categories

Interviewee category Number of interviewees Number of interviews

Court clerks from various departments 11 11

Head clerks 3 3

Court network administrators 6 7

Judges (including presidents of courts) 4 4

Prosecutors 3 3

Lawyers 6 6

Senior officials at the MOJ 4 9

Engineers at the MOJ 1 2

Employees at the MOJ 2 3

Trainers for the MEDA project 3 3

Consultant for the MEDA project 1 1

Engineer at system provider 1 3

Total 45 55



THREE ACCOUNTS OF MODERNISATION PROCESSES

This section presents three different accounts from the case, with each one relating to themodernisation of the judicial system in Morocco at one of the domains of modernisationdiscussed above, namely national policy, organisational change and individual knowledge.The accounts show how modernisation processes unfold in the three domains simultaneouslyand highlight the assumptions that were made by different actors in the field regarding therelationship between the domains.

Justice as a national strategy of development

The serious social and economic challenges facing the Moroccan population call for systemicchanges that can better the lives of large segments of the population that remain poor andmarginalised. The indirect link between any such changes and their desired social or economicbenefits makes the determination of their nature and their respective levels of priority conten-tious issues between competing ideological tendencies. However, the reform of the justicesystem came to be widely accepted as a priority and a necessary condition for any lastingreforms in other sectors. The discourses of development and modernisation were widely usedto frame the direction of this reform. For instance, in the MEDA project, a document preparedby one of the EU experts at the start of the project in order to define the specifications of theSAJ application stated the following:

The modernization of justice constitutes de facto a national priority. The reinforcement of theMinistry of Justice and of the judicial system as a whole follows a logic of progress andsustainable development.

This discourse presents the modernisation of the justice system as embedded in the globaldrive towards progress and sustainable development. It was however not limited to foreignexperts. The initiator of the local computerisation initiative that preceded the MEDA projectjustified his initiative to the Ministry as coming:

in conjunction with the efforts undertaken by the Ministry in the modernization of the justicesector . . . which aim to raise it to the level of the challenges imposed by the age ofglobalization and to make it an effective factor in the development of our country.

These discourses placed modernisation initiatives in the grand scheme of national develop-ment, which was considered embedded in the context of globalisation and an imperative of itsdynamics. In addition, many other actors in the justice system considered economic progressas one of the main motivations for modernising the system. For example, several senioradministrators argued for the need to modernise the justice system based on its importance forattracting and maintaining foreign investment.

In general, the discourse of modernisation at this level was built on a logic of nationwidereform that manifested the continued quest for increased capacity for controlled social trans-formation, which is reminiscent of the old modernisation paradigm. Reform policies articulated



this quest through national level mechanisms such as changes to legal texts and through theintroduction of new technologies that have the capacity to reach nationwide implementation.However, translating these policies into practices on the ground in a way that can changepeople’s experiences of the justice system remained an elusive process for most of the actorsinvolved in the modernisation initiatives.

Transforming judicial practices

In the domain of organisational practices, modernisation of the justice system was primarilyaiming to change the administrative practices in the courts. The changes were mainly basedon seeking higher efficiency of judicial procedures through technological rationalisation. Com-puterisation was consequently adopted as a key strategy in achieving the desired rationalisa-tion of the practices of the clerks, the bailiffs, the lawyers and eventually the judges. However,computerisation in this case faced a major challenge in the disparity between the legal textsdefining the court procedures and the practices representing the various interpretations ofthese texts in different courts.

The tension between the legal texts and the practices in the courts was most apparent duringthe development of the SAJ application when different actors tried to capture and codify theexisting practices. First, some of the European experts tried to translate the texts governinglegal procedures and the practices of these texts in the courts into an explicit call for tenders.Then the engineers from the company that was awarded the project had to continue thisengagement with the texts and the practices throughout the development and implementationprocesses.

Legal texts can be algorithmic in nature, but not their interpretation or associated prac-tices. Having the texts of judicial procedures was not enough for the developers of the SAJapplication to satisfy the requirements of the eventual users. Even if the application is sup-posed to represent the text of the law, the developers had to take into account the differingpractices in the courts. For example, while the texts of the procedures indicate that citizens’complaints need to be turned into police reports before they become part of a judicial file,in the largest city of the country, Casablanca, complaints are directly turned into judicial filesin order to cope with their large numbers. One of the developers described their interactionswith the officials and clerks of the courts in the early development stages of the SAJ appli-cation as follows:

We tell them this is what the law says; they tell us this is how we do it here.

The developers were expecting most actions in the organisational practices of the courts toreflect the nationally standardised legal texts and the national policies of the MOJ. They viewedthe relationship between organisational practices and national policies through a frameworkthat expected the former to be largely an instantiation of the latter. In other words, theyexpected the court clerks to be intermediaries that replicate national policies without muchtransformation, but they were instead mediators that were continuously transforming thepolicies they were expected to implement.



The Ministry had formed ‘users clubs’ made up of several head clerks in order to clarify thepractices in the courts for the developers. In addition, the developers made several visits to thecourts to get a sense of these practices. However, they (mainly IT engineers) and the courtpersonnel spoke different languages and had major difficulties communicating with each other,while the developers were looking for codifiable processes, they often received elaborationsfull of legal jargon. These challenging conditions faced by the application developers weregoing to bring the project to a halt, as the application became too complex in their attempts toincorporate the various practices.

In addition, even after succeeding in obtaining a workable application that satisfies many ofthe judicial practices and procedures, managers of the MEDA project needed to control themultiplicity of interpretations allowed by the new system. One member of the Ministry’s teamin the project expressed this objective while comparing the SAJ application with the otherexisting applications in the Moroccan courts by stating:

Those applications cannot achieve what the MEDA application can: The unification of thebehaviour of employees . . . [the head engineer] told me that we should not worry too muchabout the operation of the application, but we should strive for the information in it to haveone meaning.

The standardisation and integration of organisational practices in the different courts wereindeed key objectives of the modernisation initiative. However, in this case, much of thedesired standardisation did not really require computerisation. In fact, some standardisationinitiatives, such as the establishment of a common coding system for the different case types,were supposed to precede computerisation. Instead, the introduction of IT was used as animpetus for implementing and enforcing new standards.

Furthermore, computerisation was also hoped to be a catalyst for changing the legal textsthat govern the practices of the clerks. In describing the introduction of IT in the judicial system,a senior official in the MOJ stated:

This is not a full computerisation. This is a cover over current procedures . . . We justcomputerised existing procedures; the objective is that computerisation will change theprocedures.

Again, changes to the procedures did not require the introduction of ICTs, but it was hoped thatthe transformations in the judicial field resulting from computerisation would create an envi-ronment that is more conducive to reforming the texts of the law.

Building trust in electronic information

The third account of the modernisation of the judicial field in Morocco concerns the changes inthe practical epistemology of the court employees and the court users. Part of what thechampions of modernisation through computerisation initiatives needed to achieve is a redis-tribution of trust from the old paper-based systems to the new IT-based systems as reliablesources of information. As the account below shows, this trust was multidimensional and



related as much to trust in the material stability of the system as it did to trust in its informationalcontent.

In the early stages of the MEDA project, computerisation in the courts was meant as asupport to existing paper-based systems and not as a substitute to them. The deployment ofthe SAJ application helped immediately in changing some processes such as the printing ofinvitations for court hearings, which used to take a long time to complete by hand. However,many old processes continued largely unaltered after computerisation. For example, the filingof registers in which the progress of cases in each court department was recorded continuedin parallel with the electronic recording of the same information. Up to four registers were usedin each department, recording the same information in different formats.

Yet, even after the SAJ application was deployed and used in several courts, there was notimeline or future plan to get rid of the registers. Clerks, court officials and Ministry officials gavevarious reasons for why the registers would continue to be used. One of them was the needto sign some of the registers when they are moved between different sections of the court andhow that would be hard to achieve through the electronic version. Electronic signatures werenot in use, and even if they became available, technically they would need a legal frameworkto be accepted in practice. Most people were well aware of the difficulty in producing such legalframework through the lengthy and complex processes of the government bureaucracy.

However, many people saw that the main reason why registers would continue to be usedfor a long time to come was the lack of trust in electronic information. This trust had two sides.The first was trust in the stability of the system, in other words, trust that the technology andits supporting infrastructures will not fail. Indeed, common questions amongst many peoplewhen first exposed to the computerisation initiative or after its deployment were: ‘what happensif we lose electricity?’ or ‘what happens if the machine fails?’ These concerns were not limitedto the clerks but shared by many officials, and it was clear that as long as they lurked in thecommon perception of the new technology, there would not be enough political will to switchcompletely to electronic recording of cases. When asked about this issue, the IT engineer inone of the courts summarised these concerns as follows:

I don’t think the registers will disappear anytime soon . . . People don’t trust the applicationyet. They would just tell you: what happens if I don’t have electricity? What would we do, andthe lawyers are waiting?

The second type of trust relates to the reliability of the information in the system. Many peopledid not trust that what is entered in the system corresponds exactly to what is in the registers.A senior member of the MEDA project illustrated this trust issue by pointing out an earliercomputerisation experience concerning the commercial register (where businesses are offi-cially registered), which was administered from within the commercial courts. When thissection of the court was computerised through the World Bank–financed project, it took a longtime before the clerks were willing to issue business certificates through the computerisedsystem without referring to the old paper-based system; they were not ready or willing to trustthe accuracy of the electronic information.



Similarly, after several months of deploying the SAJ application, many court users could notaccept the information given to them at the reception desks, which was based on the dataentered in the electronic system. It was common practice in most courts for the plaintiffs to givea small bribe to the clerks to get information about their case. Consequently, according to somecourt officials, many people were having difficulty accepting the reliability of information forwhich they did not pay. This indicates that the trust and the processes of knowing of the courtusers did not necessarily follow the IT-based organisational changes and their evolution couldtherefore not be subsumed in the unfolding of these changes. They maintained instead theirconnections to the established practices in the courts.

In addition, for many court users, dealing with the judicial system is an emotionally andintellectually challenging exercise. Access to information plays an important role in thecitizens’ interaction with the system and is often demanded with insistence and determina-tion. Trust and acceptance of the sources of information is therefore crucial for the waypeople navigate the system. While before computerisation this source was mainly the indi-vidual clerk or court official, it was progressively becoming a heterogonous network ofmachines and people, which is increasingly mediating the practical epistemology of the courtusers.

When the knowledge of the court users was perceived as a pure social construction of theirinteraction with the clerks and court officials, it was more readily embedded in the practices ofthe courts. However, after the heterogeneity of the interaction became manifest through theintroduction of IT and the material basis of the practices in the courts became more visible, thecomplexity of the knowledge of the court users became more deployed and its embeddednessin the court practices less accepted.

DISCUSSION

The three accounts above present modernisation as national policy, as changes in organi-sational practices and as shifts in practical epistemology. All these changes occurred con-comitantly and were linked through a variety of processes and mechanisms. Like manyconcepts that span several domains, conceptualising modernisation and the way it linkstechnological change with other developmental changes depends critically on the concep-tualisation of the dynamics between these domains. As noted earlier, the dominant approachin conceiving this dynamics is through an ontology of stacked levels that considers eachlevel to be embedded in the higher ones or considers one level as the locus of action andothers as constituting its context. The case study reveals three issues with the embedded-ness relationship presumed by these approaches, namely reductionism, unidirectional cau-sality and marginalisation. In what follows, we will discuss these issues and highlight theirimplications for the conceptualisation of the intertwining between technological change andother developmental changes. We also discuss how alternative ontologies that reject theassumption of embeddedness can help in addressing these issues. We focus on the ontol-ogy of ANT.



From reductionism to symmetrical relationality

The first issue with the assumption of embeddedness is that it leads to a reductionist approachthat reduces actions in one domain to instantiations of processes in another. This reductionismmanifests in the theoretical development of researchers as well as in the conceptions ofpractitioners. In this regard, the case study reveals how modernisation as national develop-ment was viewed as an imperative of globalisation, changes in organisational practices wereperceived as an outcome of a national policy of computerisation and trust in a new source ofinformation was sought through the establishment of new organisational practices.

Practically, this reductionism leads many organisational and social actors to interpret andexplain actions at one level by reducing them to applications or instances of processes atanother. It leads e.g. policymakers at the national or international levels to consider practiceson the ground to be largely applications of policies formulated at distant institutions. It alsoleads many organisational practitioners to consider the trust of individuals interacting with theorganisation to be mostly shaped by the organisational settings and practices. This is particu-larly the case when these individuals are seen to be physically ‘embedded’ in the premises ofthe organisation or electronically ‘embedded’ in its virtual environment.

In terms of theory, most current theories of concomitant change in different domains do nothelp in freeing our conceptualisation from the assumption of embeddedness between thesedomains. Rather, in many cases, they tend to reinforce this assumption. For example, mosttheories that are based on variance analysis tend to adopt an ontology of stacked levels in thestudy of technological change across several domains (Rai & Patnayakuni, 1996; Burton-Jones & Gallivan, 2007; Aubert et al., 2008). These theories often seek two-way linkagesbetween the different levels, but the assumption of concentricity of levels (Hitt et al., 2007)combined with a search for constructs that produce a similar outcome across the differentlevels (Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999) limits the range of linkages that they can propose.

The contextualist approach offers more flexibility in the formulation of relationships betweendomains but maintains the assumption of embeddedness. Avgerou (2001), e.g. suggests thattechnological innovation should be studied in relation to socio-organisational change and thatboth should be considered in relation to their national and international context. Although thelanguage used is relational, the assumption of embeddedness underlies many of the theoreti-cal developments in this stream. Context tends to be perceived more as a container of actionto be described and represented rather than an emergent outcome of dynamic relations(Hayes & Westrup, 2011).

On the other hand, the case accounts highlighted the importance of approaching therelationship between the various domains of action differently in order to avoid the reduction-ism that results from the presumption of embeddedness. They indicated e.g. the importance forthe application developers to think differently of the relationship between the practices in thecourts and the legal texts. They also pointed out to the need for the managers to approach therelationship between the knowledge of the court users and the practices in the courts in a waythat resists the tendency to reduce knowledge to an outcome of organisational practices.Providing a theoretical basis for these shifts in perception requires reconsideration of the



ontological assumptions made about the relationship between the various domains of change.The flat ontology of ANT can offer such basis. That is because ANT not only emphasisesrelationality but also proposes an ontological disposition that rejects any a priori hierarchybetween the actors, as well as any demarcation such as that between the social and thematerial that contributes to the establishment of this hierarchy.

From unidirectional to fluid causality

The second issue with the embeddedness assumption is that it tends to make less visible theflow of causality from any given domain towards one in which it is considered embedded orcontained. In this regard, the empirical accounts indicate that while changes in organisationalpractices were expected to be an outcome of national policies of standardisation, changes injudicial practices that were induced by computerisation were instead used as a catalyst fornational standardisation. Similarly, the establishment of new ICT-based practices amongst thecourt clerks was viewed as embedded in the national legal framework and an outcome of itsapplication. Yet, the accounts show that the stabilisation of the new organisational practiceswas considered a basis for potential changes to the existing legal framework.

Theoretically, many current conceptualisations assume or reproduce the unidirectional flowof causality from the ‘higher’ domains of action to the ‘lower’ ones. For example, Aubert et al.(2008) base their multilevel analysis of ICT implementation on ‘the premise that antecedentsof lower level theories are often determined by the outcomes of a higher level theory’.Similarly, Hitt et al. (2007) argue that ‘the prevailing logic in management research is thatthe larger context within which lower-level processes are nested generally exerts a strongerdownward influence, and the lower-level variables generally exert a weaker upwardinfluence’.

On the other hand, theories such as ANT that reject the relationship of embeddedness arearguably more conducive to depicting the reversals in the flow of causality that tend to be lessvisible in the common conceptions of change. They can thereby open space for highlightingresistances from domains that get placed at the bottom of the hierarchy of embeddedness.When the relationship between individuals and embeddedness or between individuals andnations is one of connection instead of embeddedness or containment, the resistance ofindividuals to national policies and organisational strategies becomes more visible and canmore readily be represented in the researchers’ accounts.

From marginalisation to connection

The third issue with the relationship of embeddedness is that it can lead to the marginalisationof various actors in our accounts and perceptions of the processes of change. Along theselines, Berente et al. (2009, p. 357) raised several ethical issues associated with the method ofsocial stratification selected by the researcher. They argued that ‘any such method of socialstratification necessarily focuses the attention of a researcher on certain issues while unavoid-ably downplaying or neglecting other concerns’.



The empirical accounts of the case study highlight the propensity to marginalisation thatresults from the assumption of embeddedness. For example, viewing the practical epistemol-ogy of the court users and their trust in the sources of judicial information as embedded in theorganisational practices of the courts downplays the emotional and intellectual challenges thatmany people face in their interaction with the judicial system. In this case, consideringorganisational practices as a context in which the knowledge forms of the court users areembedded may add explanatory elements to understanding the development of these knowl-edge forms, but it also tends to reinforce the view of court users as intermediaries who turnorganisational practices into internalised knowledge forms without much transformation. Thisview of the court users marginalises their emotional and intellectual dispositions as determi-nants of the way their knowledge forms evolve.

On the other hand, adopting an ANT-based ontology would emphasise a view of the courtusers as mediators who are always complex actors transforming and shifting the meaningsthat the organisational practices project on them. Their knowledge forms would consequentlybe seen as a translation of networks that connect a wide range of elements including theiremotional and intellectual dispositions. In general, ANT’s emphasis on producing accounts inwhich all actors are presented as mediators can help avoid the marginalisation of issues andactions that fall beyond the domain in which the actors are seen to be embedded.

CONCLUSION

At a time in which technological changes, particularly in the form of ICT innovations, areimplicated in significant transformations in work processes, economic activities, social inter-actions and political actions, there is an increasing need for theoretical perspectives that canstrengthen our understanding of the dynamics between these domains. We need theories thatcan provide insights on how ICT-based changes are advancing or inhibiting the developmentprospects of different communities across the various domains and how they contribute to thereshuffling of the existing stratifications of these domains. In this paper, we sought to contributeto this theoretical quest by looking at the concept of modernisation that has for long been abasis for conceptualising the link between technological change and development.

Theoretical contributions in this area need to develop perspectives that are congruent withthe way current technology-based transformations connect and extend different temporal andspatial domains. The development of such perspectives arguably requires a shift in theontological assumptions that are commonly made about the relationship between the variousdomains of change. In particular, it requires a shift away from the assumption of embedded-ness, which underlies most stacked levels and contextualist approaches to the study ofchange. We argued in this paper that the alternative ontology of ANT offers a promisingapproach for generating accounts that avoid three main issues with the embeddednessassumption: reductionism, unidirectional causality and marginalisation.

The case study of the modernisation of the justice system in Morocco provided illustrationsof how ICT-based modernisation spans the domains of national policy, organisational change



and individual knowledge. It also showed how the ANT approach through its emphasis onconsidering all actors as mediators instead of intermediaries can create a symmetricallyrelational view of the dynamics between policies, practices and knowledge, how it highlightsresistances from domains that get placed at the bottom of the presumed hierarchies and howit is conducive to accounting for the often marginalised issues that fall beyond the boundariesof the particular domains of interest. This conceptual disposition of the ANT approach allowsfor critical understandings of the processes of modernisation that continue to shape much ofthe dynamics between technological change and development; it emphasises the multiplicityof modern orders that can result from technological change.

In general, the conceptual challenge of concomitant change across several domains is onethat concerns many researchers but equally faces practitioners in a number of professionalfields. It is a particularly significant challenge for those who have to grapple with the rapid paceand wide scope of the transformations induced by ICT innovations worldwide. In practice as inresearch, the assumption of embeddedness between the different domains of change inhibitsa more fluid view of the dynamics between them, a view that is arguably more congruent withthe type of transformations that many of these domains are currently undergoing. Researchersshould therefore formulate theories that contribute to this fluidity. The ANT-based approachpresented in this paper is proposed as a step in this direction.

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Biographies

Isam Faik is a Lecturer in Knowledge and Information

Systems at the Southampton Management School, Uni-

versity of Southampton. He holds a PhD in management

from the University of Cambridge, UK, and a masters

degree from McGill University, Canada. His research inter-

ests include practice-based and critical approaches to the

study of the dynamics between organisational and techno-

logical change. He is particularly interested in network-

based approaches to the study of change processes and is

continuously exploring implications of such theories for

understanding the development challenges facing commu-

nities and nations.

Geoff Walsham is an Emeritus Professor of Manage-

ment Studies (Information Systems) at Judge Business

School, University of Cambridge. In addition to Cambridge,

he has held academic posts at the University of Lancaster

in the UK where he was Professor of Information Manage-

ment in the University of Nairobi in Kenya and in Mindanao

State University in the Philippines. His research is focused

on the question: are we making a better world with infor-

mation and communication technologies? He was one of

the early pioneers of interpretive approaches to research

on information systems.



modernisation through icts: towards a network ontology of technological change

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